In 2024, We're Taking Down BookLooks

It's time to put an end to the era of context-free shock passages. Here's how.

It’s not about the books.

I’ve said that phrase, written it, heard and read it dozens of times from the smartest minds in the anti-censorship world. And it’s true. Debates about books in schools and libraries (and bookstores) are almost always about something bigger than any one novel, memoir, or informational text: they’re about the value of public schools, or about LGBTQ inclusion and acceptance, or about factual sex education or honest discussions of racism, history, and society.

But it would be a mistake to think that just because the book debates are about deeper issues, we can ignore the books themselves and jump straight into defending those bigger causes. Because over the past two years books have been the weapons lobbed at LGBTQ acceptance, public schools, etc. If we want to defend those things, we have to defuse those weapons.

The first step to doing that is understanding how books have been weaponized and why that weaponization works. The how is easy: passages with sexual content are being culled, stripped of context, and presented with outrage to people in power with the expectation that those people will be outraged at what they see. The most basic form of this is the angry public commenter reading a passage from The Bluest Eye at a school board meeting or someone tweeting a panel from Gender Queer at a librarian who speaks up for the freedom to read. In its more involved forms, it can take the shape of things like the #FilthyBooks campaign that activists used to influence Texas legislators to vote for HB 900 last spring. The main tool that makes this culling possible, of course, is BookLooks.org, a Moms-for-Liberty-affiliated website that provides ratings and objectionable passages for about 700 books.

But it’s also important to understand why those out-of-context passages are so effective. This can be hard for those of us on the pro-books side, since we do this work because of how much books mean to us. But here’s the deal: most people haven’t read the books in question.

There are lots of sharp, intelligent lawmakers in Austin, for example, but the number of legislators who have read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or Flamer, or Gender Queer is pretty close to zero. Even most school board members haven’t read The Bluest Eye or Beloved. So their introductions to those books come from the would-be censors and, what’s worse, BookLooks makes those first impressions easily digestible, memorable, and shareable.

What all this means is that we can’t just scream that the other side is taking passages out of context. We have to provide that context.

That is inherently a harder task than the other side’s. But the good news is that the other side is pretty (okay, entirely) predictable. While the lists of books they want removed are ever-expanding, the list of books they use to shock decision-makers is pretty static. If book banners in your state or school district are trying to implement a new law or policy that will remove masses of books from your school, you can bet they’re going to show up and angrily read from Flamer or Perks or All Boys Aren’t Blue. They’ll probably show some images from Gender Queer or one of a handful of inclusive sex-ed books.

But what if when they do that, the lawmakers or board members they’re addressing already have in hand a document that explains those passages, how they fit into the work as a whole, the value of the work as a whole, and the reasoning for its inclusion in libraries? And what if that document also compares the book to other books the reader is likely to know, and reminds them that they likely read works with similar content when they were students?

To help with that, I’ve made a new resource with a series of documents providing facts and context for some of the most frequently challenged and banned books. In each one, you’ll find: background on the text and its use in schools; honest acknowledgement of the controversy surrounding each book and information on the scenes most likely to shock readers; context for those scenes; what students would miss if they lose access to the book; and “comps”—other books with similar themes and content.

I’m not the first person to think of something like this. I love librarian Martha Hickson’s book resumes, and the ones made by publisher Penguin Random House. And freedom-to-read groups across the country are making similar resources—check out, for example, this beautiful webpage from parents in Davis School District (Utah) featuring books removed from libraries in their district.

I made my documents from my perspective as both a parent and a teacher with more than 20 years of classroom experience, and I’ve prioritized both the books most often challenged in the districts near me and the ones I know best. The first five are up now, and more will be up soon.

The Bluest Eye

Flamer

All Boys Aren’t Blue

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Gender Queer

I made these to be easily shareable online, and I’ve included social media friendly BookLooks-style graphics of quotes from and about each text. My hope is that if someone in your district or state starts sending those shock passages to trustees or lawmakers, or if you know a group of would-be censors is descending on a public meeting to challenge books, you can respond quickly with the context they want to strip away.

The point is not necessarily to make these books impervious to challenges. The point, again, is to defuse the inflammatory and nasty rhetoric around these books that BookLooks.org makes possible. There are legitimate discussions to be had about what books are appropriate for what ages and in what situations. These context sheets are designed to facilitate those conversations—which, too often these days, are not happening.