Fighting Back: Blue Moms Against Book Banners, And ‘Don’t F _ _ _ With Librarians’

The Washington Post reports, ‘Blue’ suburban moms are mobilizing to counter conservatives in fights over masks, book bans and diversity education:

Dozens of suburban moms from around the country dialed into an Ohio-based Zoom training session last month with the same goal — to learn how to combat the increasingly vitriolic rhetoric from parents whose protests over mask mandates and diversity education have turned school board meeting rooms into battlegrounds.

The lessons: Show up at meetings with fact-based speeches ready and create text groups for real-time strategizing. Wave “jazz hands” if told not to clap at meetings. Avoid using the divisive language of their opponents, such as “CRT” for critical race theory, and instead replace it with alternatives like “culturally responsive instruction.”

Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine and Blue — a national network of like-minded, mostly Democratic suburban women — believes the only way to fight back is to present a calm face to counter the angry right-wing groups that have dominated and disrupted board meetings and in some cases threatened officials. Her network of more than 300,000 women recently broadened its focus to fight the rising number of book bans across the country, launching a case tracker on Jan. 31, and is running training sessions to help women testify and manage highly charged government meetings.

“We believe it’s time to get off defense,” Paris said. “Why should we be the ones explaining ourselves? This is not why we moved to the suburbs. We moved to the suburbs for high-quality schools.”

Their mission has taken on new urgency after the wave of Republican parents who began showing up at school board meetings last summer using scripts written by right-wing think tanks, denouncing the teaching of topics such as transgender rights and labeling anti-racism curriculum as critical race theory — a college-level academic framework that examines systemic racism. They then moved on to books, mostly those focused on race and racial history, including by some of the country’s most renowned authors — as well as books with LGBTQ content. They often were the same parents who protested mask mandates and school closures related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Paris argues that these parents — while vocal — don’t represent the views of most parents, and in some cases books have been removed and curriculums changed after complaints from just a few.

“I don’t think that they represent any kind of majority but they certainly are part of what I would say is a pretty massive orchestrated effort to undermine public education and teachers in the country, impose a political agenda and win back suburban voters,” Paris said.

Conservative parents in Tennessee, for example, were so well organized and aggressive that those trying to marshal opposition found themselves outmaneuvered, according to Revida Rahman, 48, a Brentwood, Tenn., mother of two and co-founder of racial equity group One WillCo. The parents had scoured the second-grade curriculum looking for what they considered inappropriate content. They packed raucous school board meetings and papered carpool lanes with fliers warning that school curriculums were promoting the ideas of “Bad Angry White People” and “cannibalism.”

“I get frustrated with the Democrats’ lack of movement, to be quite transparent,” said Rahman, who recently joined Red Wine and Blue. “I think the other side has an engine that is always moving. They have a playbook. They’re playing chess and we’re playing Go Fish or something.”

Moms for Liberty, a controversial Florida-based political action group started by two former school board members and a Republican activist, [see, Unmasking Moms for Liberty], has made parental rights its rallying cry and is hoping to harness anger over mask mandates and diversity education in schools into power at the polls.

Campaigns by Moms for Liberty and similar groups have resulted in what the American Library Association (ALA) called an “unprecedented” number of book challenges last fall.

The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom recorded a record 330 challenges to books from Sept. 1 through Dec. 1, compared with 377 cases for all of 2019. In recent days, a school board in Tennessee pulled the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus,” about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade curriculum, and school officials in North Carolina removed “Dear Martin” — a novel about a Black teen who is racially profiled — as assigned reading.

“It is absolutely unprecedented to see so many school districts with so many challenges at this scale, at this speed, at this pace,” said Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at the free speech group PEN America.

“A lot of parental anger is being channeled into this in the wake of the pandemic, and people who have been wanting to remove books from schools see an opportunity to do so and wage a broader cultural war at the same time,” he said.

Meanwhile, Friedman said, Republican lawmakers, politicians and organizations are “trying to make this the issue of the moment for the Biden administration — and they’re succeeding.”

Republicans have embraced this riled-up “school board moms” energy as a pathway to victory in the November midterm elections. “This is how we are going to win,” former Trump adviser [and Coup Plotter] Stephen K. Bannon told Politico in June.

Legislatures in 14 states have passed laws or restrictions on the teaching of critical race theory, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is pushing a slate of bills called the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that would give nearly anyone the right to sue schools and teachers over what they teach, based on student discomfort. Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Henry McMaster of South Carolina have called for investigations into school library books, and Virginia’s newly sworn in Gov. Glenn Youngkin made parents’ frustration with public schools a hallmark of his upset victory in November.

