A
ll too often, people thumb their noses at English majors, trivializing the subject as the pointless study of irrelevant stories. But, All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely depicts what a powerful effect the written word can have on a reader. How the stories that books tell can give us insight into the events unfolding around us.

And as it happens, the grammar lesson on passive versus active voice detailed in All American Boys is the key to this reading of Reynolds and Kiely’s work.

Broadly speaking, All American Boys is about two high school students, Rashad Butler and Quinn Collins, and their encounters with racism and police brutality within their community. Specifically, an instance of excessive force captured on video, and its impact on the Black victim, a casualty of racial profiling who was in fact innocent of the petty theft he was accused of. As well as the effect this turn of events has on the white classmate who happens to be a witness to the beating that landed its recipient in the hospital…  not to mention being a close family friend of the offending officer.

The book’s epigraph (by Hillel the Elder) points toward the questions Rashad and Quinn come to ask themselves as a result of their experiences with this incident – which also sets up how All American Boys is formatted:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, what am I? [1]

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The text is written in alternating voices emulating a dialogue, one we would benefit enormously from having as a nation. As Brandon Kiely noted in a recent interview, referencing Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The Other America” speech, these voices reflect the two very different Americas living side-by-side in this nation.[2]

Rashad’s voice, written by Jason Reynolds, addresses the first line of Hillel’s quote – the way racism operates in society, including how violence against Black people has been normalized. And the effect that has on the identity of those subjected to it.

Quinn’s voice, written by Brendan Kiely, speaks to the second line of Hillel’s quote – in the context of privileged (and one might say oblivious) nature of white existence when it comes to racism and police brutality in The United States.

Which brings us to how Mrs. Tracey’s lesson on passive versus active voice functions to inform a reading of All American Boys.

Rashad is falsely accused of shoplifting from a local convenience store and is violently beaten by a police officer, despite his lack of resistance. Needless to say, Rashad’s situation becomes the talk of his school. And, students are divided between “the officer was just doing his job” faction and an “it was racial-profiling-inspired police brutality” contingent.

While sitting in Mrs. Tracey classroom as she addresses Rashad’s absence and how the circumstances surrounding it have affected the student body, Quinn notices her notes on the whiteboard about passive versus active voice.

And, he comes to realize that this lesson on passive versus active voice is relevant to the incident that has the entire school community in an uproar.

For those who may benefit from a refresher…   passive voice is when the subject of the sentence is the recipient of the action. For example: The lamp was knocked over by Tommy. Active voice, on the other hand, is when the subject of the sentence is the one performing the action. As in: Tommy knocked over the lamp.[3]

“’Mistakes were made,’ Mrs. Tracey had scrawled on the white board. And beneath it she’d written, Who? Who made mistakes?”

Mistakes were made.

Rashad was beaten.

Paul beat Rashad.[4]

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Quinn comes to understand that framing this instance of police brutality in a passive voice (as accounts of the incident had been) allows society to avoid accountability. It’s also important to note that describing the episode in passive voice discounts Rashad’s humanity and denies him agency.

Up until now, Rashad and Quinn have both lived pretty passive lives, meaning they have simply received actions/ assimilated life-shaping information from their parents and others in their social circles pretty much without question. The incident at Jerry’s market, however, triggers a metamorphosis in both boys from passive to active voice, as it were – to take action rather than simply fall in line their circle of friends and family.

The novel opens with Rashad’s story about how he joined the ROTC “to get [his] dad off [his] back. To make him happy.”[5] The more we learn about Rashad, the more apparent it becomes that he’s the good kid his father expects him to be.

And the more we read about how carefully Rashad is being raised, the more evident it becomes that his father’s concerns are in response to the negative way young black men are frequently characterized in the U.S. This perspective is demonstrated by the fact that Rashad’s father has definitely had “the talk” with his teenage son…  that is, how to survive as a Black man when encountering authority.

This message has been drilled into Rashad’s head with a military-style cadence chanted frequently in call-and-response style with his father:

Never fight back. Never talk back. Keep your hands up. Keep your mouth shut. Just do what they ask you to do, and you’ll be fine. [6]

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In other words, remain passive. Which ultimately fails to protect Rashad from racial profiling and police violence.

Quinn is a star athlete on the basketball team, and one of the school’s leading prospects for the college scouts scheduled to visit in the next few days. He’s a popular student, and loyal son to his father – a soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. He’s also a dutiful son to his mother, whose lessons occupy his mind as he begins nearly every day:

Ma’s voice in my head, telling me what I needed to do, what I needed to think about, how I needed to act. [7]

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The favorite teenage hang out in town is a pizza joint called Mother’s. A picture of Quinn’s father hangs on the wall amid photos of those who work in the family-run pizza shop. He’s dressed in his Class A blues alongside “two guys in greasy T-shirts with their arms up around [his] dad’s shoulders.”[8] Quinn’s father is nothing short of revered there. And, Quinn notes that he “[has] it good at Mother’s”:

…the guys at Mother’s always gave Saint Springfield’s son a major discount, and yeah, well, I was the kind of guy who just kept taking those free Cokes no questions asked, like I actually deserved them or something.[9]

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Clearly, both young men are still passively functioning within the patterns and rhythms created by their families. One of them in an effort to navigate a world where “Black men are at disproportionate risk of death from lethal force by law enforcement compared to white men.”[10] And the other, living a life of relative privilege, blissfully unaware of such statistics.

We also learn that Rashad is an artist. And, a significant detail about Rashad’s art is that his subjects are faceless. Which is precisely how Rashad feels as he lay in the hospital bed watching the news coverage of the incident that put him there – just another victim:

I had seen this happen so many times. Not personally, but on TV. In the news. People getting beaten, and sometimes killed, by the cops, and then there’s all this fuss about it, only to build up to a big heartbreak when nothing happens. The cops get off. And everybody cries and waits for the next dead kid, to do it all over again. That’s the way the story goes.[11]

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It feels like the news coverage of the incident at Jerry’s, complete with video captured by an onlooker, is running on a loop. Not only does Rashad repeatedly see himself “being crushed under the weight of the cop,” he hears the recurring insinuation that he was yet another perpetrator in a “string of robberies” at Jerry’s.[12]

Feeling as forlorn as he does, Rashad is inclined to remain passive, and blow off the rally against police brutality that was sparked by the incident he was involved in.  That is, until he meets Mrs. Fitzgerald, an elderly lady who works in the hospital gift shop.

Mrs. Fitzgerald tells Rashad a story about her brother, who participated in the Civil Rights protests and “took the bus trip down to Selma.”[13]  He begged her to go. But, she didn’t. Because she was scared.

Sounding very much like the sentiments Rashad has expressed about police brutality, Mrs. Fitzgerald told her brother “it didn’t matter.” [14]

But as she watched the clips on the news, she began to regret not joining her brother in the Civil Rights protest in Selma and the March on Washington. Because she came to realize how courageous he was, and that he was not protesting only for himself, but for “all of us.”[15]

Mrs. Fitzgerald gives Rashad a piece of advice that sets his “active voice” in motion:

Now, I’m not telling you what to do. But I’m telling you that I’ve been watching the news, and I see what’s going on. There’s something that ain’t healed, and it’s not just those ribs of yours. And it’s perfectly okay for you to be afraid, but whether you protest or not, you’ll still be scared. Might as well let your voice be heard, son, because let me tell you something, before you know it you’ll be seventyfour and working in a gift shop, and no one will be listening anymore.[16]

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Rashad thinks about what Mrs. Fitzgerald had to say and how he would feel if he didn’t go to the protest, if he didn’t, as she said, “speak up.”[17] He turns on the TV, and sits and watches the news. But this time, he really watches it, forcing himself to see himself, to relive the pain and confusion. And, how his life changed “in the time it took to drop a bag of chips on a sticky floor.”[18] Then, he picks up his sketch pad:

And started drawing like crazy, but it was hard—stupid damn tears kept wetting the page, they wouldn’t stop, but neither would I. So I kept going, letting the wet spread the lead in weird ways as I shaded and darkened the image. The figure of a man pushing his fist through the other man’s chest. The other figure standing behind, cheering. A few minutes more, and normally it would’ve been complete. A solid piece, maybe even the best I had ever made. But it wasn’t quite there yet. It was close, but still unfinished. I took my pencil, and for the first time broke away from Aaron Douglas’s signature style. Because I couldn’t stop—and I began to draw features on the face of the man having his chest punched through. Starting with the mouth.[19]

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Rashad has found his voice. And, bearing that in mind, he does march in the protest. As a symbolic gesture, he removes his bandages prior to the protest, because he wants people to see what happened. He wants them to know that regardless of whether Officer Galluzzo gets off scot-free, and this day ends up like other protests sparked by police brutality visited upon young Black men, that he would never be the same person.

In the midst of the protest, Rashad notes:

I knew it wasn’t just about me. I did. But it felt good to feel like I had support. That people could see me.[20]

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Rashad has evolved from being the recipient of the action, to someone taking action. He is no longer being forced by outside pressures, appearing as a stereotype to be co-opted by those in power. Rashad has developed into a self-affirming individual taking a publicly antiracist stance. Consequently, people genuinely see him and his earnest nature. And, as Hillel predicted, they are for him.

As noted above, Quinn is a witness to the police brutality that put Rashad in the hospital. The following Monday “everyone – everyone— was talking about” the video of the incident.[21] Everyone, that is, except Quinn because he doesn’t want to put himself back there, watching it happen all over again.

But, more significantly, it occurs to Quinn that he might be in the video, which makes him start “freaking out.”[22] And, that’s more than a little self-absorbed given how things turned out for Rashad.

During a conversation with his friend Jill, Quinn is relieved to discover that he isn’t in the video after all. But, Jill also brings it to his attention in no uncertain terms that “This is not about you, dumb*ss.”[23] And, the proverbial light bulb begins to flicker for Quinn about the larger implications of what transpired at Jerry’s the previous Friday.

