On May 19, 2023, the federal Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights concluded a Georgia school district might have violated students’ civil rights by removing books with Black and LGBTQ+ characters from its libraries. In response, the Forsyth County school district agreed to provide what are described as “supportive measures” to affected students, including posting an explanation of their rationale for removing the books and explaining how students can file discrimination and harassment complaints.
Hannah Natanson and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff explain how the Education Department determined that students’ civil rights had been violated:
To establish that students’ civil rights were violated, the letter states, the department had to unearth evidence that the Forsyth district fostered a hostile environment based on ‘race, color, or national origin’; that district officials knew about that hostile environment; and that authorities took no steps to fix the situation.
The foundation for this conclusion is that any school which accepts federal funding is subject to Title VI and IX policies involving non-discrimination and non-exclusion on the bases of race and gender. Despite being notified during a school board meeting that a hostile educational environment had been created, the Education Department’s letter notes, “the District’s responsive steps related to the book screening process were not designed to, and were insufficient to, ameliorate any resultant racially and sexually hostile environment.”
This case, along with an even more pointed and potentially wider-reaching complaint filed by the ACLU against a Texas school district claiming removal of racial and LGBTQ+-themed books constitutes illegal discrimination, opens up a potential fruitful avenue for challenging book bans. Many campaigns against book banning focus almost entirely upon accusations of exclusiveness and anti-intellectualism which, while true, tend to be ineffective with the book banners (who view those characteristics as virtuous) and the silent majority in the book banners’ communities who, if not particularly in favor of book bans, also generally do not care enough about such “abstract concepts” as inclusivity and intellectual freedom to challenge extremists who have brandished guns to reinforce their threat. These cases, in comparison, rely upon a specific application on laws or policies, and these in turn are based upon demonstrable harm and damage caused by the violation of the laws or policies.
Focusing on specific laws and policies, such as Titles VI and IX or specific book removal policies in school and library districts, enables the government to address a provable failure and, through the legal system, to mandate a specific correction. For example, in the ACLU/Granbury, TX case mentioned above, Hannah Natanson notes,
If the government finds in the ACLU’s favor, the determination could have implications for schools nationwide, experts said, forcing libraries to stock more books about LGBTQ individuals and requiring administrators, amid a rising tide of book challenges and bans, to develop procedures ensuring student access to books that some Americans, especially right-leaning parents, deem unacceptable. The books most often targeted explore sometimes-challenging themes of sexual and racial identity.
Such legal counter-challenges can successfully be made with the involvement of affected youth and parents. Those individuals who courageously stand up and decry discriminatory book bans, and who can describe precisely how they are excluded and harmed by such actions, are invaluable in both assisting legal actions and opening the eyes of the “silent majority” to the damage they are allowing to occur in their communities.
