Public school libraries are facing an unprecedented number of attempts to ban books from their shelves. The mounting pressure levied by parents, community members, and political groups against school administrators threatens to overwhelm attempts to enhance students’ access to information—particularly information that does not fit within the framework of assumed “community values.” The majority of challenged titles are written by LGBTQ+ authors and authors of color, and typically cover topics including race, sexuality, and counternarratives to the traditional middle-class white America experience that is often portrayed in literature written for young audiences.
This Note will discuss efforts to ban books from public school libraries and how such bans violate students’ First Amendment rights. Specifically, it will discuss how book banning restricts students’ rights to free speech and to receive information, and it will argue that current jurisprudence allows for book bans motivated by political and performative objections made in bad faith in an attempt to dictate what a “proper” school community looks and thinks like. This construction of the “proper” student body champions a white, straight, cisgender, and homogenous learning environment as normative and preferable while it perpetuates the subjugation of Black, Indigenous, and other Persons of Color (“BIPOC”) and the LGBTQ+ community.
This Note argues book bans are one of many tools used to uphold tenets of white supremacy that are inherent in the American public school system and posits that access to diverse texts is critical to upholding the ideals of the First Amendment while also dismantling systemic harms that disproportionately impact BIPOC communities. It begins in Part II with a brief review of precedent regarding free speech in public schools and then, in Part III, discusses the standard of review proposed by the plurality decision in Pico. Part IV reviews the malleability of the standard proposed by the Pico plurality, and as adopted by lower courts, related to book bans from public schools. Part IV further discusses how ill-defined precedent regarding book bans permits school boards and lower courts to contort their supposed justifications for removing a book from the school library.
These justifications and removals of text are how white supremacy maintains control in the public school system. Part V concludes that it is essential to defend students’ access to diverse texts in the school library to resist racial violence inherent in the public school system and proposes a pragmatic (if imperfect) approach to a review of challenged books.