In the spring of 2022, the principal of my children’s elementary school told a group of parents gathered to discuss a library audit that she wished she could get rid of “all the old books.” The bulk of the library’s holdings were, from her perspective, too Eurocentric, too male, too heteronormative.
I understood these concerns, which were broadly shared among parents and teachers. Still, the prospect of liquidating several thousand library books struck me as obviously wrong—offensive not only to me personally but also to the liberal democratic values that (however shakily) underpin our society.
I wanted to say something but quickly checked myself: Was there not a strong chance my defence of “liberal values” in this context—a children’s library, with its tiny chairs and animal posters—would come off as patently absurd?
Then the moment passed, the meeting broke up, and I was left chewing on my questions: What was so special about a bunch of old books? Were they, in fact, worth defending? Or was my fondness for these antiquated objects a product of my own nostalgia or upbringing—a sign that it was me who was antiquated?
It’s true that I grew up in a bookish household, although I was not a bookish child. There were years of sports, video games, and adolescent hijinks of a tame, middle-class variety, years in which I had no career aspirations beyond making the NHL. Eventually, I found myself yearning for a more literary life, which led to the study of English.
My job now involves teaching novels and short stories to enthusiastic university students, many of whom are budding bibliophiles; at home, I’ve read aloud to my own children almost every night for more than a decade and will keep doing so until the audience dries up. Many of my friendships were initiated or solidified over the giving or receiving of books. Somewhere along the way, I came to think of these objects as self-evidently valuable. I had lost (if I ever really had) the arguments to explain why books matter and why the banning and destruction of literature is so odious and socially corrosive.
It’s time to revive and sharpen those arguments. Book censorship is on the rise. We’ve all seen the news stories—the frequent headlines about book banning in schools or public libraries, about the takeover of school boards, about novels that are no longer teachable on university campuses, publishers pulling or issuing bowdlerized editions of suddenly controversial classics, authors who face cancellation. Not all these phenomena constitute “banning” per se, but they all fall under what we might call the new “censorship consensus,” in which books are called upon to justify their existence through demonstrations of their moral value.
Many people who consider themselves book lovers seem comfortable with the new censorship consensus. Indeed, they no longer need an external authority to tell them which books ought to go. In the summer of 2024, after Andrea Robin Skinner, one of Alice Munro’s daughters, came forward with the story of her harrowing sexual assault at the hands of Munro’s husband (and Munro’s complicity over the years in covering up the abuse), readers took to X to declare that Munro had been expunged from their shelves. “I just can’t . . . ” one user posted, above a photo of a garbage can filled with Munro’s Nobel Prize–winning books.
We’ve long struggled with questions about how to frame the art of people who do things we abhor, but it was the lack of struggle that seemed notable in this case—at least among those who had decided that Munro’s work was now trash.
Books have always been challenged, but the current eruption of censorship feels like something new. “Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools,” went an April 2024 New York Times headline, which found that rates of book banning were doubling year over year.
According to PEN America, thousands of book removals occurred in 2023, in forty-two states, both Democratic and Republican. PEN has now identified more than 10,000 instances of books being removed from US schools but is quick to clarify that the true number is likely much higher. One well-known study conducted by the American Library Association estimated that between 82 percent and 97 percent of all library challenges go unreported. Much of this book banning appears to be fuelled by outright bigotry. “Overwhelmingly, book banners continue to target stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” PEN notes. “30 percent of the unique titles banned are books about race, racism, or feature characters of color. Meanwhile, 26 percent of unique titles banned have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.”
Book bans are as old as the book itself. In Canada, state-sponsored book censorship began with the passage of the Customs Act in the first session of the Canadian Parliament in 1867. That act prohibited the importation of “books and drawings of an immoral or indecent character”; the criminal code further forbade the exhibition of any “disgusting object.” The US outlawed using the postal service for “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” material—prohibitions backed by measures including confiscation, customs seizure, civil and criminal prosecution, and police arrests.
Where book banning once largely involved the legal and disciplinary apparatus of the state, the new censorship consensus works through both state actors and a constellation of special interest groups operating inside and outside of institutions. Their target is libraries: public libraries, in which all taxpayers have a stake, and especially school libraries, which can be uniquely vulnerable due to chronic funding shortages and lack of full-time librarians able to cultivate their collections year over year.