A couple days later, Mrs. Tracey enters her classroom with a copy of the novel Invisible Man in her hand. She had assigned the first chapter a week earlier, which Ralph Ellison originally published as a short story titled Battle Royal.

Quinn had never read anything like it, and doing so made him “twisted up in discomfort.”[24] He hated the violence, and how the white men in the story watched Black boys getting beaten, and beat each other, for sport. But, Quinn tells himself, in passive thinking born of obliviousness:

White people were crazy back then, eighty years ago, when the story took place. Not now. [25]

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Mrs. Tracey tells the class that the school’s administrators have decided it would be best to just move on to the next unit rather than assign a paper for this story as they usually did. It seems Battle Royal hits a little too close to home. The obvious parallels between Ellison’s story and the incident at Jerry’s would likely lead to discussions about Rashad and why he has been absent from school. So, no papers would be written on this unit.

And that’s when Quinn begins to understand what Ralph Ellison meant by the title Invisible Man… when it really starts to sink in:

…a weight of dread dropped through me. Were we going to talk about the story again? After Rashad? Because after what had happened to Rashad, it felt like no time had passed at all. It could have been eighty years ago. Or only eight. Now it wasn’t only the city aldermen. Now there were the videos, and we were all watching this sh*t happen again and again on our TVs and phones – shaking our heads but doing nothing about it.[26]

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Quinn sees what was in Ellison’s text about invisibility. Why shouldn’t their classes talk about what happened to Rashad? “Was what happened to him invisible? Was he invisible?”[27]

So, Quinn instigates a spontaneous read-aloud of Ellison’s work in class. And, it fell upon him to read the old grandfather’s deathbed advice,a passage reminding everyone in class “what had to be learned by the ‘young’uns:”[28]

Grandfather had been a quiet old man who never made any trouble, yet on his deathbed he had called himself a traitor and a spy, and he had spoken of his meekness as a dangerous activity.[29]

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Quinn’s proverbial light bulb is becoming increasingly brighter. It becomes clear to him that being passive does nothing but maintain the status quo, keeping marginalized communities invisible:

It was like Jill had said. Nobody wants to think he’s being a racist, but maybe it was a bigger problem, like everyone was just ignoring it, like it was invisible. Maybe it was all about racism? I hated that sh*t, and I hated thinking it had so much power over all our lives—even the people I knew best. Even me.[30]

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New understandings like Quinn’s is why reading books about people whose lives are different than our own is so important. Doing so gives us insight into societal issues we haven’t experienced, or may not even be aware of because they aren’t happening to us – even when those things are happening to people we may work alongside or go to school with.

Quinn’s description of this dynamic as it pertains to his relationship with Rashad – or lack thereof –  is spot-on:

We lived in the same godd*mn city, went to the same godd*mn school, and our lives were so very godd*mn different.

Why? You’d think we’d have so much in common, for God’s sake. Maybe we even did. And yet, why was there so much sh*t in between us, so much sh*t I could barely even see the guy?[31]

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Sometimes, violence like Ellison talks about (which is purportedly the reason for his work being banned) is a regular part of what some folks contend with on a daily basis. Not to mention the fear of being on the receiving end of racial profiling and police brutality (which All American Boys has been banned for addressing). But, we would never know such injustices exist, or more importantly feel called to address them, if all we know about the world has been limited to the bubble of a single perspective.

Ellison’s work, and its relevance to the police brutality Rashad has experienced, pops the proverbial bubble Quinn has been living in. Battle Royal is Quinn’s wake-up call:

Well, where was I when Rashad was lying in the street? Where was I the year all these black American boys were lying in the streets? Thinking about scouts? Keeping my head down like Coach said? That was walking away. It was running away, for God’s sake. I. Ran. Away. F*ck that. I didn’t want to run away anymore. I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t happening. I wanted to turn around and run right into the face of it… [32]

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Quinn has come to realize that part of the privilege his whiteness affords is the notion that injustices he witnesses can be ignored.  That it’s easier to diagnose racism as a social problem than confront it on an individual level.

So, he finds a fat, black permanent market, digs up one of his white t-shirts, and writes I’M MARCHING on the front of it – referring of course to the protest against police brutality scheduled for that weekend. Then, he writes ARE YOU? On the back of the shirt. And, he wore that shirt to school the next day.

This new perspective allows Quinn to break free from the blind loyalty his tight knit circle (which includes the offending police officer’s family) expect from him. The type of loyalty they associate with Quinn’s father and his military service. Even though this hard choice cost him a busted lip at the hands of someone he previously counted as his best friend:

Your dad was loyal to the end,’ they’d all tell me. ‘Loyal to his country, loyal to his family,’ they meant.[33]

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Quinn wants to be his father’s son, as the saying goes. But, he also realizes that the thing his dad was most loyal to was his belief that a better world was possible. And, he was someone who stood up for it, not just for those in his immediate circle.

Quinn has clearly contemplated Hillel’s question, “But if I am only for myself, what am I?” And as a result, he has evolved from seeing the world in a passive and narrow manner, to engaging the world and actively addressing injustices that exist outside his limited circle.

After Rashad returns home from the hospital, he goes straight to his room and begins to “scour the Internet” to catch up on his life. The hashtag #RashadIsAbsentAgainToday brought hundreds if not a thousand posts from all around the country.

There were pictures of people carrying posters with the hashtag written on them. Others simply read ABSENT AGAIN. And then, there was the picture of some guy with a T-shirt that said I’M MARCHING on the front, and ARE YOU? written on the back.

The protest is to start at Jerry’s at 5:30 on Friday afternoon and work its way down to the police station. It would culminate in a Die-In – which is sort of like the sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Rashad’s brother Spoony pulls a stack of papers out of his bag, and says:

Then we make the most powerful statement we can make.” Spoony dug in his bag and pulled out a stack of papers. “We read every name on this list. Out loud… [34]

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The list, of course, contains the names of unarmed Black people who have been killed by the police, enough names to fill several sheets of paper.

And, the protest turns out to be much more than just a handful of high school students. The street was a river of people, with Rashad at the front of the march. “Speaking truth to power. Standing up for injustice.”[35] And it goes off without a hitch.

During the protest Quinn makes a video of himself for his younger brother, stating:

If [Dad] died for freedom and justice – well, what the hell did he die for if it doesn’t count for all of us? [36]

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Quinn’s video narration could be described as his version of “what had to be learned by the young’uns.”

Despite the fact that Rashad and Quinn’s stories are so intertwined, the two never actually meet each other. And, that’s important to note, because as Jason Reynolds pointed out it in a recent interview, a “kumbaya moment” at the close of the novel, “where everything is right with the world,” wouldn’t be reality.”[37] But most of all, “you don’t need to actually know a person to care about their well-being.”[38]

The final chapter is written as a poem. Like the overall format of the novel, it consists of alternating stanzas between each narrator:

Oh my God! He was right over there!
Closer than I’d been to him when
Paul laid into him. Much closer.
And Rashad was looking at me, too.

I locked eyes with a kid I didn’t know, but
felt like I did. A white guy, who I could tell
was thinking about those names too.

All I wanted to do was see the guy I hadn’t
seen one week earlier. The guy beneath
all the bullshit too many of us see first—
especially white guys like me who just haven’t
worked hard enough to look behind it all.

Those people. I hadn’t known any of them,
and he probably hadn’t either. But I was
connected to those names now, because
of what happened to me. We all were. I
was sad. I was angry. But I was also proud.
Proud that I was there. Proud that I could
represent Darnell Shackleford. Proud
that I could represent Mrs. Fitzgerald—
her brother who was beaten in Selma.

I wanted him to know that I saw him,
a guy who, even with a tear-streaked
face, seemed to have two tiny smiles
framing his eyes like parentheses, a guy
on the ground pantomiming his death
to remind the world he was alive.

For all the people who came before
us, fighting this fight, I was here,
screaming at the top of my lungs.
Rashad Butler.
Present.[39]

The poem speaks to the third enduring question posed by Hillel some two thousand years ago:

And, if not now, when? [40]

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Though Hillel’s third enduring question isn’t included in the novel’s epigraph, its sentiment is implied throughout All American Boys. The incident at Jerry’s shakes both Rashad and Quinn out of a passive tendency to stick with their respective herds, if you will, sparking them to actively address the racial injustices that continue to occur in the United States.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man prompted the proverbial light bulb to flicker for Quinn. Reading All American Boys is also an eye-opening experience. One that has the capacity to pop the bubble many of us have been living in. And, be a catalyst for transforming readers from being passive members of society to taking action toward making the world a better place. This is the power of literature, whether it’s a classic novel like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, or a new favorite like All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brandon Kiely.

That’s my take on All American Boys, what’s yours?

Checkout this Discussion Guide to get you started!

Endnotes:

[1] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, epigraph.

[2] “All American Boys.” Velshi Banned Book Club: Police brutality, white privilege, and “All American Boys.” https://www.ms.now/ali-velshi/watch/velshibannedbookclub-police-brutality-white-privilege-and-all-american-boys-159483973820

[3] “Active Versus Passive Voice.” Purdue Online Writing Lab. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/active_and_passive_voice/active_versus_passive_voice.html

“Active vs. Passive Voice: What’s the difference?” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/active-vs-passive-voice-difference

[4] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 213.

[5] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 9.

[6] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 50.

[7] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 63.

[8] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 77.

[9] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 78.

[10] Ramos, Jill Terreri. Politifact. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/apr/29/kevin-parker/police-violence-leading-cause-death-young-black-me/

[11] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 59.

[12] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 94.

[13] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 245.

[14] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 245.

[15] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 245.

[16] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 245.

[17] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 246.

