I grew up in a home where no book was off-limits. I still remember borrowing Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye from my high school library – a novel that shook me, challenged me, and ultimately taught me empathy. No one tried to stop me from reading it.
Fast forward to today, and that same book is on banned lists in some school districts.
Book banning, something many of us assumed was a relic of the past, is back in force. And it’s not just a handful of controversial titles or concerned parents; it’s a full-blown movement.
As a California-based writer who thinks a lot about psychology and the choices we make every day, I can’t help but see the current wave of book censorship in the US as more than just debate over pages and ink. It reveals something deeper about fear, control, and our willingness to let others tell us what ideas are “safe.”
In this piece, I want to talk about why the battle over books in America right now matters to everyone, even if you’re nowhere near a school library. Because when we scratch the surface, it’s clear that it’s not going to stop with the books, no matter how you spin it.
Book bans are back in force
If it feels like there’s a new story every week about a book being pulled off the shelves, it’s because there probably is. The last couple of years have seen an explosion in attempted book bans across the U.S. In 2023, the American Library Association (ALA) recorded 1,247 demands to censor library materials – targeting 4,240 unique book titles in schools and public libraries.
That’s a 65% jump from 2022 and by far the most in any year since ALA began tracking. To put it in perspective, the previous record (set in 2022) was 2,571 titles – meaning 2023 blew past it by a wide margin. We’re not talking about a minor uptick; this is a tidal wave of challenges.
What kinds of books are drawing the most fire? Not surprisingly, it’s often books that shine a light on diversity and uncomfortable truths. About 47% of the titles targeted in 2023 were books by or about LGBTQ people or people of color. In fact, nearly all of the most frequently challenged books last year involve LGBTQ themes or racial justice topics.
The list of top targets tells the story: titles like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe (an award-winning graphic memoir about identity), All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson (a coming-of-age memoir by a Black queer author), and yes, classics like The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison made the top ten of most banned books.
These are stories that explore sexuality, gender, race, and history – the very subjects that often make certain people uneasy. Even a beloved YA novel like The Perks of Being a Wallflower or a children’s picture book about two male penguins raising a chick (And Tango Makes Three) have been swept up in this crusade.
The pattern is hard to ignore: the more a book encourages empathy for different experiences or asks tough questions, the bigger a target it becomes.
And it’s not confined to a few ultra-conservative pockets. At least 17 states each saw over 100 attempts to ban books in 2023. We’re talking states from Florida to Pennsylvania to Utah – red, blue, purple, you name it. One state, Florida, far outpaced all others with more than 2,600 unique titles challenged just in that year. That’s right: a single state accounted for well over half of all book challenges nationwide. If that doesn’t raise your eyebrows, consider that public libraries (not just school libraries) saw a 92% spike in book challenges in 2023.
So it’s not only about what kids read in English class – it’s also about what anyone can read at the local public library. Library workers have been put in the crosshairs; many have faced harassment, threats, even laws proposing criminal charges for librarians who fail to remove “objectionable” books.
The message being sent is loud and clear: certain ideas have no place on the shelf, period.
Now, you might have heard that in 2024 the pace of book challenges appears to be slowing a bit. It’s true that in the first eight months of 2024, the ALA logged 414 attempts to censor books, involving 1,128 unique titles – fewer than the record-shattering 2023 figures. But don’t be too relieved.
The drop may not mean the fever is breaking; it might just be going underground. Librarians report a rise in “soft censorship,” where books on potentially controversial topics are quietly kept off displays, moved to back rooms, or not purchased at all out of fear of backlash.
In other words, some censorship is happening preemptively, before a formal challenge even occurs. And many challenges simply aren’t being reported because, frankly, speaking up can put a librarian’s job at risk.
So the official numbers don’t tell the whole story. By all accounts, we are still far above the historical norm when it comes to scrubbing books from shelves. Book bans are very much back – in force – and they show no signs of truly slowing down.
What are we so afraid of?
Whenever the topic of book banning comes up, the defenders of these challenges often frame it in one tidy phrase: “protecting children.”
As a parent or educator, that hits home, right? No one wants kids exposed to truly inappropriate content.
On the surface, removing a book full of explicit sex or violence from a school library might sound like due diligence. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find that “inappropriate” has become a catch-all label for anything that makes certain adults uncomfortable, especially regarding LGBTQ identities or America’s racial history.
