The Rockingham County, Va., School Board recently took up the question of whether to remove 57 books immediately from school libraries, claiming it needed to create a process for … removing books from school libraries. Four members voted yes, and one voted no.
I grew up in Rockingham County; it’s where I went to elementary and middle school. My parents now live just across the county line, and I sat in their kitchen to stream the school board meeting two weeks after the book-removal vote, to hear the public comment on what the board had done.
Nothing about the book removal made sense. A complaint process already existed. And even if the board found that process to be insufficient or unclear, the new “cancel-first policy” — as one concerned parent called it — is, well, backward. Parents, if they chose, could have found out what their children were checking out. No one had used the existing complaint process to challenge any of the books on the list, some of which were not even in the school libraries.
It’s an odd list — a patchwork of Advanced Placement lit classics, young adult romance and perennial book-ban favorites. Some are light, and some are heavy. Subjects include sex, drugs, poverty, police brutality, slavery, sexual abuse, bullying and suicide. More than a third of the books feature trans or queer characters. It’s hard to see what connects “All American Boys” to “Heartstopper” to “Slaughterhouse-Five,” really, beyond one essential feature: They say what often goes unsaid.
The books on any book-ban list, by definition, express feelings, experiences and political views that the prevailing culture prefers to pretend do not exist.
But they do exist, and not just somewhere outside each community but inside it, too.
Since moving to Virginia, my parents have been Democrats living in majority-Republican communities and synagogue members in a landscape dotted with churches.
Urban blue dots float in rural seas of red across the country. We know that. If you zoom in on those blue cities, you find red enclaves — Beverly Hills in Los Angeles County, Staten Island in New York City. We know that, too.
But people sometimes forget that, if you zoom in on the farmlands and suburbs, you’ll find blue houses here and there. Or maybe a blue voter in a red house.
This is something I never forget — not when stunned Trump-era Democrats joked that the South should secede, not when progressives suggested banning travel to red states.
A nonbeliever in a Muslim household in a Christian neighborhood. A gay child in a family that believes homosexuality is a sin. In every house, kids with thoughts and feelings and experiences that are not polite to talk about.
During the public comment session of the school board meeting that followed the book removals, some people spoke passionately against the board’s action. One said that taking away those books meant “banning life-changing experiences that allow us to see each other more clearly.” Another directed comments to students who are struggling: “I want you to know that you are not alone.”
But those who spoke in defense of the book removals said, in essence: Yes, you are.
“Rockingham County is overwhelmingly conservative, like it or not,” one resident said. “Elections have consequences. And it serves the community well to be represented as such rather than being dictated to by those who don’t share the values and the views and the morals of the rest of the community.”
Freedom to read is the closest thing we have to freedom to think. It doesn’t matter how lopsided the numbers are — if it’s 4-1 or 40-1 — the majority has no right to take that freedom away.
Yes, it’s true, as some commenters insisted: The books that have been removed are still in print and on public library shelves. But that’s like saying art instruction is available outside of school. Or math help. It presumes that kids have access to outside education. Public school promises everyone the right to learn and grow and think, regardless of their circumstances. That’s a promise we must try to honor, even if, as parents, we worry our children might think differently from us.
Later, another resident told the lone dissenter on the school board: “Get on board with the parents, grandparents and your fellow board members.”
“Get on board.” No room for dissenting opinion, no tolerance for free thought. Majority rules … your mind.
After the board meeting, at my parents’ kitchen table, I went back to preparing the talk I would give the next day at the local library, on my book about becoming an atheist. The book is essentially a printed version of the verbal trust fall I’ve been doing for years — saying what I used to leave unsaid — which I do more confidently now than I once did, knowing that, as a nonbeliever, I am not alone.
How do I know, when people tend to keep quiet about their atheism — about whatever makes them different from their neighbors? I know from statistics, from conversation, from my own experience extrapolated.
I know from books.
