By Sophie Staires
“Banning books is wrong. Instead of erasing history, let’s make history.”
These words were uttered by President Joe Biden in his 2024 State of the Union address. But despite the president’s blatant disapproval, book bans have been on the rise in public libraries and schools nationwide.
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution is commonly cited in arguments against book bans because such bans violate children’s rights to receive information and authors’ rights to distribute information. Facing what seems like a clear constitutional violation, this argument has done little to stem the rising tide of book bans and challenges.
Maybe a First Amendment argument isn’t enough because a child’s right to receive information is outweighed by the parents’ right to determine what information their child sees.[1] Or maybe the First Amendment argument is not doing enough to stop book bans for the simple reason that the voices most affected by book bans, i.e. marginalized voices, are not the voices the Constitution is designed to protect.
Perhaps, because I am a woman, and more particularly a Cherokee woman, the Constitution really doesn’t do much for me. Unsurprisingly, this is not a very popular argument in the legal field. I’m a big fan of the constitutional amendments, but no amount of amending can correct what is, at its core, a document intended to protect certain people and exclude others. After a while, it begins to feel like we are stretching a blanket further and further, trying to include more and more people under its protection—but there are limits to how far it will stretch (especially considering there is disagreement about whether the blanket is stretchy to begin with).
That said, book banning is bad, maybe even more so than we realize.For anyone else who doesn’t feel particularly invigorated by the First Amendment, I offer up this alternative reason for worrying about book bans: Book bans fall squarely within a longstanding tradition of using schools to erase certain groups of people.
In the late 19th century, government- and church-operated boarding schools were erected to educate and, more importantly, assimilate Native children. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School, famously said that the school’s mission was to “kill the Indian . . . and save the man.” Native children were brought to these schools, often by force, and given English clothes, and English names. They were forbidden from speaking their Native language or engaging in traditional practices.
Pratt said he “believe[d] in immersing the Indian in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.” In short, Indian children were taught to be white, but they were also taught that to be white is to treat non-whiteness with violence, shame, and disrespect. They were given the colonists’ tools and sent back to their communities to do the work of colonization themselves. The boarding schools were a mechanism employed by the state to further the goals of colonization and promote the erasure of Native culture.
In the 1960s, many of these boarding schools closed as federal policies toward Indians shifted goals from from Termination to Self-Determination. However, the colonizer doesn’t need to directly regulate students’ names or bodies to diminish their cultural identity; they only need to control what information students are exposed to. To that end, the American education system has continued to erase Native culture through pedagogy.
I was raised and educated in northeastern Oklahoma, home to dozens of tribal nations. Nearly half of the students in my class were tribal citizens, but public school taught only the performance of whiteness. Every year we dressed up as pioneers to reenact the land run. At recess we played cowboys and Indians, and the cowboys usually won. After all, that was the story we had learned. The only place we saw our people represented was in history books, discarded byproducts of the steady, inevitable hand of progress. Even in the era of Self-Determination, schools were actively used to diminish Native culture.
Book banning is not new, but the last few years have brought a surge in book challenges and bans in public schools and libraries. Of course, children ought to be protected. Of course, parents should have some authority over what their children are exposed to. And of course, some things are not appropriate for children of all ages.
But the books currently facing challenges are disproportionately books written by and about LGBTQ individuals and people of color. By eliminating these voices, schools are teaching children only how to be white and straight, and furthermore, they are teaching that being white and straight means silencing everyone else. When LGBTQ books are banned, representation of those identities is banned by extension, and schools remain a mechanism for the erasure of marginalized groups.
Does it violate the First Amendment to make sure schoolchildren are not exposed to queer representation and discussions of race? Absolutely, it does. But it also violates a more fundamental human right: to exist, loudly and unabashedly, and to have your existence acknowledged. Why does it feel like we know how to use the First Amendment to protect bigots and racists, but not to protect queer and black children? Instead of trying to stretch this constitutional blanket to cover more people, we might need to think about getting a new blanket.
In the meantime, we ought to take a long, hard look at our education system as a whole and consider the role it plays in our society. Schools are not just a place where children learn history, science, and math; it is one where children learn who they are, how to move about in the world, and how to relate to other people. Do we want schools to be a place where children grow, or where they shrink into the background? We should take book banning in schools seriously, because it is about a lot more than books.
[1] But then, if a parent’s interests outweigh that of their child, how does that square with our nation’s current legal framework for reproductive rights?
Sophie is currently a 3L at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Prior to law school, Sophie completed a master’s degree in humanities and worked in the wine industry in the Washington, D.C., area. She is interested in Federal Indian Law, tribal sovereignty, and women’s issues. Outside of law school, she enjoys backpacking, sipping wine, and watching old movies.
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