The spin is that it’s about shielding the young and innocent. The reality is that it’s often about shielding the older and anxious.
It’s about adults’ fears – their discomfort with changing social norms, with re-examining history, with having honest conversations about identity and racism.
Take the example of And Tango Makes Three, that innocent children’s picture book about two male penguins in the Central Park Zoo who hatch an egg together.
A Florida school district actually restricted access to this book in school libraries, essentially treating it as inappropriate for kids, solely because it features a same-sex family of penguins. (After an outcry and a lawsuit, that decision was reversed – but the fact it happened at all is telling.)
Think about that: a book about penguin parents was deemed dangerous. Not because it’s graphic or explicit (it’s not), but because the idea of two dads raising a child made some adults uneasy. If that isn’t about fear, I don’t know what is.
And it’s not an isolated case. Over and over, books get labeled “pornographic” or “obscene” when the real issue is that they challenge a particular worldview.
A YA memoir about growing up Black and queer gets tagged as “sexual content” and pulled from shelves, when its real offense is telling LGBTQ teens they’re not alone.
A novel by Toni Morrison gets yanked for “graphic violence,” when its real offense is forcing readers to confront the brutality of racism.
Sure, these books can be intense or uncomfortable – they’re meant to be. That’s what makes them powerful. Banning them doesn’t protect kids from harm; it protects adults from fear of having to address that harm exists.
If we’re honest, a lot of this comes down to control. By pulling a book, we try to control the narrative and avoid the hard conversations. It’s a psychological coping strategy: eliminate the source of anxiety (in this case, a book that sparks tough questions) and you eliminate the anxiety.
But life doesn’t work that way, does it? Racism won’t disappear just because The Bluest Eye is not in the library. Teenagers won’t stop feeling confused about their sexuality just because This Book Is Gay is kept off the shelf.
All that happens is we send a message of shame – we tell certain kids that stories about people like them are not fit for public consumption.
We also tell kids in general that if something scares or unsettles you, the solution is to hide it, ban it, banish it.
Psychologists have a term for this kind of overprotection: moral panic, where a group jumps to censor or outlaw something symbolic of a deeper fear.
Historically we’ve seen it with rock music, with Dungeons & Dragons, with the Harry Potter series – today it’s books about racism and LGBTQ characters. The pattern is the same. It’s not really about the content of those pages; it’s about what they represent. It’s about a world that’s changing, and some people wanting to hit pause or rewind.
Here’s another revealing fact: the majority of these book challenges aren’t just random concerned moms browsing their kids’ bookshelves. ALA data from 2024 shows that 72% of demands to censor books came from organized pressure groups or government officials, not from individual parents.
One prominent group, Moms for Liberty, has been linked to nearly 60% of the coordinated book bans in schools tracked in one analysis. These are well-organized campaigns, often with political backing, handing out 100-book “hit lists” for volunteers to challenge at their local libraries.
So when someone says this is just about “parents’ rights,” remember that most parents aren’t the ones clamoring for these bans. It’s a relatively small but vocal movement, leveraging fear to impose its will on entire communities.
Parental rights are important – I have every respect for a parent deciding a certain book isn’t right for their child. But what these groups are doing is deciding for everybody’s children. They’ll claim they’re saving kids from harm; I’d argue they’re mainly saving themselves from having to explain complex realities to those kids.
And let’s not overlook the basic truth: kids are curious, not stupid. By middle school or high school, they are aware that LGBTQ people exist, that racism exists, that sex exists.
Removing books won’t erase these realities; it just removes safe, structured ways to learn and think about them.
I’d rather have a teenager read about these topics in a nuanced book and discuss it – with teachers, with parents – than have them encounter it in the wilds of the internet with no context at all.
Every time a book is banned, an opportunity for understanding is lost. We should ask ourselves: what are we so afraid of our kids seeing or thinking about? Is it really about protecting them, or protecting our own comfort zone? Because censorship might feel like control in the short term, but in the long term it’s just ignorance by another name.
It won’t stop at books
Here’s the scary thing about censorship: once it gets rolling, it tends to snowball. Today it’s books; tomorrow it could be curriculums, libraries, and beyond.