[18] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 246.

[19] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 246.

[20] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 306.

[21] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 123.

[22] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 128.

[23] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 130.

[24] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 212.

[25] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 212.

[26] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 213.

[27] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 215.

[28] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 217.

[29] Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage Books, 1995, Pg 16.

[30] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 262.

[31] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 261.

[32] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 251.

[33] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 267.

[34]  Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 282.

[35] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 294.

[36] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 294.

[37] “All American Boys.” Velshi Banned Book Club: Police brutality, white privilege, and “All American Boys.” https://www.ms.now/ali-velshi/watch/velshibannedbookclub-police-brutality-white-privilege-and-all-american-boys-159483973820

[38] “All American Boys.” Velshi Banned Book Club: Police brutality, white privilege, and “All American Boys.” https://www.ms.now/ali-velshi/watch/velshibannedbookclub-police-brutality-white-privilege-and-all-american-boys-159483973820

[39] Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. All American Boys. New York: Antheum Books for Young Readers, 2015, Pg 309-310.

[40] Rev. Shawn Newton. “The Three Vital Questions.” First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto. December 11, 2022. https://www.firstunitariantoronto.org/wp-content/sermons/2022/2022-12-11%20Shawn%20Newton%20-%20The%20Three%20Vital%20Questions.pdf

Images:

What’s the Conversation?:  Photo by autumn_ schroe on Unsplash

Passive versus Active voice:  Photo by Ivan Shilov on Unsplash

Passive Beginnings:  Photo by Stanley Emrys on Unsplash

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?: Photo by Reneé Thompson on Unsplash

But if I am only for myself, what am I?: Photo by Alonso Reyes on Unsplash

A Die-in:  Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

In Conclusion: Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash

M
erry Christmas! And, here’s a free downable copy of banned author L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus for your virtual stocking.

It’s Santa’s origin story as told by L. Frank Baum. Though The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus isn’t located in Oz, it’s written by this master world-builder. So, rest assured there are plenty of whimsical characters, magical happenings, and daring adventures to satisfy the imagination of any reader. It’s about Santa Claus, after all.

You’re probably no stranger to Baum’s name because he also wrote The Wizard of Oz series. Which was banned because of its strong female characters in leadership roles, among other things.

And, if you are familiar with the works of L. Frank Baum, you’re likely aware that Elphaba’s name (yet another strong female character in the Oz-inspired Wicked) is a play on his moniker: L-F-Ba, get it?

Whether you celebrate Christmas, or one of the other wonderful holidays that take place this time of year, enjoy this seasonally specific work by banned author L. Frank Baum.

Download it here.

And, be sure to check out our reading of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while you’re at it.

#L. Frank Baum     #Celebrations

W
e hear the expression “Great minds think alike” when two people arrive at the same conclusion, or come up with the same idea, at the same time.

At its core, “great minds think alike,” celebrates intellectual synergy, the cooperative interaction of creative thinkers working toward the same answers or solutions. [1] Like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace who, independent of one another, were both writing about natural selection during the mid-nineteenth century.[2]

We seldom hear the other half of this saying, however, the often-forgotten, “but fools seldom differ.” Which is a warning against groupthink and the dangers of blindly agreeing with others.

Intelligent thought is about more than simple agreement. It’s about reasoning and analysis. So, when you find yourself thinking the same way as someone else, stop to consider whether that’s a result of insight or a lack of critical evaluation.

When taken as a whole, Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ, this aphorism highlights the importance of independent thought and the ability to entertain diverse ideas. Bearing in mind all the book banning and full-throttle attacks on diversity taking place these days, that’s something we could use a lot more of.

#Aphorisms Unplugged 

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Endnotes:

[1] Nguyen, Spring. “Great Minds Think Alike Full Quote: Oriign, Meaning, 55 Best Variations & When to Use It.” Snugfam.com  snugfam.com/great-minds-think-alike-full-quote-origin-meaning-55-best-variations-when-to-use-it/

[2] “What about Wallace?” Charles Darwin & Evolution. https://darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk/what-about-wallace

Image:

Great Minds Think Alike: Photo by William Felipe Seccon on Unsplash

T
hanksgiving is just around the corner! So, let’s Talk Turkey, as the saying goes. The actual story of the first Thanksgiving is banned.

This holiday typically revolves around a roasted Turkey with all the trimmings (whatever scrumptious morsels that might include at your house). And as we learned in school, it commemorates a Day of Thanksgiving observed by the Pilgrims in 1621, one celebrating a successful harvest…   not to mention the fact that they survived a harsh first year after landing on Plymouth Rock.

Historian David Silverman sums up the story of the first Thanksgiving that virtually all of us were taught as kids like this:

The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear. They hand off America to white people so they can create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit. That’s the story — it’s about Native people conceding to colonialism. It’s bloodless and in many ways an extension of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.” [1]

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What really happened around the first Thanksgiving, however, is much more nuanced, and a lot more complicated than this version — which was clearly written from a colonist perspective, and obviously with no Native American input.

That is why it’s important for Indigenous peoples to write their own stories – to counter damaging narratives written about them by non-Indigenous people, and correct historical inaccuracies.

Unfortunately, efforts toward a full understanding of our country’s history are systematically being squashed. From the book banning that targets works about any sort of diversity, to the curriculum scrubbing that nullifies teaching about race and ethnicity at all levels of education, to the dismantling of the Department of Education itself.

Which is why books like If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving, written by Chris Newell (a proud citizen of the Passamaquoddy Tribe), are essential. This book may have been designed with elementary and middle schoolers in mind, but anyone interested in learning facts about the first Thanksgiving will gain new knowledge.

In a recent interview, Newell talks about the uninformed questions he frequently fielded during his tenure as Education Supervisor at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Maine. The erasure of indigenous peoples’ role in early American history is so complete that Newell would get questions like “are the Pequots still alive?” [2]

This is the type of widespread misinformation his book addresses. Effective education about events like the first Thanksgiving requires moving beyond a singular, colonist-focused view to one that includes multiple perspectives. In this case, the Indigenous viewpoint in particular given the significance of their role in the first Thanksgiving.

That is what Newell has set out to do in If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving. He exposes truths about this major American holiday that have been suppressed, beginning with the original spelling of Plimoth (as opposed to Plymouth).

He addresses unexplored subjects like epidemics brought by European settlers that decimated Indigenous communities, the enslavement of Indigenous people by English colonists, and the loss of land associated with European contact.

And, he doesn’t restrict his outlook to the first Thanksgiving. Newell also casts a proverbial eye beyond the dialog where other writings leave off, with questions like: “How and when did Thanksgiving become a national holiday?” “Do Indigenous peoples celebrate Thanksgiving?” He also poses the very important question, “what are holidays that honor Native history?”[3]

So, before you sit down to whatever delicious foods make up the Thanksgiving feast at your house, be sure to check out If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving. And, have a heaping helping of Thanksgiving history to offset the myth we were fed as children.

Pair this with

It’s Native American Heritage Month:
Shining a spotlight on Zitkála-Šá

and

The “American Experience”
Embodied in the Childhood Reflections
of Zitkála-Šá and Laura Ingalls Wilder

           #Benefits of Humanities           #Celebrations           #The American Experience

Endnotes:

[1] Bugos, Claire. “The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story and the Lasting Damage They Imbue.” Smithsonian Magazine. November 26, 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thanksgiving-myth-and-what-we-should-be-teaching-kids-180973655/

[2] If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving by Christopher Newell, Conversation Club, Nov. 18, 2021

[3] Zotigh, Dennis. “’If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving.’” By Chris Newell Exposes New Truths About a Major American Holiday.” Smithsonian magazine, November 23, 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2021/11/23/if-you-lived-during-the-plimoth-thanksgiving-by-chris-newell-exposes-new-truths-about-a-major-american-holiday/

“Native-American Slavery in New England.” New England Historical Society. https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/native-american-slavery-in-new-england/

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Images:

The First Thanksgiving by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris. Public Domain Library of Congress. ID cph.3g04961

B
ook banning constitutes what is known as a dignity violation. And it’s easy to see how such experiences negatively impact one’s mental health. But, it’s important to realize that dignity violations impact our physical health as well.

Here at This Book is Banned, we talk a lot about how reading books with characters whose lives are different than our own fosters empathy. We also stress how important it is to see ourselves in the books we read. Because being represented in the books we read gives us a sense of dignity.

But, what if that wasn’t the case? What if you were excluded, and never saw yourself in the only books you have access to? Or when you did see characters who look like you or those with the same gender identity as you, they were consistently depicted as criminal, morally deficient, or somehow inferior to the other characters in the book?

That would be quite a hit to your dignity, and therefore your mental health. But, it isn’t only our mental health that suffers when we’re stigmatized by society. Stigma affects our physical health as well.

The following article, by Anindya Kar and Dinesh Bhugra, outlines how being stigmatized by society negatively impacts the physical health of marginalized communities.

Which is yet another reason why it’s essential for all of us to have access to books that not only represent us, but depict characters with our life experience fairly and in a dignified manner. And, why the current epidemic of banning books about marginalized communities is so detrimental.

Dignity is not a metaphor. It is a method and mechanism. In this article, the authors critically explore the concepts of tolerance, respect, and dignity through the lens of ethnic minority mental health, arguing that dignity must become a diagnostic principle within psychiatry. Drawing on recent findings in stress biology, social psychology, and global policy, it presents how dignity violations, ranging from subtle exclusions to structural violence, leave biological, psychological, and cultural impacts. At the cellular level, chronic stress linked to exclusion activates inflammatory pathways, shortens telomeres, and predicts psychiatric morbidity. At the meso-social level, cultural othering, forced migration, and political authoritarianism incite stigma and internalized shame. At the macro-structural level, austerity, hostile immigration laws, and regressive policies erode collective mental well-being. The article further explores the concept of double jeopardy, where ethnic minority status and psychiatric diagnosis intersect to multiply vulnerability, institutional mistrust, and diagnostic harm. We argue that dignity must be restored as a measurable outcome, not a rhetorical flourish. The proposed model of the “Dignity Constellation for Ethnic Minority Mental Heath” outlines a multilevel framework where dignity injuries can be identified and repaired, from clinical to legislative spaces.

