Dark money fuels Kansas and Missouri school book banners. Don’t let the minority rule

I call your attention to today’s unprecedented, unconstitutional and inhumane campaigns to ban books in schools. They oppose understanding the legal and cultural traditions of “We the People” and the public welfare and interest. The rights of children, for which we fought from the late 19th century well into the early 21st, are under assault.

I write as a historian of literacy, education, children and youth, and as a teacher for almost 50 years. My colleagues include authors of national prize-winning young adult novels that have been banned in several states on false grounds.

Organized, well-funded, national dark money campaigns led by the Koch family’s foundations, the Heritage Foundation, the Bradley Foundation and others flood social media to frighten right-wing sympathizers into intimidating local school boards and superintendents to ignore their own rules and ban or weed out books that the aggrieved have not read. Sometimes, the banners admit to reading scripts from websites, and to not having children in the schools they attack.

Across the United States, as in Missouri and Kansas, the dishonest campaigners — the new illiterates — do not and perhaps cannot read the books they seek to ban. These works are often classics, praised by educators and child development experts, popular among young people, bestselling and in demand..

In contrast to previous book banning campaigns, imitating other states and following their marching orders, Missouri and Kansas banners almost exclusively target books aimed at the young by nonwhite and especially non-straight-male authors. Their lists and the fractured school board proceedings speak to the lack of due process or protection of students’, educators’ and librarians’ interests and constitutional rights.

Overland Park’s Blue Valley School District following its librarian’s recommendation over the objection of a parent who wanted to ban two acclaimed books last month is a too-rare case of the law winning out. To the contrary, more common factors aligned in Wentzville, Missouri, where a local school board under intimidation by one parent violated its written rules to ban the classic “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison despite its review committee recommendation to retain it. Confronted with its own rules by ACLU of Missouri, the board reversed its earlier decision in late February.

If the issue were indecency or protecting children, many more books by white men would be targeted. So would the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

The matter is far from settled. In Wentzville, several books remain inaccessible to students because of the school district’s policy of allowing their removal upon being challenged. Each of these books features a minority perspective.

The book banners are a small, undemocratic minority. Out of fear of losing power, they assault human dignity, development and rights — especially of the young. Their illegal campaigns are based on lies, manipulation and intimidation. Forces of resentment grow alongside gradual movement toward racial equality and integration during the last three-quarters of a century.

These actions do not stem from grassroots parental concern. They are promoted by right-wing organizations such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Their anti-literacy and anti-child fearmongering ricochets through social media. Attacking books that school professionals carefully evaluate is hypocritical and ignorant.

Those striving to remove books from schools are not concerned about the books. Books are symbols, proxies in a culture war where the real objective is stealing political power by asserting the supremacy of a minority world view.

Banning books is inseparably interrelated to other bans: abortion rights, LGBTQ and same-sex couples’ rights, First Amendment free speech rights, transgender athletes’ rights to participate in sports and gender-affirming medical care, the actual text of the Second Amendment, and voting rights. This is unprecedented. We must oppose it in all its forms.