A new wave of book bans has hit Florida school districts, with hundreds of titles being pulled from library and classroom shelves as the school year kicks off.
The Republican-dominated state, which has already had the highest rate of book bans nationwide this year, is continuing to censor reading materials in schools, bowing to external pressures in an effort to avoid conflict and government retaliation.
“This is an ideological campaign to erase LGBTQ+ lives and any honest discussion of sex, stripping libraries of resources and stories,” William Johnson, the director of PEN America’s Florida office, told the Guardian.
“If censorship keeps spreading, silence won’t save us. Floridians must speak out now.”
Book bans have been rising at a rapid rate across the US since 2021, but this latest wave comes after increased pressure from the state board of education in Florida.
The board issued a harsh warning to the Hillsborough county school district in May, saying that if they didn’t remove “pornographic” titles from their library, formal legal action could ensue. More than 600 books were pulled as a result, and the process was expected to cost the district $350,000.
The books taken off the school shelves included The Diary of Anne Frank and What Girls Are Made of by Elana K Arnold. None of them were under formal review by the district, and they hadn’t been flagged by local parents as potentially inappropriate. Parents with children in the school system even had the opportunity to opt their children out of a particular reading, without removing them from the class for everyone.
PEN called the board of education’s mass removal in Hillsborough county a “state-driven censorship”, and concluded “it is a calculated effort to consolidate power through fear, to bypass legal precedent, and to silence diverse voices in Florida’s public schools,” in their press release.
Fearing similar retribution, nine surrounding school districts have taken proactive measures, pulling books which they are worried could cause similar controversy. This includes Columbia, Escambia, Orange and Osceola, who have followed suit and quietly complied, probably to avoid similar state retaliation.
“Censorship advocates are playing a long game, and making Hillsborough county public schools bend the knee is a huge win for them,” said Rachel Doyle, who goes by “Reads with Rachel” on social media.
Doyle has two children in the Hillsborough school district system and is frustrated that they are being used as political pawns. She feels that her voice has been erased by far-right groups like Moms for Liberty and that parental rights groups do not have her kids’ best interests in mind.
“I do not want or need a special interest group or a ‘concerned citizen’ opting out for me,” Doyle said. “Once Florida becomes a place where this is the norm entirely, other states will follow.”
In Escambia county, one of the nine school districts that have taken books off their library shelves after the Hillsborough removal campaign, 400 titles have been removed without review. These include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, a satirical anti-war novel centered around a prisoner of war in Dresden after the Allied bombings in the second world war.
What is happening in Florida is part of a broader, nationwide censorship drive fueled by conservative backlash against teachings about race, gender and diversity.
Unsurprisingly, red states on average have seen higher instances of banned reading materials, with Florida accounting for 4,561 cases of prohibited titles this year, spanning 33 school districts.
These bans often target authors of color, female writers and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Books that educate about any of these experiences, or that document historical periods, are the recipients of frequent censorship attacks.
Rob Sanders, the author of several acclaimed children’s books like Ruby Rose and Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights, and a former Hillsborough county educator, has seen many challenges to his books in Florida and beyond.
“If we eliminate every book that tells a story that is different than the life experiences of an individual or a family, there will be no books left in the library,” Sanders said.
“As an author, the best thing I can do for children is to keep writing books that tell the truth and that celebrate the wonderful diversity in our world.”
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