Tolerance, respect, and dignity are concepts deeply intertwined, each carrying distinctive implications for how we interact with and perceive others, especially in the context of mental health. This becomes even more relevant regarding the mental health of ethnic or any other minority groups at the individual, familial, and community levels. Although tolerance in contemporary culture is subscribed to a progressive stance, it inherently positions one party, the tolerator, as holding power or moral superiority, implicitly delineating a boundary between what is considered normative and what is perceived as deviant or requiring acceptance. In contrast, respect, derived from the Latin “respicere” meaning “to look again” or “to consider closely”, signifies an active and intentional acknowledgment of the other. To respect is to engage, value consciously, and genuinely attempt to understand another’s perspectives and feelings. Thus, indifference or superficial dismissal fundamentally contradicts the spirit of respect. Dignity encompasses a person’s inherent worth and is the cornerstone of human interaction, particularly critical in mental healthcare. In therapeutic settings, mutual respect is important from the concepts of “unconditional positive regard”, but if there are difficulties in acknowledging similarities and differences, mutual suspicion may take hold. Respect directly upholds and reinforces dignity, from simple acts of politeness to deeply valuing individuals’ lived experiences, emotional states, and cultural narratives. Dignity, therefore, is not merely an ethical ideal, it is a mechanism with measurable biopsychosocioanthropological effects and a method for clinical diagnosis and systemic intervention. This paper argues that dignity should serve as a central organizing principle in addressing mental health inequities, especially for ethnic and cultural minorities. We propose that dignity violations act as stressors across cellular, individual, social, and policy levels and that restoring dignity across these domains should be a therapeutic and public health imperative.

Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrined dignity as a universal value affirming the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, including medical care and social services, it remains an open question whether we have truly achieved this vision, particularly in mental health [1]. In its Diamond Jubilee year, the UDHR calls us not just to reflect but to act especially as political, cultural, and structural forces continue to challenge the dignity of marginalized populations.

This paper expands on concepts related to tolerance, respect, and dignity, integrating recent scholarly conversations and building a scaffold that spans biology, psychology, sociology, and policy. We end by proposing a model of “The Dignity Constellation for Minority Mental Health”—a multilevel framework designed to map where dignity is eroded and where targeted interventions can restore it. This model situates dignity harms across five levels, namely cellular, individual, interpersonal, community, and policy/societal levels, each with corresponding outcomes and practical levers for repair. This framework is especially critical in the context of intersectionality, where mental illness and minority status combine in forms of double jeopardy. For the purposes of this paper, “ethnic minority mental health” refers to individuals and groups who face structural disadvantages based on ethnicity, culture, migration status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

While the primary focus is on ethnic minorities, we also consider how intersecting forms of marginalization such as those experienced by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer plus (LGBTQ+) communities and refugees create layered dignity harms that impact mental health outcomes. This broader lens allows us to account for shared mechanisms of exclusion, stigma, and structural vulnerability across minority identities.

2.1. Allostatic load—disrespect entering the bloodstream

Allostasis is a bodily process through which the body maintains homeostasis in response to stress. Unsurprisingly, when stress is chronic, the adaptive system becomes dysregulated, resulting in “wear and tear” on biological systems, known as allostatic load [2]. Stress biology has mapped how social injuries become cellular scars, and this is particularly important in the context of minority stress. Repeated humiliation, exclusion, or coercion is an example of violations of dignity at the core level, which activate the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, maintain cortisol surges, and leave the immune system in a low-grade inflammatory state. Ravi et al. [3] showed that chronic perceived stress predicts elevations in C-reactive protein (CRP) and pro-inflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-6 and tumour necrosis factor-α, as well as other biological signatures strongly linked to depression and anxiety. Chronic stress not only fuels mental illness but also drives physical disease through immunological dysregulation—increasing the risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and autoimmune conditions [4]. Minority groups, already facing barriers to healthcare access, experience these burdens more acutely. Structural inequalities persist across both psychiatric and general medical care, and mounting evidence shows that extreme stress leaves epigenetic marks. These findings echo Jacobson’s notion of dignity of self [5].

This framework refers to a person’s internal sense of worth, integrity, and self-respect, particularly how individuals experience and perceive themselves to how others treat them in a society. For people from ethnic minorities living with chronic mental health conditions, this has a broader implication as race and ethnicity, culture, and mental illness intersect to shape their perceptions about themselves. Hence, it is imperative to be intersectional because cultural misrecognition and institutional racism can keep  these individuals in the bubble of allostatic load.

2.2. Social defeat and neuro-inflammation

Models of “repeated social defeat” (RSD) produce microglial activation and anxiety-like behaviours that persist long after the initial insult at the cellular level [6]. The model illustrates neuroimmune interaction that shows that monopolization by an aggressive conspecific is not stressful but a biologically encoded message of low rank and thus an insult to dignity. Translational studies echo this as well. Social defeat predicts psychotic experiences such as perceptual distortions, paranoid ideation, or delusional thinking via aberrant salience networks, a neurobiological model of psychosis that explains how irrelevant stimuli are perceived as signifcant [7]. Humiliation is thus not metaphorical but molecular. This is further significant for individuals already marginalized by race, culture, chronic mental health conditions, or immigration status. This further activates chronic neuroinflammatory pathways reinforcing psychiatric vulnerability.

2.3. Epigenetic weathering and telomere attrition

Discrimination leaves a genomic shadow. Decades ago, a longitudinal relationship was established that showed the African–Caribbean migrant population was vulnerable to chronic mental health conditions [8]. A recent review linked racial trauma to accelerated epigenetic ageing, implicating methylation patterns on stress response genes [9]. These findings extend dignity downward to the genome, illustrating UDHR Article 25 in a microcosm, showing that persistence in indignity shortens life.

3.1. Otherism—difference as dignity’s raw material

Contemporary psychiatric culture often preaches “tolerance”, but tolerance can be a loaded and asymmetrical gesture. Tolerance operates as a regulatory discourse granting conditional acceptance from a dominant group to a minoritized one—thereby reinforcing existing hierarchies [10]. In this sense, tolerance imagines unidirectional power flowing from the “normal” toward the “deviant”, implicitly pathologizing differences rather than valuing them. Respect, by contrast, demands mutual recognition and ethical reciprocity. Within this framework, ethnic minorities are often positioned as “objects of tolerance” rather than full subjects of respect—permitted to exist within the system but only under terms defined by the dominant culture. This aligns with the logic of otherism, a colonial inheritance that ranks human difference in terms of value and proximity to dominant norms [11]. Ethnic minorities—particularly racialized groups such as Black, South Asian, and South Americans in the US—are often assigned a lower rung in this hierarchy, treated as peripheral or “less-than”. This status is not merely symbolic. Being kept in this position of conditional inclusion or exclusion activates sustained stress responses, driving up cortisol levels and, over time, increasing vulnerability to depression, anxiety, and even psychosis [12]. These effects are compounded when political or media discourses validate such hierarchies, turning prejudice into policy or public sentiment into surveillance. Additionally, otherism, when validated by political or media discourse, can cause prejudice to escalate to harassment, assault, or hate crime. Otherism often starts with “they” and crystallizes into xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, and islamophobia [11, 12]. Collectively, each incident reinforces fear, further eroding the dignity and mental health of targeted ethnic minorities.

3.2. Geopsychiatry—mapping distress onto displacement

At the end of 2024, a staggering 123 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide [13]. War, climate crisis, and forced migration now shape the mental health caseload, yet only 4% of UK psychiatric trainees report adequate instruction in geopolitical determinants [14]. Geopsychiatry demands curricula that track the multi-layered traumas of climate refugees, conflict survivors, or asylum seekers detoured into detention. This must be embedded within a broader shift in both undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. Training should go beyond the biomedical model to include humanities, public health, and medical anthropology, enabling a biopsychosocioanthropological approach that recognizes how biology, psychology, social structures, and cultural meaning interact in the development, perception, and treatment of illness. Hence, prevention must start early through education that cultivates mutual respect, cultural humility, and structural awareness, helping society recognize that dignity is not a clinical luxury but the foundation of health. The World Health Organization (WHO) warns that post-arrival stressors like family separation, insecure status, and hostile media can be as perilous as the original trauma [15]. Geopsychiatry information system (GIS) maps, asylum law, and climate displacement forecasts enable clinicians to document and help their ethnic minority patients navigate uncertain legal scenarios or situations.

3.3. Right-wing authoritarianism and stigma

Recent data show a clear pattern in a person’s score on right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). RWA is a trait cluster characterized by strict obedience to authority, hostility toward out-groups, and a preference for social conformity—the higher the score, the more likely they are to judge people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, major depression, or alcohol-use disorder more harshly [16]. Authoritarian mindsets treat any deviation from the “approved” norm as a threat to group stability. Psychiatric symptoms, by definition, challenge expected behaviour, so individuals high in RWA reflexively label such patients as dangerous, weak, or morally defective. This results in external stigma, as people with high RWA scores are more likely to support and uphold harsher public attitudes, greater social rejection, and institutional policies that prioritize control over care for individuals living with mental illness. The other resultant is internalized stigma that corrodes self-dignity, amplifying shame, delaying help-seeking, and worsening prognosis. Hence, additional anti-stigma efforts like posters, hashtags, and wellness slogans barely dent the problem if they sidestep its political undercurrents. Unless clinicians, professional bodies, and public health leaders call out these narratives, clinicians will keep treating symptoms in the consulting room, while status-driven stigma spreads unchecked in society.