Libraries are natural quarry for anti-government organizations, including Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Legal challenges against books, of the sort that once banned Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover from American shelves, are costly and hindered by decades of First Amendment jurisprudence that steadily broadened the sphere of expressive freedom. Libraries, by contrast, are soft targets. Any citizen can mount a challenge. The instructions for doing so are often posted on the library website.
We should be clear on the stakes. When parental rights organizations attack libraries, they are attacking one of the last public institutions committed to intellectual freedom. While it’s true that more books are now available online, we court disaster by assuming that the internet—which is volatile and ephemeral and frequently weaponized against users across the globe—has replaced libraries as key intellectual infrastructure for liberal democracies.
Battles over book banning are especially contentious in school libraries, for obvious reasons. We compel children to attend school, and kids are more impressionable, so materials must be “age appropriate”—an inherently debatable category. Those who would cleanse the school library frame their efforts as an appeal to save children from harm.
Beneath the surface of these disputes lies a deeper conflict over our national and communal history. One reason why book banners so frequently attack works of historical fiction—including Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor; Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s haunting novels of American racial trauma; and countless other texts at the intersection of race and history—is that the banners are fighting for control of our collective past.
At the same time, in seeking control over the narratives that children will carry into adulthood, the banners are also fighting for their vision of the future. Attacks on school libraries are, among much else, future-oriented attacks on liberal democracy and its vital institutions.
Among the most influential of the US parents’ rights organizations is Moms for Liberty, which the Southern Poverty Law Center characterizes as an anti-government extremist organization given to trafficking in conspiracy propaganda and anti-LGBTQ+ hate. The group’s own membership, by contrast, understand their calls to remove library books as empowering parents and defending children from “LGBTQ indoctrination.”
Some of their book-banning efforts seem like social media–fuelled spectacles intended to galvanize outrage. Yet parents of a variety of religious backgrounds see their “anti-pornography” advocacy as a sincere expression of faith and as an expression of democratic values; their avowed aim is not to impose their beliefs upon schools or libraries but to free children from beliefs that have been imposed upon them. Their censoriousness arises from opposition to a liberal culture that would “pollute and sexualize our children,” in Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s phrase.
Ontario progressives, no less than Florida conservatives, find in “child safety” a warrant to ban books. Greater sensitivity to racially charged language and imagery has resulted in school library challenges to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, and several titles by Dr. Seuss. After some school districts banned from classrooms all books by non-Black authors that contain the N-word, books like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird went from being mandatory to unteachable.
In the fall of 2023, educators in Ontario’s Peel Region (a municipality just east of Toronto, containing some 257 schools) engaged in an “equity-based book weeding process,” leading some schools to purge thousands of books. These books were, according to the social justice framework that motivated their removal, potential sources of student “harm.”
Because no one involved with efforts to remove books from libraries characterizes their efforts as “book banning” or “censorship,” some conceptual clarity is in order.
Emily Drabinski, former president of the American Library Association, defines a book ban as “the removal of a title from a library because someone considers it harmful or dangerous”—which captures both equity-based and parents’ rights arguments for pulling books from shelves. For PEN America, the definition is slightly broader: “Any action taken against a book based on its content that leads to a previously accessible book being completely removed.”
Our school principal was adamant that she was not proposing to ban any books. Likewise, administrators in Peel Region claim that their actions constitute “weeding” rather than “banning,” but this is a misrepresentation of library protocol. As the American Library Association states, “While weeding is essential to the collection development process, it should not be used as a deselection tool for controversial materials.” The industry standard for weeding is “MUSTIE,” which stands for misleading, ugly (worn out), superseded (by a later edition), trivial, irrelevant, and elsewhere (the item is widely available).
These definitions do not please everyone. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, argues that PEN’s definition of book banning is too broad, because even if a book is banned from a school library, it may still be available at a public library or for purchase from online vendors. (A book’s mere existence in another library should console readers who lost the opportunity to read it in theirs and can’t afford to buy it, the AEI seems to believe.)