‘Not political? No problem’

Paris, 42, lives in the affluent Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights with her husband and two children, but she spent a decade in Washington working for liberal political causes, including helping found the website Media Matters, which monitors conservative media for disinformation. She started Red Wine and Blue shortly after the 2018 midterms — a record year for female candidates — to focus on Ohio, and expanded the group nationally last year.

The group embraces a deliberately low-key vibe: “Not Political? No problem. In fact, it’s perfect,” the banner on its website reads, with the tagline of “Channeling the Power of Suburban Women.” The group tries to foster the kind of political discussion women might have over a glass of wine with friends, Paris said. It also has a podcast, “The Suburban Women Problem,” with guests such as actress-activist Alyssa Milano and Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

On the training call, Paris praised the women for being “organized and cheerful and clapping for each other,” she said. “What we’ve seen consistently all across the country really work is having that decorum! It creates such a contrast with the other side,” she said, adding that it gives moms a “permission pathway” to join the group.

Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which is based in Melbourne, Fla., said the Williamson County, Tenn., chapter of the group recently spent 1,000 hours evaluating grade-school curriculum and creating a spreadsheet of concerns after the Asian mother of a biracial child said he had come home at the conclusion of a civil rights module worried that he should “hate” his White heritage.

The women found a wide range of content objectionable. They complained that a book about sea horses describes the animals’ sexual activity, and an autobiography of civil rights icon Ruby Bridges — who in 1960 became the first Black child to integrate an all-White elementary school in the South — “causes shame for young impressionable White children to read this dark history.”

Are you fucking kidding me, Snowflake? How do you think Ruby Bridges felt being escorted to school by U.S. Marshals because white women like you were shouting vile racist epithets and making threats to her life? (Norman Rockwell’s portrait of Ruby Bridges goes to school). History has to be taught from a white snowflake perspsective? How about teaching the truth, and deal with it, you snowflake.

Ruby Bridges was a brave little girl. You women are cowards who can’t handle the truth that your grandmothers may have been among the racist women who opposed desegregation of public schools in the South.

On Jan. 28, the Williamson County school committee removed one of the books, “Walk Two Moons,” a Newbery Medal-winning novel about a Native American teen journeying to her mother’s grave, saying its emotionally freighted subject matter was of “great concern.”

Descovich says the group’s efforts to promote age-appropriate content for children are being unfairly vilified as censorship.

“It’s frustrating because parents absolutely have the right to vet and evaluate and pick what their children are exposed to,” she said. “In the good old days Blockbuster never put [adult-themed] movies next to ‘Finding Nemo’. Why are our children finding them in school libraries?”

Since its founding in January 2021, the group has grown to 167 chapters in 33 states and 70,000 members around the country. They’ve declared 2022 the “Year of the Parent.”

“I think it’s been very clear if you look at the political climate that parents in general are feeling silenced and are feeling shut down and feeling ignored by school boards and elected leaders,” Descovich said.

The group is attracting parents who have never been involved in politics before, she said, “so the momentum is on our side.” She believes these parents will be turning out both to run and vote in school board elections in the coming year.

Paris of Red Wine and Blue, however, cites a recent study by Ballotpedia, a website that tracks U.S. politics, that identified 96 school districts with 302 seats up for election last year where social issues and the coronavirus response were major campaign issues — including mask mandates, sex education, rights for transgender students and teaching about race in the classroom. Ballotpedia found that only about 28 percent of the winners were conservative.

Red Wine and Blue plans to continue with friend-to-friend organizing and using digital media to mobilize suburban women. It recently founded a charitable education arm to raise money from nonpartisan donors.

In Florida, where some of the school board battles have been the most bitter, Jules Scholles, who has a child in public school in Sarasota County, founded Support Our Schools late last year to be an equally loud counter to Moms for Liberty. She’s trying to build numbers by forming coalitions with existing groups such as the NAACP, and worries about what Moms for Liberty and others will demand next.

“They’re ruining our schools, and they’re not stopping,” the 41-year-old said. “You’ve got no masks, you’ve got no vaccines, you’ve got no CRT, you’re about to get no teaching anything that makes White children feel bad, why are you still so effing angry? Like why are you still coming to these meetings so juiced up and angry?” said Scholles, who is White.