In some places, it’s already gone beyond individual titles on a shelf. We’ve seen school boards and state legislatures take the crusade further – passing laws that restrict what teachers can say in class or what books libraries can buy.
Even more extreme, some activists have shown they’re willing to burn down the house to kill a spider. In Virginia last year, a group of ideologues effectively defunded an entire public library because it refused to remove LGBTQ-themed books. The county board withheld funding, pushing the library to the brink of closure over a handful of titles that one faction dubbed “pornographic” (they were in fact storybooks featuring two-mom and two-dad families).
That’s right – rather than let those books sit on a shelf, they were ready to shutter the library for everyone.
What happens in a community when a public library closes? People lose access to all books, all information, regardless of content. It’s the ultimate lose-lose, driven by an absolutist mindset: “our way or no library at all.”
It’s a chilling preview of where this can lead. As one free-speech advocate put it, what’s happening in that Virginia town should be a wake-up call about the freedom to read. Because if a small but determined group can dictate the fate of a library, what else can they dictate?
Censorship has a way of bleeding outward. Allow a ban on one thing, and the list of banned things tends to grow. We’re seeing attempts to control not just books, but educational curricula, school board decisions, even the ability of librarians to do their jobs without looking over their shoulders.
And let’s be real: it’s not going to stop with the public library or school library. The logic of “protecting” people from ideas can extend to art exhibits, theater performances, websites, news, you name it. And let’s not start on the current administration’s demands on our universities – it’s the same slippery slope.
Once you normalize the idea that it’s okay for authorities to silence certain voices “for our own good,” the door is open for all kinds of abuse.
In fact, these battles are already adjacent – we’ve seen controversies over diverse voices, history standards and health curriculums running parallel to the book bans. It’s all part of a larger effort to control the narrative of what young (and not-so-young) Americans can know about their world.
Now, from a psychological perspective, this trend also says something about us as individuals. In everyday life, it’s tempting to avoid what makes us uncomfortable. We all do it to some extent – tuning out opposing viewpoints, skipping the article that might contradict our beliefs.
That’s human nature. But there’s a big difference between personally choosing to avoid something and enlisting the power of the state or the school board to make sure nobody can access it.
The former is personal preference; the latter is authoritarianism, even if it’s clothed in good intentions. If we start letting others decide for us what ideas are acceptable, we’re outsourcing one of our most fundamental freedoms: the freedom to form our own judgments.
Do we really want a world where a small committee, or an activist group, or a political figure gets to draw the boundaries of our curiosity? Where our willingness to explore ends exactly where their fear begins?
I don’t. And I suspect most of us, when we pause to think about it, don’t want that either. The willingness to let others do our thinking for us, to let them declare certain knowledge off-limits, is a slippery slope toward a very narrow, controlled society. It may start with a controversial novel or a graphic memoir in a school library, but it rarely ends there.
Censorship, once justified “for the public good,” tends to metastasize. It feeds on the very fear it propagates. The more you censor, the more fearful people become of the ideas that got censored – and then the demand for censorship grows. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of shrinking horizons.
Conclusion
The debate over book bans isn’t just about books – it’s about what kind of society we want to live in.
Are we a confident society that can tolerate divergent ideas, trusting in education and open discussion? Or are we a fearful society that copes by playing whack-a-mole with every story or fact that might unsettle someone?
I vote for the former. A healthy democracy relies on diverse voices and open debate. Once the inclination to ban becomes commonplace, it’s not just the books that are being silenced. It’s any idea or topic – or person – someone in power decides is too “problematic” or “subversive” for the rest of us. The ripple effect can be huge, influencing everything from academic research funding to the types of discussions teachers feel safe having in classrooms.
At the end of the day, book censorship is a cautionary tale about fear and control. Call it “parental rights,” call it “protecting kids,” call it “patriotism” – no matter how you spin it, a ban is still someone else deciding what you can’t read.
And once we swallow that pill, it won’t stop with the books. The impulse to censor will just move on to the next thing, and the next, until there’s not much left to ban – or much freedom left to lose.
Let’s not let it get that far. Instead, let’s treat controversial books and diverse voices as an opportunity to talk, to think, to understand – not as a threat to be extinguished. Because a society that isn’t afraid of a book is a society that isn’t afraid of ideas – and that’s a society that moves forward.