While interpersonal and community dynamics shape the day-to-day experiences of dignity, structural forces operating at the level of law, economics, and governance exert a more ambient but equally powerful influence. For ethnic minorities, these macro-level conditions often create environments where dignity is either systematically undermined or selectively upheld. Economic austerity, punitive legislation, and policy neglect translate abstract values into tangible inequalities, causing disparities in access, quality, and outcomes of care. This next section on macro-dignity explores how dignity is shaped by systems that govern the societal distribution of resources, rights, and recognition.

4.1. Austerity as a dignity tax

Austerity policies worldwide have eroded mental and physical well-being, especially among marginalized groups. Movsisyan et al. [17] noted that the global post-2008 financial crisis highlights how fiscal consolidation deepened health inequities internationally. Additionally, it shows that austerity tends to worsen overall mental health disparities, particularly in contexts where public services are already fragile [17]. Empirical studies corroborate the following: in the UK, cuts to local council services—such as cultural, environmental, and planning support—were significantly associated with deteriorating mental health, especially in deprived areas [18]. More broadly, systematic reviews show that austerity-induced income stress, housing instability, and food insecurity profoundly undermine mental health across diverse income settings, with disproportionately severe effects for those already facing disadvantages [19, 20]. Taken together, the data confirm that austerity not only slashes budgets but multiplies stressors for vulnerable populations, disproportionately affecting ethnic minorities.

4.2. Legislative changes versus global backlash

From a clinical standpoint, the evolving legal context on both sides of the Channel will directly shape everyday decision-making. In England and Wales, the Mental Health Bill 2025 is expected to tighten criteria for compulsory admission, formalize advance choice documents (ACDs), and mandate culturally specific advocacy services [21]. If backed by proper funding and audited via dashboards that track detention rates and community treatment orders by ethnicity, these measures should reduce coercion, improve shared decision-making, and enhance therapeutic alliance, core components of dignified care. Meanwhile, the European Court of Justice’s Advocate-General has deemed Hungary’s ban on “LGBTQ content” incompatible with dignity and non-discrimination [22]. Similarly, across the Atlantic, in the United States, more than 750 state-level bills aiming to curb LGBTQ-inclusive curricula or restrict gender-affirming care were tabled during the 2025 legislative cycle, with 26 states already enforcing such bans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union [23]. In India, the Supreme Court’s October 2023 ruling declined to recognize same-sex marriage, leaving queer couples without marital rights [24]. These rulings, although outside clinical settings, matter to psychiatrists across the world and reinforce the principle that a patient’s identity must be respected in schools, media, and public life domains that heavily influence help-seeking, stigma, and treatment adherence. For clinicians, this inconsistency means patients may present with dignity injuries caused by the very systems that claim to defend them.

The intersection of minority status and psychiatric diagnosis combines a form of double jeopardy, which is a compounded vulnerability where individuals face discrimination on multiple levels simultaneously [25]. Ethnic minorities, particularly those living with various mental health conditions, not only navigate the stigma attached to psychiatric labels but also bear the baggage of racialized surveillance, systemic neglect, and cultural misappropriation. For example, ethnic minority patients in the UK are more likely to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act and less likely to receive talking therapies [26]. Similarly, Black men with psychosis are unusually subjected to coercive interventions, with their emotional expression often read through the gaze of danger rather than distress. Hence, cultural idioms of distress are often translated into pathology. This double jeopardy is not an accidental phenomenon but a result of systemic failure that account for how difference compounds existing risk.

In light of the multiple, intersecting stressors faced by ethnic,cultural, sexual, and migration minorities, the Dignity Constellation offers a reference model to identify where dignity is eroded and where targeted interventions may restore it (Table 1). Each layer aligns with a biopsychosocioanthropological framework and offers clinically and systemically relevant entry points for action.

Culturally responsive care already shows promise. Services for psychological therapies in England have piloted culturally adapted cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) programmes for South Asian communities, showing improved engagement and outcomes [27]. In Canada, some clinics have begun employing ethno-racial matching and trauma-informed interpreters to reduce diagnostic error [28]. These initiatives suggest that having ethnically concordant clinicians, interpreters, and community liaisons can improve timeliness, adherence, and cultural safety in mental healthcare. However, these remain exceptions rather than the norm, and access to such services remains uneven globally.

Within this landscape, the Dignity Constellation offers a practical framework. This prompts clinicians and policymakers to treat dignity deficits as seriously as symptoms. In routine practice, the model can be used for

• Formulation: The model can be used to integrate dignity-related factors into biopsychosocial formulations by identifying experiences of coercion, exclusion, or systemic neglect across any layer of the constellation.

• Assessment: The mode can be used to include dignity harms in patient histories, for example, asking whether patients have felt dismissed, humiliated, or treated unfairly by services or institutions.

• Clinical supervision and MDT meetings: The model can be used to examine how team routines and service structures may perpetuate or repair dignity injuries and adjust pathways accordingly.

• Policy advocacy: The model can be used to audit structural dignity deficits such as unequal access, coercive practices, or culturally unsafe care, as well as resources for corrective action.

Rather than locating pathology solely within the individual, the Dignity Constellation shifts the focus toward context-sensitive care by diagnosing not only symptoms but the dignity injuries that exacerbate or generate them. In this way, it becomes a method of clinical seeing, offering a structured lens for both diagnosis and redress.

Mental healthcare must invest in benevolent tolerance and replace it with a radical politics of respect. Dignity is not an idealistic concept but a biological, social, psychological, and legal imperative. As demonstrated in the article, insults to dignity leave scars in the bloodstream, the community, and the policy ledger. Psychiatry, to remain ethical and effective, must elevate dignity as a diagnostic principle and therapeutic goal.

.

Pair this piece with:

The Picture of Dorian Gray: The story of a closeted psyche 

The Bluest Eye: Driven to madness by Dick and Jane

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Author contributions

Conceptualization, D.B.; methodology, D.B.; investigation, D.B. and A.K.; writing—original draft preparation, D.B. and A.K.; writing—review and editing, D.B.; supervision, D.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Conflict of interest

The authors declares that they have no competing interests.

Data availability statement

All data supporting the findings of this publication are available within this article.

© 2025 copyright by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). No changes were made to original article.

References

1. Saxena S, Hanna F. Dignity-a fundamental principle of mental health care. Ind J Med Res. 2015;142(4):355–8. doi: 10.4103/0971-5916.169184

2. Juster RP, McEwen BS, Lupien SJ. Allostatic load biomarkers of chronic stress and impact on health and cognition. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2010;35(1):2–16. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.10.002

3. Ravi M, Miller AH, Michopoulos V. The immunology of stress and the impact of inflammation on the brain and behaviour. BJPsych Adv. 2021;27(3):158–65. doi: 10.1192/bja.2020.82

4. Shantz E, Elliott SJ. From social determinants to social epigenetics: health geographies of chronic disease. Health Place. 2021;69:102561. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102561

5. Jacobson N. Dignity and health: a review. Soc Sci Med. 2007;64(2):292–302. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2006.08.039

6. Weber MD, Godbout JP, Sheridan JF. Repeated social defeat, neuroinflammation, and behavior: monocytes carry the signal. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2017;42(1):46–61. doi:10.1038/npp.2016.102

7. Bielawski T, Rejek M, Misiak B. Social defeat predicts the emergence of psychotic-like experiences through the effects on aberrant salience: insights from a network analysis of longitudinal data. Psychol Med. 2024;54(16):4886–95. doi:10.1017/S0033291724003209

8. Chae DH, Epel ES, Nuru-Jeter AM, Lincoln KD, Taylor RJ, Lin J, et al. Discrimination, mental health, and leukocyte telomere length among African American men. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2016;63:10–6. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.09.001

9. Lim S, Nzegwu D, Wright ML. The impact of psychosocial stress from life trauma and racial discrimination on epigenetic aging—a systematic review. Biol Res Nurs. 2022;24(2):202–15. doi: 10.1177/10998004211060561

10. Brown W. Regulating aversion: tolerance in the age of identity and empire. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press; 2008.

11. Bhugra D, Ventriglio A. Others, othering, otherism and social psychiatry. Int J Soc Psychiatry. 2024;70(5):837–8. doi:10.1177/00207640241269086

12. Akbulut N, Razum O. Why othering should be considered in research on health inequalities: theoretical perspectives and research needs. SSM-Popul Health. 2022;20:101286. doi:10.1016/j.ssmph.2022.101286

13. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Global trends: forced displacement in 2023 [Internet]. Geneva: UNHCR; 2024 [accessed on 2025 Jun 14]. Available from: https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends.

14. Torales J, Torres-Romero AD, Barrios I, Castaldelli-Maia JM, Chumakov E, Ventriglio A, et al. Geopsychiatry and its integration into psychiatry residency curricula: a very first global survey for faculty and psychiatry residents. Geopsychiatry. 2025;1:100004. doi: 10.1016/j.geopsy.2025.100004

15. World Health Organization. Refugee and migrant mental health [Internet]. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2023 [accessed on 2025 Jun 14]. Available from: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/refugee-and-migrant-mental-health.