For others, this definition of banning (i.e., pulling once-available books) is too narrow, as it fails to capture books that weren’t “banned” because they were never ordered in the first place. “Progressive librarians already practice a form of book banning by not ordering books seen as ‘conservative,’” argues writer and podcast host Dave Seminara. Or we might be tempted to consider pre-emptive bans even further upstream in the publishing process. “Random House Canada staff try to ban Jordan Peterson’s new book,” the Daily Mail declared in a headline, after the firm received seventy anonymous complaints about publishing Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.
The truth is that publishers have always shaped their lists according to their editorial priorities and business practices, just as individual booksellers stock only a tiny fraction of the millions of titles available at any given moment; neither should be conflated with book banning. Similarly, conflicts between the ideals and business imperatives of publishers (and between their employees and paying readership) lie beyond our scope (which is not to say that an illiberal culture of policing and regulating what gets produced, and by whom, is not worthy of consideration).
But even former ALA president Emily Drabinski’s relatively narrow definition of book ban (“the removal of a title from a library because someone considers it harmful or dangerous”) leaves an alarming number and range of incidents to consider.
When considering the origins of contemporary book banning, we can point to material causes. We can follow, for example, the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Patriot Mobile, a self-identified Christian cellphone carrier, devoted to promoting Texas school board candidates who were committed to eliminating critical race theory and “LGBTQ indoctrination” from schools. We can point to political causes: Texas governor Greg Abbott’s 2021 campaign promise to investigate a list of about 850 books that might cause students “psychological distress because of their race or sex,” or legislative efforts in Florida, Utah, and Missouri aimed at removing LGBTQ+ content from school libraries.
In Canada, we can examine a British Columbia school board’s decision to pull The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, In the Heat of the Night by John Ball, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee from a grade ten reading curriculum over student safety concerns. But all of this unfolds against a broader context in which the cultural value of books and reading seems to be waning.
The rise of contemporary book banning presents a paradox. Book banners assign extraordinary power to books at a time when, by objective measures, books and literature seem to matter less and less. One recent survey found that about half of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2023. English departments have seen declining enrolments for a generation; increasingly, students arrive at university having never read an entire book in high school. In classrooms across North America, teachers are assigning ever fewer full-length books; instead, they provide summaries and key passages.
This turn away from books (“paywalled dead trees,” as the tech bros call them) is becoming educational policy. In 2022, the US National Council of Teachers of English released a clear position statement on media literacy: “The time has come to decenter book reading and essay-writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Students, too, seem glad to be rid of books. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans between fifteen and nineteen read for personal interest for an average of eight minutes per day; no age group reads less. This at a time when teens are spending a median of almost four and a half hours daily on their smartphones. The typical teen spends more time on their phone each day than they spend reading over an entire month.
At a historical moment in which social media and digital technology occupy an increasingly central role in children’s lives, it seems strangely nostalgic to fret about the power of books to, for example, “indoctrinate” children into adopting a queer lifestyle, or, for that matter, to psychologically harm them with non-inclusive narratives. You might think, in short, that parents concerned with saving children from the baleful effects of media would focus their attention upon the forms of media that their children actually consume.
Toward that end, in 2024, eight Ontario school boards and two private schools launched lawsuits, seeking over $7 billion in damages, against social media companies (including the owners of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok) for marketing intentionally addictive products to children and for “rewiring” the way children “think, act, behave and learn.”
But that is to presume that book banning is expected to work, and it rarely has. At least, not if we believe that the work of book banning is to eliminate dangerous or harmful or otherwise subversive ideas, however those ideas are defined. But book bans can achieve the opposite of their desired effect, increasing people’s desire to read what authorities would prohibit. “Every time a school district bans THUG, the sales in that area skyrocket,” tweeted The Hate U Give author Angie Thomas. Direct action against authors can bring similar results. On Friday, August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie’s novels weren’t charting on the Amazon top 100 bestsellers. Then he was stabbed. By the following Tuesday, The Satanic Verses—the “blasphemous” novel that had prompted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue the fatwa ordering Rushdie’s execution in 1989—had topped several of Amazon’s bestseller lists.
