Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 describes a dystopian future in which books are outlawed and burned. In the book, one character asks the protagonist, “So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. So few of them dare to question the status quo.” Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 in response to McCarthysim and the burning of books by Nazi soldiers. The dystopian novel has become relevant once again as book banning has re-emerged as a popular tactic in American politics. The American Library Association received 330 reports of books being challenged last fall, a number they described as “unprecedented.” Ironically, Fahrenheit 451, the book most commonly associated with the concept of book banning, is often among the banned or censored books.
In January of 2022, Gene McGee, a mayor in Mississippi, announced that he was withholding funding from a local public library because it housed books with LGBTQ+ content on its shelves. In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced in December that would restrict students’ access to books on gender expression or sexual orientation, if parents in the district object. If even one parent protests a particular book, the book will be promptly removed from the school library and a bounty will be awarded to the parent each day it remains on library shelves. The school employee tasked with the removal will also be terminated if they fail to take action. This sounds more like a scene out of Fahrenheit 451 than a policy enacted in a nation with extensive free speech protections. Responses to these policies have largely been political, with liberals railing against restrictions and conservatives staying silent or defending the bans.
Earlier in 2021, however, the parties reversed roles in the face of a new supposed book ban. Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that they were discontinuing the publication of six Dr. Seuss books containing racist imagery. Many Republican leaders erupted in outrage, defining this action as “book banning” and accusing liberals of “canceling” Dr. Seuss. On March 2nd, 2021, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) tweeted, “Now 6 Dr. Seuss books are canceled too? When history looks back at this time it will be held up as an example of a depraved sociopolitical purge driven by hysteria and lunacy.” Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed that liberals were “banning Dr. Seuss not because he was a racist, but precisely because he wasn’t.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) posted a five minute video of himself reading the entirety of Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. He captioned the video, “I still like Dr. Seuss, so I decided to read Green Eggs and Ham. RT if you still like him too!” However, Rubio, Carlson, McCarthy and other conservatives are completely misrepresenting both the entire situation and the definition of banning books more generally.
In order for a book to be truly banned, an outside agent must restrict access to the book. In the case of Dr. Seuss, it was Dr. Seuss Enterprises itself that decided to stop publication because it felt the images found within the six books did not align with the values of Dr. Seuss. This action is analogous to an author themselves deciding to stop publishing their own book. As alleged supporters of free enterprise, the Republican Party should have no problem with this. Conversely, the bill introduced in Oklahoma and other similar policies have taken place without the consent of the books’ authors, who are largely members of marginalized communities themselves. They have had to defend their work in the court of public opinion in order to avoid losing out on book sales, and in some extreme cases, they have also had to defend their work in the court of law. On November 9th, 2021, a Florida county school board member filed a criminal report against George M. Johnson, the author of the 2020 book All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto. The school board member alleged that the inclusion of the book, which recounts Johnson’s experience growing up Black and queer, in local school libraries violated state obscenity restrictions. As much as Republicans love to erupt in anger when they believe someone has fallen victim to “cancel culture,” they also ignore the detrimental impact that their own “canceling” can have on the lives of underrepresented authors.
Further hypocrisy can be found behind the reasoning of these policies. State Senator Rob Standridge, who introduced the Oklahoma legislation, said in a statement, “More and more schools are trying to indoctrinate students by exposing them to gender, sexual and racial identity curriculums and courses. My bills will ensure these types of lessons stay at home and out of the classroom.” Republicans have sought to avoid alleged “indoctrination” by limiting the availability of books they claim to be politically biased. Through these attempts, Republican politicians are, in fact, indoctrinating young children, just into a different ideology and with a different methodology. Specifically, by limiting children’s access to specific books, they deny the existence of certain identities. The result is that young children are neither able to recognize their own identities in the media, nor are they exposed to viewpoints from alternate perspectives—an outcome far more harmful than the removal of racist imagery from children’s books. When young members of the LGBTQ+ community do not see their identity represented in classrooms or the media they consume, it can lead to disastrous consequences. According to a poll conducted in 2021 by the Trevor Project, 42 percent of LGBTQ+ youth, ranging from 13 to 24 years-old, seriously considered attempting suicide. The poll also found that the rate of attempted suicide can be reduced if these young people are given access to spaces where their identity is confirmed. The prohibition of these books has deeply politicized the process of deciding which books are available in public schools and which books are included in the curriculum, with an utter disregard for the adverse impacts these policies have on youth. Conservatives often object to the idea of using the nation’s youth as a pawn in a political chess game, but their book bans have done exactly that.
Granted, there are some similarities between Dr. Seuss Enterprises’s decision to take certain books out of circulation and recent Republican book bans. Both cases were met with hostility from political figures from one side of the political spectrum. However, there is a key distinction: One is a private company making the choice to eliminate racist imagery from their products, while the other is a dangerous example of how banning books can be used as a tool for discouraging healthy political discourse.