16. Szabó ZP, Lönnqvist JE, Lantos NA, Valtonen J. Right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance, system justification, and conservative political ideology as predictors of mental health stigma: The Hungarian case. Int J Soc Psychiatry. 2024;70(8):1505–15. doi: 10.1177/00207640241267803

17. Movsisyan A, Wendel F, Bethel A, Coenen M, Krajewska J, Littlecott H, et al. Inflation and health: a global scoping review. Lancet Global Health. 2024;12(6):e1038–48. doi:10.1016/S2214-109X(24)00133-5

18. Cummins I. The impact of austerity on mental health service provision: a UK perspective. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2018;15(6):1145. doi: 10.3390/ijerph15061145

19. McAllister A, Fritzell S, Almroth M, Harber-Aschan L, Larsson S, Burström B. How do macro-level structural determinants affect inequalities in mental health?—a systematic review of the literature. Int J Equity Health. 2018;17(1):180. doi: 10.1186/s12939-018-0879-9

20. Ruckert A, Labonté R. Health inequities in the age of austerity: the need for social protection policies. Soc Sci Med. 2017;187:306–11. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.03.029

21. Department of Health and Social Care. Mental health bill 2025 [Internet]. London: GOV.UK; 2025 [accessed on 2025 Jun 14]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/mental-health-bill-2025.

22. Rankin J. Hungary’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ content violates human rights, says EU’s top court. The Guardian [Internet]. 2025 Jun 5 [accessed on 2025 Jun 14]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/05/hungary-lgbtq-content-violates-human-rights-eu-court.

23. American Civil Liberties Union. Legislative attacks on LGBTQ rights, 2025 [Internet]. New York: American Civil Liberties Union; 2025 [accessed on 2025 Jun 14]. Available from: https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2025.

24. Biswas S. India’s supreme court declines to legalise same-sex marriage. BBC News [Internet]. London: BBC; 2023 Oct 17 [accessed on 2025 Jun 14]. Available from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-65525980.

25. Hancock KP, Daigle LE. Double jeopardy?: exploring the intersectionality of sexual/gender group membership, racial/ethnic group membership, and victimization risk. J Ethn Crim Justice. 2021;19(2):140–62. doi: 10.1080/15377938.2021.1942373

26. Gajwani R, Parsons H, Birchwood M, Singh SP. Ethnicity and detention: are black and minority ethnic (BME) groups disproportionately detained under the mental health act 2007? Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol. 2016;51:703–11. doi: 10.1007/s00127-016-1181-z

27. Naeem F, Phiri P, Munshi T, Rathod S, Ayub M, Gobbi M, et al. Using cognitive behaviour therapy with South Asian Muslims: findings from the culturally sensitive CBT project. Int Rev Psychiatry. 2015;27(3):233–46. doi: 10.3109/0954 0261.2015.1067598

28. Mental Health Commission of Canada. The case for diversity: Building the case to improve mental health services for immigrant, refugee, ethno-cultural and racialized populations. Ottawa (ON): MHCC; 2016.

Images

Book Banning is a Dignity Violation: Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Abstract: Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

Introduction:  Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Micro-dignity:  Photo by Navy Medicine on Unsplash

Meso-dignity:  Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

Macro-dignity:  Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash

Double Jeopardy:  Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

Dignity Constellation:  Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Discussion:  Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Conclusions:  Photo by Rosemary Williams on Unsplash

I
t’s Banned Book Week! Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the extreme level of book banning we’ve been seeing over the last few years will be going away anytime soon. Here’s a report from PEN America about where things stand.

But don’t be dismayed. Use this information to rouse the proverbial troops, and fuel the fight for intellectual freedom.

In 2025, book censorship in the United States is rampant and common. Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country. Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide. Never before have so many politicians sought to bully school leaders into censoring according to their ideological preferences, even threatening public funding to exact compliance. Never before has access to so many stories been stolen from so many children.

The book bans that have accumulated in the past four years are unprecedented and undeniable. This report looks back at the 2024-2025 school year – the fourth school year in the contemporary campaign to ban books – and illustrates the continued attacks on books, stories, identities, and histories.

This report offers a window into the complex and extensive climate of censorship between July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. Our reporting on book bans remains a bellwether of a larger campaign to restrict and control education and public narratives, wreaking havoc on our public schools and democracy.

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The State of Book Bans

Two things help us make sense of the world – information and stories. Both explain, describe, and give language to the world we encounter. It is not a surprise then that banning books is a way of erasing stories, identities, experiences, and peoples and reshaping understandings of the past. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop warns: “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.”

Stories tell us who we are and who we can become.

This right – the right to discover – is being taken from students under the guise of their “protection.” Over the past four years, a misleading campaign to “protect children” alongside advocacy for “parental rights” has been weaponized to diminish students’ First Amendment rights in schools, sow distrust in librarians and educators, and diminish the ability of authors and illustrators to connect with their intended audiences. In this upside down world, any rights of young people as students are somehow subservient to the absolute rights of their parents.

In 2022, we cautioned that book bans and related threats to free expression and the First Amendment should not be ignored; that this assault on students’ freedom to read is a slippery slope; and that state censorship of this nature, once unleashed, would snowball. Today, that escalation is no longer hypothetical. For many students, families, educators, librarians, and school districts, book banning is a new normal.

This change didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t a fluke of history. National and local groups touting extreme conservative views have played on parents’ fears and anxieties to exert ideological control over public education across the United States using consistent and coordinated tactics. These groups’ efforts have catalyzed censorial trends and a full-blown attack on public schools and democracy. This “Ed Scare,” as PEN America has termed it, has produced changes at the local, state – and increasingly, federal – levels at a frighteningly rapid pace, resulting in new policies that not only diminish students’ right to read and learn, but also take away protections for educators and librarians. Together, these trends are having a profound impact on the literary community and the country at large.

As a result of these groups and their political allies, book censorship in schools has reached a new apex, now becoming a routine and expected part of school operations, particularly in states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. And it is being anticipated on the horizon for educators and families in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota. While we explore the specific trends that have led us to this escalated climate of censorship in this report, it is important to remember the big picture. These attacks on students’ rights and educational institutions are the symptoms of a much larger disease: the dismantling of public education and a backsliding democracy.

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What is a School Book Ban?

PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.

Accessibility forms the core of PEN America’s definition of a school book ban and emphasizes the multiple ways book bans infringe on the rights of students, professional educators, and authors. It is important to recognize that books available in schools, whether in a school or classroom library or as part of a curriculum, were selected by librarians and educators as part of the educational offerings to students. Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or even politicians on the basis of a particular book’s content.

For the 2024-25 school year, we recorded three types of school book bans: “banned,” which includes books that have been completely prohibited; “banned pending investigation,” which includes books that are pending a review to determine what restrictions, if any, to implement on them; and “banned by restriction,” which includes grade-level or school-level restrictions or books that require parental permissions.

For more details, please visit PEN America’s Methodology and Frequently Asked Questions on book bans. You can also visit our prior reports on book bans released in April 2022, September 2022, April 2023, December 2023, September 2024, and November 2024.

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Key Trends from
the 2024-2025 School Year

In the fourth year of book bans, several key trends stood out this year:

Federal efforts to restrict education use rhetoric from state and local efforts to ban books. In 2025, a new vector of book banning pressure has appeared – the federal government. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has mimicked rhetoric about “parents’ rights”, which, in Florida and other states, has largely been used to advance book bans and censorship of schools, against the wishes of many parents, students, families, and educators. Under the guise of “returning education to parents,” President Trump has released a series of Executive Orders (EOs) mainly: “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism,” and “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.”

Although none of these EOs take a direct aim at books, they were used as justification for the July 2025 removal of almost 600 books from Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) schools on military bases. In restricting discussion of transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion and barring schools from “promoting un-American ideas,” books like ABC of Equality by Chana Ewing or several volumes from the series Heartstopper by Alice Oseman were removed from access. Students and their families responded by suing.

In addition to the efforts from the White House, the U.S. Department of Education declared book bans “a hoax,” parroting language from state leaders like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis. The Department removed a federal position within the Office of Civil Rights set up to investigate allegations of discriminatory book bans and issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to “cease using race preferences and stereotypes” or risk federal funding. Although federal judges prohibit the enforcement of the letter, several state leaders already acknowledged compliance with the directive.

And while the the Department of Education chills speech and expression across public schools, the “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities” EO simultaneously facilitates the closure of the Department of Education. In doing so, the EO aims to transfer educational authority back to the states and local governments. Without any federal oversight, states will have carte blanche to impose ideological control over public education.

The rhetoric of the Trump Administration and the directives of the Departments of Education and Defense add yet another pressure on states and school districts to censor.

Persistent attacks conflate LGBTQ+ identities as “sexually explicit” and erase LGBTQ+ representation from schools. Since book challenges and removals exploded in 2021, books depicting same-sex and trans identities have been conflated as inherently “sexual.” In sexualizing LGBTQ+ people, swaths of literature have been removed under the premise of removing “inappropriate” or “obscene” books.

Efforts to ban children’s picture books especially illuminate the perniciousness of this attack. We have tracked and reported on how book banners claim that picture books like And Tango Makes Three, Everywhere Babies, The Family Book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, or The Purim Superhero are “sexually explicit,” merely for including LGBTQ+ identities. Nationally, there is evidence that extreme conservative groups have continued to circulate reports to schools with these claims, putting pressure – and providing cover – for district leaders to ban books on that basis.

The inclusion of LGBTQ+ books in classroom and school libraries was at the center of a United States Supreme Court case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, which was decided this summer. This case asked whether or not Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland must allow parental notifications and opt-out if lessons related to gender and sexuality might violate a family’s religious beliefs. During oral arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch reflected derogatory and misinformed views, often repeated by book banners – when discussing the children’s alphabet book, Pride Puppy, he referred to the presence of a leather jacket as evidence of “bondage” and drag queens as “sex workers.”

The ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, to mandate “opt outs” for children whose parents object to LGBTQ+-relevant picture books, forecasts heightened censorship of LGBTQ+ content across school districts nationwide. Rather than offering histories, stories, and books that reflect all students and families, LGBTQ+ stories will be omitted from classrooms. LGBTQ+ students and their families will effectively be denied the freedom to read about themselves and those around them.