Yet there’s no denying that censorship has wrought devastating effects. Writing by Ovid, Confucius, Mikhail Lermontov, and countless others may have been censored out of existence; great libraries have been reduced to rubble; writers have been tortured and burned. Missionaries including Diego de Landa destroyed Mayan codices and Inca quipus, part of what is now understood as a broader genocidal campaign aimed at eliminating all cultural traces of pre-Christian North America. Untold monuments to human culture have been permanently lost; many more have failed to materialize under authoritarian regimes in which expressive freedom must fly under the radar of secret police.
If calls to censor Angie Thomas and Salman Rushdie lead to increased sales in the anglosphere, that is because a robust culture of expressive freedom continues to allow for the celebration of challenged books. And it is precisely this culture of expressive freedom that today’s book banners erode by normalizing censorship.
Still, given the ubiquity of digital technology that allows for near-instantaneous reproduction of material, the complete eradication of texts may strike us as increasingly implausible. Never has it been easier to upload, disseminate, or find challenged texts on the internet (at least theoretically—library patrons without the technology, time, or money to source the book elsewhere will disproportionately suffer the effects of book bans). The prospect of eliminating a book’s existence, or preventing determined readers from accessing it, has never been more fanciful than for contemporary North Americans.
Which brings us to a second paradox of contemporary censorship: in an era where book banning feels less feasible than ever, more and more people are attempting it, which forces us to think again about their goals. The new censorship consensus does not “work” as censorship once did, through pre-publication licences or the efforts of customs officers charged with confiscating and destroying contraband literature.
Instead, it works as symbolic practice, as means for the book banners to announce what they would extirpate from the library, and not only from the library. Book banning may be a symptom of political impotence, in the sense that it does nothing to alleviate underlying conditions: Peel Region is no less racist for having expunged thousands of pre-2008 library books, and the racialized student who came to school without breakfast before the book purge is still coming to school without breakfast. Banning All Boys Aren’t Blue from the library won’t prevent children’s acquaintance with LGBTQ+ ideas, nor will it hasten the dawn of a new golden era of traditional gender roles in American society.
But it may work in other ways, and the “success” of book banning needn’t be understood as zero sum. Today’s book banners may care less about permanently eradicating certain books or ideas than about temporarily limiting access during an impressionable life stage. The effect may be to deprive a queer student of the solace of literary representation at a moment when it was needed most. Regardless of the final availability (or not) of any challenged book, book banning may perform the political work of uniting community members against a perceived threat, of defining group affiliation through opposition to an imagined other. It constitutes a form of symbolic violence, where purged books represent what banners would purge from society itself—and where the act of purging constitutes a rite of belonging.
The parental rights movement’s calls to resist “pornography” and “LGBTQ indoctrination” now enjoys significant political support. When he was running for re-election, Donald Trump inveighed against school board “dictatorships” at the 2024 Moms for Liberty Summit. “Your schools and your children are suffering greatly because they’re going into the classrooms and taking disease,” he warned.
For years, state legislatures have been passing bills that would prohibit teaching sexual or racial concepts in schools. Some of these have been struck down as unconstitutional, and more will be. Regardless, the fate of Roe v. Wade serves as a reminder that legal freedoms remain fragile; the return of regressive censorship committees, postal searches, and prosecutions remains a live possibility. Those in favour of such a regime can find inspiration not only in our own recent history but also in the systems of censorship currently thriving in authoritarian regimes around the world.
For now, we fight about schools, about what the children, who read less and less, should read. Contemporary progressive educators from Ontario bear little in common with parents’ rights activists from Florida, and their aims are not equivalent. But both treat books as sources of contagion and libraries as fields of indoctrination, and both invoke the vulnerability of children as a warrant for censorship. Both abide by the new censorship consensus, where the school library is a microcosm of the ideal society, and books are levers of social engineering. In my ideal society, their thinking goes, there will be more of this and less of that: more diversity, less racism.
Both ignore the cyclical nature of censorship, presuming that the new censorship apparatus won’t eventually come for them. They deceive themselves.
Excerpted from On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy by Ira Wells, with permission from Biblioasis. Copyright © Ira Wells, 2025. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
