Will We See More Book Banning Challenges In 2023?

Actor Maulik Pancholy was touring to promote his debut novel, a charming middle grade book called The Best at It about a boy searching for his place at his Midwest middle school, when he got thrown headfirst into the book ban debate.

He was presenting to a middle school group. “Not only were the kids that I met fans of my voice acting work, but they also really glommed on to the idea of my first book, which is about a gay Indian American kid,” Pancholy remembers. “I showed a picture to them of me and my husband, and 700 kids started clapping in the audience. They just met me with so much love, and so many of those kids opened up about their own experiences with feeling different.”

So Pancholy, best known for his voiceover work on Phineas and Ferb and role as Jonathan on 30 Rock, felt shocked a few days later when he learned that a group of parents were angry the school had allowed an openly gay actor to address their children. “There were a lot of lies posted online, you know, about how I tried to sexualize their kids and told them that all the characters on Phineas and Ferb were gay,” Pancholy says.

The school district changed the way it chose representatives for assemblies in the wake of the parental outcry, which frustrated Pancholy because he had connected so well with the kids and felt their voices deserved to be heard in the matter. His book was banned in school districts in Florida and Texas.

When Pancholy released his second book this fall, he knew he could face bans again. He was hardly the only author to encounter such a reaction in 2022.

A Surge in Book Bans In 2022

A report this fall from PEN America found some alarming book banning statistics. From July 2021 to March 2022, 1,648 titles penned by 1,261 authors, 18 translators and almost 300 illustrators were banned by school districts. The report cites 2,532 instances of book banning in that span, spanning 138 school districts across 32 states.

Bans encompass removing books from school libraries and classrooms as well as preventing them from being used anywhere in the district.

The 5,049 schools that enacted book bans have almost 4 million enrolled students. That’s a lot of young readers being denied the opportunity to read books like Pancholy’s that describe what it’s like to grow up as a person of color and member of the LGBTQIA+ community. Not coincidentally, it seems, 41% of the bans targeted books with queer main or secondary characters, while 40% targeted books with protagonists or secondary characters of color.

Texas accounted for the most bans, 42% more than the state with the second-most, Florida.

PEN America notes that the rate and number of book bans increased from 2021, calling it “an unprecedented flood.” The organization doesn’t predict whether book bans will rise in 2023. But it does enumerate circumstances that have led to the rise of bans, and it’s unclear if those will change in the coming year.

What Drove Book Bans In 2022

PEN America points out that the bans are not a coincidence nor a one-off. At times, they’re not even the result of parents within a school district—cases have been noted in Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania where the protesters didn’t even have a child in the district.

“The large majority of book bans underway today are not spontaneous, organic expressions of citizen concern. Rather, they reflect the work of a growing number of advocacy organizations that have made demanding censorship of certain books and ideas in schools part of their mission,” says the PEN America report.

PEN America says at least 50 groups have national, state or local presence focused on book bans. Messages are often spread through social media, which makes them easier to disseminate.

Legislation has also upped the probability of book bans. The so-called “don’t say gay” law in Florida and SB 775 in Missouri, which bans offering “sexually explicit” texts, can be used to justify book bans.

PEN America calls it a “growing movement” and also notes that school districts, including one in Pennsylvania, have taken control of who oversees library collections, replacing librarians with people designated by the school board.

While it’s always difficult to predict the future, the momentum of book banning hasn’t waned yet.

Shining A Light Forward

Pancholy says that navigating the aftermath of the middle school event made him feel shame. He channeled his feelings into that latest book (Nikhil Out Loud), released this fall, in which the gay protagonist deals with similar pushback after getting cast as the lead in the school play. “It’s hard for Nikhil to describe how that makes him feel,” Pancholy says. “There’s nothing wrong with being open about who I am to young kids. But that old sense of shame, of ‘is there something inherently wrong with me that people are telling me I don’t deserve to be there?’ It was important to me to put into the book, too.

“Knowing that there are young people who don’t think my book should have been banned and don’t support that is really important because they’re, they’re the future leaders of our country. And so I have a lot of hope around that.”