Originally published at: Report on banned books in scools for 2022 | Boing Boing
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ISWYDT
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It looks like a pretty good reading list, actually.
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Too cool for scool.
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Scool rools, book banners drool.
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Note that PA is among the worst with the most banned books, yet it is about 60 Democratic.
Because of gerrymandering, however, Republicans dominate the State House, while the governor is nearly always a Democrat. The book bans come overwhelmingly from the GOP counties.
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Interesting map, with a few surprises. I would not have guessed that Vermont (1-10) has more book bans than Alabama, Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia combined (0).
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Grrr, that’s too high, Kansas.
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The most banned one, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, is actually an awseome book. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
And let’s do acknowledge that while it’s been banned a lot, other school boards are giving it a thumbs up.
Excerpt:
The committee related the following merits of the book as a work of literature:
- The book is a well-written, scientifically based narrative of one person’s journey with gender identity that contains information and perspective that is not widely represented. This depiction includes the difficulties nonbinary and asexual individuals may face. The book has literary value in its structure, voice, and themes and has won literary awards.
- Students with a related experience will feel affirmed and others can gain understanding and empathy.
- The resources referenced in the book provide access to additional, reliable information.
- The book neither depicts nor describes pedophilia.
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I’m glad that my local school board is standing up to Glenn Youngkin.
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This map would be more useful if it was adjusted for population.
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How so? Does the number of people matter with regards to books being banned? How does knowing the population improve our understanding of this?
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I was just thinking more people loosely correlates with more books, but that’s probably not that relevant when we’re dealing with number of titles overall.
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I get where you’re going with that, but I’d say that the problem is often in smaller, more conservative leaning communities, where groups are targeting already marginalized people in their push to take control of public resources, in order to control them or shut them down. Places like libraries, even in conservative places, are likely going to lean toward being more inclusive and providing resources for marginalized communities, which enrages right wingers, who think that marginalized communities should be MORE marginalized, not less.
But we should focus on book banning where ever it is happening, regardless of the population size, as everyone deserves to have access to materials that reflect their own experiences.
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Yep. I number-crunch for a living, and a pet peeve is maps of x that also look exactly like population density maps (e.g. “number of cars per state”). But that doesn’t seem to be happening here; it doesn’t look like a population density map.
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I went to look at the numbers for my state (GA) as I was curious who was banning what… I was unsurprised that the bans are all from one, ultra-conservative, metro-suburban county, which is skewing the numbers for the rest of the state. This is a cultural problem, not a density problem. Although that county is more densely packed than it used to be, but it’s certainly the most conservative part of Metro-ATL now.
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If I hadn’t seen the map, I might be persuaded by an argument along the lines of “more people = more ultra-conservative people, because percentages”, but I’m not seeing it in the map data. I believe your argument makes more sense: this problem is cultural and specific, not broadly demographic.
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The correct spelling is “skools”.
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