Tanita Davis is an award-winning author. She has written 8 novels for young readers, and her short fiction can be found in Hunger Mountain and Cicada magazines. She is currently the CYBILS Awards Board Vice President.
When my book HAPPY FAMILIES was among the hundreds banned in 2023 by the Katy ISD, a public school district based in Katy, Texas, I wasn’t shocked. As I’d seen the waves of book challenges tightening the Bible Belt, I’d observed to my husband, “I know these people.” And I felt like I did: the families whose children attended church school, who earnestly attended churches and belonged to conservative congregations. The parents who fervently believed that ideas could harm their children, and whose tweens couldn’t yet be trusted to make good decisions to “set their minds” on whatever was true and praiseworthy. My parents believed that my opinion on anything on Earth mattered less than my citizenship in the kingdom of God, so they policed my reading habits vigilantly and made sure my hands and mind were never idle. While my parents limited their efforts to my siblings and me, they were strict parents who actively supervised my activities. Thus, with my history I felt that I dimly understood the concerns and fears behind my book being included on a ban list (though I also doubted that those concerned had read the book, or at least not read past a certain point). People care about their children in their own ways, and some communities feel it’s important to limit depictions of the experiences of people with whom they disagree, so I tried to be generous.
Well, as time has gone on, my ‘understanding’ of book banning has necessarily changed.
I understand that recent book bans aren’t about authoritarian but loving parents like mine. Book banning isn’t, in many cases, about parents at all. Did you know that a recent American Library Association survey found that 70% of parents were perfectly comfortable with librarians choosing the books their children were exposed to? A Washington Post study conducted in 2023 indicated that nationwide, sixty percent of book challenges were reported by just eleven people.
During the first half of the 2022-23 school year, PEN America analyzed the book challenges that came in, and determined that about 26% of banned books were books dealing with LGBTQ+ topics, and 30% were to do with race or racism. Those eleven people, whoever they are, don’t want to talk about America’s difficult history with race and how we’ve come so far, but still have a long way to go. They don’t want to think about or acknowledge the undiscovered spectrum of gender. They want to discourage discussions of inclusivity, broadening our understanding of others, or empathy. And they want to extend this refusal to everyone.
That I ”knew” these folks in Katy, TX, affirmed that some parenting values haven’t changed over the years. Even today’s kids have parents whose opinions decide what can be read and watched, with whom they’re allowed to socialize, and even how they can dress. It is a parent’s responsibility to do what they believe is best for their children. In the words of LeVar Burton, every book is not for every child, but there is a child for every book. Every book isn’t for everybody, but these attempts to extend a heavy-handed authority over other parents’ kids is unacceptable to me.
The thing is, change happens glacially – at a frozen snail’s pace. Banners have wanted to remove people’s civil rights for years, and literary activists have been pushing back against their attempts for years as well. The battle for civil rights marches on. Though change happens slowly, the only way to make changes is to take action to make changes take place. And the action that we can take? Is to vote – and to vote like our civil liberties are at stake… because they really are.
Now that my parents’ job is finished, I have the power to choose for myself what I could not as a young person. I choose to vote and to affirm the right of every reader to choose what they read for themselves. And whatever you believe, I hope that you vote, too.