Earlier this month, the American Library Association released a list of the “top 10 banned books” of 2021 to mark an unprecedented surge in attempts to drop books from school curricula in the United States. The list included best-selling titles such as “This Book is Gay” by Juno Dawson and “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas, which have been criticized for, respectively, “providing sexual education and LGBTQIA+ content” and for promoting an “anti-police message.”
Book banning is not a new phenomenon. Adam Laats, a historian of American education, told Vox that when it comes to book banning, “history repeats itself.” Since the early 20th century, there have been regular waves of outrage against a “specific kind of content, seen as teaching children, especially white children, that there’s something wrong with America,” he noted.
Yet the latest surge in book banning appears to be more intense than the ones that came before it. According to the American Library Association, 2021 saw the greatest number of challenges to books in a given year since the organization started tracking this data in 2000.