One trend has remained constant throughout these four years: Many of these book bans are not due to decisions made in reconsideration policies and processes. Nor are they the direct result of legislation. As noted in PEN America’s first Banned in the USA report, just 4% of books banned in 2021-2022 followed the recommended processes for reconsideration and challenges of books in school districts. For the 2024-2025 school year, vast numbers of the books removed from shelves – pending investigation and permanently banned – came as a result of fear of legislation by school boards, administrators, and educators. Within our Title Level Index, described below, PEN America identified 2,520 book ban cases where the bans were influenced by pressure imposed from the presence or threat of state laws. Out of those, however, only 3% of the bans were triggered by a law requiring the removal of a book – the rest, 97%, came from bans caused by the fear that districts had of being out of compliance, regardless of whether the law was enjoined, hadn’t been passed yet, or didn’t call for the direct removal of books. This functions as a form of “obeying in advance” to anticipated restrictions from the state or administrative authorities, rooted in fear or simply a desire to avoid topics that might be deemed controversial.

State-mandated bans are challenging to quantify but we can estimate the impact on students, and that impact is significant. In 2024, Utah and South Carolina introduced mechanisms to create state-mandated “no read” lists. Tennessee also enacted such a mechanism in 2024; however, it has not been used. Although we cannot verify if every district had copies of the book titles now prohibited in school libraries, we can estimate the scale of restrictions on the freedom to read.

In Utah, to trigger a statewide ban, each of the 18 titles on the state’s “no read” list had to have been previously labeled as “objectionable content” and banned in at least three school districts, or two school districts and five charter schools. There are 41 public school districts in Utah and over 100 public charter schools. Each of Utah’s 18 titles were banned at least three times before being added to the “no read” list (totaling 54 bans), and if each of these 18 titles was available in each of these 41 districts, and subsequently banned, then that would amount to an astonishing 738 bans overall.

In South Carolina, the State Board of Education can decide to ban a book statewide following an appeal by those dissatisfied with a district’s decision to retain a challenged title, or the board can choose to review a title on their own initiative. Once books are listed on the state’s “no read” list, those books become prohibited in all school districts. South Carolina has 81 school districts. That means that the 22 unique titles were banned at least 22 times; but if they were present in every district, and then subsequently banned, that would number 1,782 bans across South Carolina. Taken together, the “no read” lists in South Carolina and Utah may have triggered over 2,500 cases of book bans.

Where there are everyday book bans, there is also everyday resistance. For the first time in our tracking, we catalogued the robust network of advocates fighting back publicly against censorship in defense of the freedom to read. Of the 87 districts impacted by book bans this year, 70 contained evidence of a public response against censorship, whether from individuals, organized groups, or whole communities. Often, it is parents, individual authors, students, educators, librarians, and community members who have been instrumental in creating the most local and direct pressure to return books to shelves. Their resistance is supported by district-specific groups, such as Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization, Marietta in the Middle, and Freedom to Read Coalition of Columbia County. We also tracked state-level groups putting out fires in almost every district in their states, including Florida Freedom to Read Project, Texas Freedom to Read Project, Let Utah Read, Annie’s Foundation, ACLU state affiliates, Families Against Book Bans, and Fight for the First state and local affiliates. Other times, national organizations were publicly outspoken about district-level bans supporting these state and local efforts, such as National Coalition Against Censorship, Authors Against Book Bans, the ACLU, EveryLibrary, American Booksellers for Free Expression, the Author’s Guild, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and Military Families for Free Expression. Truly, no one fighting book censorship in schools is doing so alone, and many individuals, coalitions, and organizations are actively pushing back.

A page for the letter “L” in alphabet board book Pride Puppy, one of the titles at the center of Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor.

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Books Bans by the Numbers

During the 2024-2025 school year, PEN America recorded 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts.

When taken all together, since July 2021, our Index records 22,810 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts.

The numbers are only part of the story. As we report on the fourth year of the book banning crisis, it is important to note the limitations of our data collection and reporting:

• First, the numbers documented here represent cases of school book bans reported directly to PEN America and/or covered in the media. As indicated in our methodology, the data presented in this report is not comprehensive, as there are likely additional school book bans that have not been reported. Further, it is important to note that books are also banned within public libraries and prisons, but those do not appear within this index.
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• Second, school districts commonly copy one another, and pull the same book titles from their shelves. Lists of book titles are circulated online by individuals, groups, and even school districts, calling for them to be culled. As a result, commonly banned books from past years simply aren’t available in many school libraries anymore.
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• Third, each school year PEN America’s Index captures a snapshot of books that were removed within that particular year – where a triggering action led to a ban on a particular book title. Although many titles remain banned year after year, PEN America’s Index does not count these cases. Therefore, books removed during previous school years that are still prohibited are not counted within this school year’s Index. Our data instead chronicles the books removed from shelves within the last school year.
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• Lastly, strategic pressure from groups, school districts, and state legislation accelerate book bans, causing spikes where hundreds of books get banned all at once and shelves are emptied. These bans are difficult to count comprehensively, as often the total number of titles affected by these sweeping bans are not reported.
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New This Year:
Title, District, and State Mandated
Ban Indexes

In addition, this year, Banned in the USA also includes three Indexes of School Book Bans – the Title-Level Index, as released for the past four years, the District-Level Index, and the State-Mandated Bans Index.t

1. Title-Level Index: This index lists all titles banned within school districts, as collected by PEN America, and is most similar to data presented in previous years.
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2. District-Level Index: This index presents data on book bans by district, including the total number of books banned, sources of pressure to ban books, and pushback against book bans at the district level where it can be identified. While similar to the Title-Level Index, this Index includes some districts for which information on specific titles banned was not publicly available, but where the total number of banned books and/ or an official acknowledgement that books were removed was documented.
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3. State-Mandated Bans Index: This Index captures an unprecedented phenomenon in the book banning crisis – the removal of specific books from all public schools statewide due to state policies in Utah and South Carolina. As described above, these policies, enacted in 2024, introduced mechanisms to create state-mandated “no read” lists. Tennessee is the third state that enacted such a mechanism in 2024; however, it has not yet been reported as used. For this category of state-level book bans, PEN America cannot verify if every district had a copy of the books that are now prohibited in school libraries, and therefore we do not include these bans within our title- and district-level indexes.

Together, these three Indexes demonstrate the variety of ways in which books are today being banned in school districts – in some cases because of state legislative mandates far beyond local districts’ control. These Indexes also illustrate the shocking enormity of the book banning crisis’ effect on unique book titles, authors and illustrators, students, parents, schools and school districts.
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Most Banned Titles

No title is safe as long as book banning efforts continue. This 2024-2025 school year, book bans affected 3,752 unique titles in 87 school districts nationwide. Some types of books are targeted for removal because of their content; but the climate of censorship that has spread in schools has impacted a wide array of titles written for all sorts of audiences. Access to literature prepares our youth to confront the real world, offering a window into experiences otherwise unknown to them. However, diverse ideas and stories featuring protagonists from historically marginalized identities are often the first topics targeted by censors.

As lists of titles to remove continue to be circulated online, greater restrictions are implemented at the local and state levels, censorship rises, and students’ rights are violated.
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Where the Book Bans are Happening

During the 2024-2025 school year, our Index of School Book Bans documented bans in 87 public school districts and 23 states.

Florida led the nation with 2,304 instances of book bans for the 2024-2025 school year, owing to the passage of multiple vague laws, direct pressure from local groups and elected officials, and threats to educators’ professional licenses if they fail to comply. In holding the state accountable for censorship in their public schools, Florida Freedom to Read Project maintains an extensive system for tracking and reporting book bans, offering a blueprint for pushing back against censorship. As stated above, where there is everyday banning, there is everyday resistance.

2024-2025 Instances of School Book Bans by State

Overall, in the course of the last four school years, book bans occurred in 45 states and 451 public school districts.

No school library will be left untouched if local and state policies and pressures continue to foster a climate of censorship. In fact, the magnified number of book ban instances in these states is largely due to pressure campaigns by censorship-minded groups and individuals in local districts coupled with emerging state legislation. The chilled environment enables attacks on freedom of speech and our democracy to persist.
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Authors and Illustrators Impacted

The damage caused by book bans doesn’t stop at the infringement of students’ free speech rights and restrictions to the freedom to read. In their wake, book bans also leave a detrimental mark on thousands of creative people in the literary world. Throughout the 2024-2025 school year, book bans affected the works of almost 2,600 artists, including 2,308 authors, 243 illustrators and 38 translators.

As with books, a subset of authors are more susceptible to book bans than others. The majority of the authors whose books are overwhelmingly targeted often explore themes with race and racism, gender identity and sexuality, or depict sexual violence in their work. During the 2024-2025 school year, the works of the ten most commonly banned authors account for 13% of all book ban instances.

