The data compiled by the ALA — an incomplete total picked from news reports or submitted by librarians to the group’s Office for Intellectual Freedom — stretches back to 1990. For the first three decades, the number of titles challenged across the 50 states generally hovered around 450, plus or minus 100. But then came 2020.
That year, two significant disruptions helped spur a new push to target books. The first was the coronavirus pandemic, during which many children shifted to remote learning. Several parents, often politically conservative ones, took issue with what they observed their children being taught. School board meetings became centers of ferocious conflict centered on pandemic restrictions and curriculums.
This overlapped with the second disruption: the renewed focus on racism that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police. The Black Lives Matter movement, viewed with skepticism by right-wing Americans, gained new prominence even as a small number of protests devolved into vandalism or violence. Donald Trump made this criminal activity a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, giving the issue added political salience.
These two disruptions were intertwined by politics. The argument (promoted by Trump and others) was that kids were somehow learning to hate America because they were learning about its racial history. There was a tangible fear promoted by Trump and in right-wing media like Fox News programming centered on that vandalism but, more broadly, on how the country was growing more accepting of the idea that marginalized populations should have a visible presence or a voice. School curriculums became a way to fight back; excising stories about Black leaders or LGBTQ+ Americans from libraries was a way to keep America from changing.
The data from ALA show how 2020 was a turning point. From 2021 to 2023, the number of titles being challenged in nearly every state spiked. From 2011 to 2020, an average of about 300 titles were challenged across the 50 states (including duplicates in multiple states). From 2021 to 2023, more than 6,800 were on average.
You can see the surge in each state below. Each state’s number of challenged titles is compared with the 1990-to-2013 annual average, with each graph scaled to the state’s smallest and largest annual totals since 2014.
Almost uniformly, the columns representing 2021 to 2023 are far higher than those prior. The number of challenged titles shot up in the past three years.
If we normalize those values, giving each state’s graph the same scale, we can see how the phenomenon was more significant in states that voted for Trump in 2020 (identified with red).
The quarter of states that had the smallest average increase in challenged titles from 2021 to 2023 preferred Joe Biden’s 2020 candidacy by about 11 points on average in 2020. The quarter of states that had the largest increases in challenges backed Trump by an average of 12 points.
One element of this is that challenges tend to target more titles. Before 2020, most states had about as many cases of challenges as titles; that is, a challenge targeted one book. Since then, the ratio has skewed heavily toward more titles per case. Here, again, you can see the shift in recent years.
The quarter of states with the most titles challenged per case (a 7-to-1 ratio since 2021) again preferred Trump by a 12-point margin on average in 2020.
In other words, it’s not just that books are being targeted more often. It’s that they are being targeted en masse, often by a small group of people (as The Post has reported). The effort is less about taking issue with individual titles than with trying to broadly purge libraries of material deemed unacceptable.
It isn’t because kids are reading propaganda in school that younger Americans are more likely to identify as LGBTQ+; after all, older Americans have similarly grown more accepting of LGBTQ+ Americans without spending much time in middle-school libraries. It also isn’t because kids are encountering stories about civil rights leaders that Americans are more open to combating systemic racism. Instead, it’s the success of such movements as Black Lives Matter in drawing attention to those issues.
But calling for curriculums to be changed or books to be banned feels like doing something, one of the most sought-after sensations in our modern culture. It feels like a victory on behalf of the United States, though leveraging government power to restrict speech is obviously antithetical to the country’s values.
If you’re convinced that your opponents have been brainwashed, though, you’re going to try to figure out where that happened. Libraries and schools have borne the brunt of that search.