When all the furor started “there were already a ton of groups on Facebook that were trying to fight back. But there were literally, and this is very typical on the left, so many ideas, and no action,” she said. “The thing is we can sit here and talk all day long about what our ideas are, but until somebody just puts one into motion, we can’t test whether or not it’s right and will work.”

“Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.” ― Neil Gaiman

Katrina vanden Heuvel writes, Book Bans Are on the Rise. But Librarians and Authors Are Fighting Back.

The idea of banning books conjures images of piles of hardcovers in the street going up in flames. But over the past few decades in the United States, book banning has taken on a decidedly more genteel character. It has taken place in deliberative school board meetings and in quick after-school chats between librarians and concerned parents.

And incidents of this quieter version of book banning have recently spiked: A group of Texas school districts reported 75 attempts in the first four months of the 2021–2022 school year to censor children’s access to books. The number of attempts over the same period last year? Just one.

Many advocates for these bans claim they simply want to protect children from “vulgar, explicit material.” But no matter how well-intentioned, our best literary experts—librarians and authors themselves—have a clear message: This most recent wave of book banning is no less dangerous than book banning has been throughout history.

When Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust fable “Maus” was banned in a Tennessee school district last month, he readily conceded: “This is disturbing imagery. But you know what? It’s disturbing history.” It’s a profoundly uncomfortable subject to learn about, and that’s the point.

It might be tempting to soften the horrors of historical atrocities in the name of making them more easily digestible for children — what historical fiction author Gwen Katz calls “pajamafication” — but that hinders our ability to understand and learn from our history. As Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and Vietnamese American refugee Viet Thanh Nguyen recently told me, “We have to try to make our nation confront what it doesn’t want to remember.”

Books help us process difficult things in the past and the present. As author Carmen Maria Machado — whose award-winning memoir about a queer, abusive relationship met protests from Texas parents — tells us, “Preventing children from reading my book, or any book, won’t protect them. On the contrary, it may rob them of ways to understand the world they’ll encounter, or even the lives they’re already living.” Machado wrote the book because she couldn’t find any existing art resembling her experience. Denying young people access to works like hers only leaves those gaps unfilled.

Of course, some ideas in banned books aren’t just difficult; they’re downright dangerous or hateful. But in response to those concerns, the American Library Association cites philosopher John Stuart Mill: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing … those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.” As Mill argues, the “collision” of ideas can make us wiser, but that requires people reading and engaging with ideas in the first place. W.E.B. Du Bois also saw the value in facing abhorrent historical truths directly, observing: “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this?”

Research bears out the value of letting students interrogate these sorts of ideas. One study of middle school classes found that students who got to debate controversial subjects were more likely to see themselves as “an active participant in civic affairs” instead of sitting on the sidelines. And keeping children engaged with important topics through reading is no small feat in our current educational and media environment. Americans are reading fewer books than they have in decades, and the pandemic has done no favors for children’s reading fluency. So why try to stop them if they’re compelled to read a difficult story?

In a beautiful recent essay on dangerous books, Nguyen argues that “to compete with video games, streaming video and social media, books must be thrilling, addictive, thorny and dangerous. If those qualities sometimes get books banned, it’s worth noting that sometimes banning a book can increase its sales.” That certainly happened with “Maus.” If anything, the Tennessee district’s ban has given Spiegelman a platform to participate in crucial public conversations about his work — including a webinar hosted by several Tennessee community organizations on Monday.

In short: These books will be read regardless of any censorship efforts. But by allowing them in the classroom, teachers can present them with the context and guidance they demand.

Fortunately, as these attacks on books intensify, librarians and authors are fighting back. In Texas, a group of librarians started a social media campaign to promote students’ access to a diverse range of books. Meanwhile, the Authors Guild launched a national letter-writing campaign to persuade school boards and local representatives to resist this movement. And PEN America, an advocacy group for free expression composed of thousands of writing professionals, has chronicled recent efforts to censor education and offered several actions authors can take when their work is threatened.

We should support these efforts from the people who understand literature best. And we should keep reading thought-provoking (and even fear-provoking) books. If you’re looking for a place to start, during our conversation last year, Nguyen shared his recommended reading list. As he wrote in his essay, “books are inseparable from ideas, and this is really what is at stake: the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question.”

Maybe you can form a Banned Book Reading Club. The moral scolds who ban books only make it more popular and people want to read it to find out what all the fuss was about.

Banned Books Week this year is September 26 – Octiber 2, 2022.