“It’s a volume of challenges I’ve never seen in my time at the ALA – the last 20 years.
We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books dealing with LGBTQIA themes and books dealing with racism.”.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye has been removed from school libraries in Utah over its “explicit” content; in Virginia, the Nobel laureate’s Beloved has been challenged for similar reasons.
(The all-white school board said it was coincidence that almost all the material banned was by or about people of colour.).
“I guess we live in a world now that our public schools would rather have kids read about gay pornography than Christ.”
The school board subsequently ordered that “sexually explicit” books be removed from district libraries.
Last year, the ALA reported more than 273 attempts to ban or challenge books. »