Texas Censorship Board Declares Nonfiction Book To Be Fiction So It Can Bury History It Doesn’t Like

Culture

from the not-even-pretending-there's-a-mask-to-take-off dept

People are censoring books all over the country, thanks mainly to a new wave of hatred encouraged and blessed by a failed businessman and marginal golfer who somehow managed to be elected president for a single term.

These book ban laws encourage activists with “conservative views” (you know which ones) to “challenge” any content they don’t like. Unsurprisingly, most book challenges target books that either contain LGBTQ+ content or highlight America’s history of racism. These challenges have nothing to do with “protecting children” from inappropriate content (since there are plenty of pre-existing obscenity laws capable of keeping this content out of the hands of kids) and everything to do with hateful people erasing people they don’t like, along with any criticism of the parts of history (slavery, segregation, etc.) they do like.

Governments get to censor what they want while pretending it’s just acting in the interest of concerned citizens. Governments provide the weapons and the laws placing book challenges in citizens’ hands gives them the (im)plausible deniability.

When all the parts start moving, the outcomes are literally Orwellian: a government entity declaring certain facts to be fiction in order to deny people access to factual historical accounts. Here’s how this all went down, as recounted by founders of Texas Freedom to Read Project, an activist group fighting a battle on multiple fronts to ensure Texans’ access to books a bunch of bigots would rather no one had access to.

While book challenges and book challenge avenues are a dime a dozen thanks to tons of elected bigots, this new twist belongs to one county in Texas, which has given certain people the power to unilaterally decide what is or isn’t factual.

[A] decision made this month in a county near Houston left us stunned. The Montgomery County Commissioners Court ordered librarians there to reclassify the nonfiction children’s book “Colonization and the Wampanoag Story” as fiction.

This reclassification decision is a consequence of a contentious policy change in March. Right-wing activists pressured the Montgomery County Commissioners Court to remove librarians from the review process for challenged children’s, young adult and parenting books.

[…]

Shortly thereafter, the newly formed Montgomery County “Citizens Review Committee” reclassified “Colonization and the Wampanoag Story” as fiction. The committee reviewed the book in a closed meeting — all its meetings are closed to the public — and it offered no explanation for its decision. The new policy does not allow decisions made by the Citizens Review Committee to be appealed.

That’s how you start erasing your own history. You take the librarians out of the equation. Next, you remove the public from the conversation by making these discussions private. Then you give only the citizens you want to hear from — including any non-residents who want to challenge content they don’t like — the only invitation to the discussion: the blanket permission to challenge books and/or their classifications. Then you seal it with a court order and pretend this is just citizens protecting each other, rather than the government engaging in censorship on behalf of people who love censorship as long as it only silences the people they don’t like.

So, maybe it is time to let Texas secede. It’s always wanted to. And the past decade of state leadership has proven it has no desire to be part of a constitutional republic… at least not as long as that requires it to respect the US Constitution. This state — like far too many in the US right now — is willingly embracing the very worst of its residents. And that means far too many people in positions of power cannot be trusted to govern, not when they’ve decided the most hateful in their midst should be given the largest platforms. They’re literally trying to rewrite history at this point. If they’re not stopped now, they won’t give up until they’ve managed to marginalize or disappear millions of people who they’re supposed to be representing.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, book ban, censorship, libraries, montgomery county, texas