Several of these authors have penned multiple titles and been branded with a “Scarlet Letter” – a phenomenon dubbed by PEN America where a ban on one title from a specific author is followed by efforts to ban their entire collection. Book bans leave authors at increased financial risk due to a reduction in school visits or events, and the potential subsequent impact on their future book sales. Some authors have reported the emotional impacts of these book bans on their creativity, citing concerns about potential blowback to future works, which cause them to feel the need to self-censor. In this way, the book banning campaign has had an impact that ranges far beyond the specific titles and school districts, ultimately leaving many readers without access to current stories, and jeopardizing the stories yet to be imagined by these creators.
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Takeaways

This year’s report is underlaid by urgency as campaigns, directives, and laws impelling censorship stretch across districts and states, and – more recently – are adopted by the Trump Administration and other federal agencies. In examining the fourth year of the book banning crisis, we note the following takeaways:

1. The campaign to censor books is increasingly routine as individuals and boards capitulate to rapidly expanding pressures to remove books. In 2021, the book banning crisis was mostly centered around school boards as special-interest groups and individuals lobbied school board members to remove books based on the content and identities represented in certain titles. Over the last several years, censorship pressures have expanded and escalated, taking on different forms. State legislatures passed laws restricting educational materials and library books. State superintendents or departments of education issued directives to schools, causing confusion, and called out school leaders and librarians to remove educational materials. Elected leaders issued lists of books containing “explicit” material, demanding schools remove them. Groups made accusations of “porn in schools” to police and sheriffs departments, creating another form of pressure locally to ban certain titles. School districts have started issuing preemptive bans through “do not buy” lists, barring titles from ever entering their libraries. Administrators find it safer to remove a book in the face of pressure than fight for its belonging on library shelves, and educators and librarians admit to omitting books that may be objectionable.From a birds’ eye view, school districts today are surrounded by multiple and persistent local, state, and now federal pressures to ban books, with diminishing reasons not to. The result is a kind of everyday banning – the normalization and routinization of censorship as an expected part of public education in many parts of the country. Opposing this will no longer take just counter-efforts to any one of these threats; it will require a similarly committed effort, rooted in recognition of the fundamental right to read.
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2. Book bans harm public school systems and restrict education. Book bans are the result of coordinated campaigns by individuals and groups, some of whom harbor homophobic, white supremacist, and Christian nationalist views. The onslaught of these campaigns upon public schools is an attack on the very purpose of public education – to educate all students, to generate empathy and understanding for an informed citizenry, and to serve as a great equalizer for students from all backgrounds.Persistent book ban campaigns undermine the time available for educators to dedicate to quality instruction and often can subject them to harassment and vitriol. It means educators and librarians must spend greater hours cataloging books and dedicate more administrative time overseeing processes that comply with vague legislation. It also means that districts are accruing significant legal costs to navigate lawsuits that seek to protect the civil rights of students and enforce constitutional protections and are facing burdensome demands on educators to increase transparency and provide parents with alternative options.Book bans are reported to decrease students’ engagement in reading, discourage students’ critical thinking, and interfere with a teacher’s ability to teach. Book bans and other efforts to limit and restrict education also strain systems that are already overwhelmed, as schools face teacher shortages, funding cuts, chronic absenteeism, and ongoing learning loss exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The escalation of the attacks on books has detrimental impacts on the state of public education writ large.Our public school system is foundational for free expression and for the rich exchange of information and ideas. School libraries are essential in supporting voluntary inquiry and have been defended as necessary places free from content restrictions and ideological control. And much like public libraries and other public institutions, the goal of public education is to serve everyone – equally and fairly. In sowing chaos across public education, the book banners and ideologues have laid bare their fear – namely, the fear of a more just, informed, and equitable populace.
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3. Book bans are a bellwether as censorship spreads within and beyond library shelves. During the 2024-2025 school year, in addition to targeting books for removal, censors have mobilized against a suite of other educational materials and events.Book fairs, book donations, and even scholarships aimed at supporting public education have been challenged. One of the most ironic examples is Lynchburg City Schools’ recall of “Free Speech Handbook: A Practical Framework For Understanding Our Free Speech Protections,” in August. After copies of the book were donated to elementary school students by the Virginia Education Foundation, school leaders requested families return them for containing alleged “adult satire.”Textbooks and curricula are also being challenged for many of the same topics that have been targeted for banning. In Colorado, despite a teachers’ committee’s recommendation in Mesa County Valley District to include “The Colorado Story” as part of their history curriculum, the school board vetoed the decision, citing concerns about mentions of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as negative portrayals of historical figures such as Christopher Columbus. In Florida, a biology textbook was formally challenged by multiple residents due to concerns over sections on climate change, evolution, COVID-19, and masking.These efforts to reject educational materials are illustrative of what ideological censors want to actually destroy: educational climates that allow access to critical historical narratives, the frontiers of contemporary science, and a diverse set of ideas that encourage students to learn to think critically. As PEN America has cautioned previously, the result of these efforts to police public education will inevitably narrow open inquiry and what young people learn about the world, creating a “recipe for lowest-common-denominator curricula” which puts “the avoidance of controversy ahead of the imperative of a broad and challenging education.”
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Conclusion

“Everyday Banning” is a particularly apt phrase in the fourth year of the school book ban crisis. The climate of bans is no longer new, but something that families, educators, and all of us have become conditioned to expect as part of the U.S. education system. Book challenges and bracing for parental criticism has become as routine as preparing a syllabus or checking books in and out of the library. While most acute in a state like Florida, state laws, local policy shifts, federal policy changes, and continued attacks from conservative groups have placed extreme pressure on school district leaders to err on the side of censorship. In many parts of the country, librarians, educators, and administrators now expect lists of challenges to “objectionable” titles as an inevitability. These titles, falsely deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate,” far too often target marginalized groups and groups historically under-represented in public school library collections. Eroding students’ right to receive information about their world, their histories and identities, and their own bodies, will inevitably allow a culture of censorship to fester, impoverishing students’ educational opportunities.

It is well known that censorship can be a slippery slope and that banning “just one book” will never appease coordinated efforts to remove certain topics, ideas, and identities from public schools. As Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond warned us in their book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, those making demands will always want more. Today’s ideological censors feed not on the number of books banned, but on the ideas and people contained within these books’ pages. Banning books with trans protagonists like Call Me Max by Kyle Lukoff will never be enough, because there will always be trans stories and students. Likewise, banning Dear Martin by Nic Stone will never satisfy book banners because there will be more stories about the experiences of Black people in the U.S. and of the impact of racism on the lives of young people. It’s not about the censorship of any one book – it’s about total control of the story.

“My job is to bear witness to the reality of their lives.” Jason Reynolds, award winning author of books for children and young adults said this when talking on the Daily Show in 2024. He continued speaking directly to students, “Your life, as it exists today, is a life that matters enough to be written about.” That is the extraordinary job of the literature being banned today. Stories that reflect the lives, voices and imaginations of young people are being taken from them at the very moment when they are learning to assert their right to access information, their right to speech, and their right to explore the world.

But there is reason to hope as local and state organizing and awareness-raising put pressure on campaigns to ban books and uplift the need to protect and defend the freedom to read.

We owe it to them, our communities, and ourselves to fight censorship wherever and whenever we see it. This can be done by messaging your state and Congressional representatives in support for the right to read, urging elected leaders to pass legislation that protects books, schools, libraries, and librarians, speaking out on October 11 for Let Freedom Read Day – and then continuing to speak out, or reaching out to a broad coalition of authors, students, and advocacy organizations to see how you can help us fight the good fight.

“Never before” only turns into “no more” if we make the constant, consistent choice to fight for our democracy and the bedrock institutions within it – public schools, public libraries, and more – that uphold free expression principles, including the freedom to read and exchange books, stories, ideas, histories, and information.
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Acknowledgements

This report was written by the Freedom to Read Program experts Sabrina Baêta, senior program manager; Tasslyn Magnusson, PhD, senior advisor; Madison Markham, program coordinator; and Yuliana Tamayo Latorre, program assistant. The report was reviewed and edited by Kasey Meehan, Freedom to Read program director, and Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms managing director, U.S. Free Expression Programs.

This report is informed by our Indexes of School Book Bans which is not possible without support from several PEN America colleagues and external consultants. Critical support for data collection and analysis was provided by consultant Sanobar Chagani and PEN America’s Daniel Cruz. Support for legislative analysis was provided by Laura Benitez, state policy manager.

Geraldine Baum, chief communications officer, oversaw production of the report and Suzanne Trimel and Lisa Tolin supported its release. We thank the entire Communications team at PEN America for their support of this work.

PEN America is grateful for support from the Endeavor Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, and the Long Ridge Foundation, which made this report possible. We also thank key partners in this work, including the Florida Freedom to Read Project, the Texas Freedom to Read Project, Annie’s Foundation, and Let Utah Read; as well as the contributions of the Censorship News Reports from Kelly Jensen at Book Riot.

Finally, we extend our gratitude to the many authors, teachers, librarians, parents, students, and citizens who are fighting book bans, speaking out in their communities, and raising attention to these issues. We are proud to stand with you in defending the freedom to read.
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Pair this with Fight Book Bans: Tools for fighting book bans
and resisting censorship.

Share this post, to keep other champions of intellectual freedom
up to date in the fight against censorship and book bans!

And, be sure to visit PEN America for more ideas on
how to get involved during Banned Books Week…
or any other week.
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#fight book bans      #Banned Books Week     #banned books      #on censorship       #book banning

A
ll you educators out there, have a gander at our discussion guides! To make your life easier, we put them in one convenient spot.

..

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Internment by Samira Ahmed

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Stop Bullying: A Discussion Guide for using books as a tool to address bullying

The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Image: Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

This piece from guest essayist Sarah Bland speaks to the necessity of self-care for teachers navigating this era of extreme book banning.

Here at This Book is Banned, we talk a lot about how book banning effects students. What they miss out on when books about diverse characters, and histories of marginalized communities are removed from classrooms and libraries. The holes in curriculums created by the removal of books that talk about difficult moments in American history.

We’ve also talked about the threats of fines or jail time levied at educators who make banned books available to students. To say nothing of Project 2025’s threat to register them as sex offenders. And let’s not forget the doxxing, shunning, and threats of physical violence more than one educator has experienced over the last several years.

And now, guest essayist Sarah Bland, an educator, writer, and wellness advocate, talks about self-care for teachers navigating this era of extreme book banning.

T
he power of books about diversity (like the ones being banned from classrooms and libraries these days), is that they present narratives that are different from the dominant cultural narratives. More specifically, books are often banned because they tell stories of what it is like to live in bodies or have bodily experiences that are outside of the narrow boxes that dominant culture deems acceptable. Essentially, the practice of banning books is a way not just to control ideas, but to control, to manage, how and what we share about bodies.

Peeling back this layer, it is easy to see the subtext: that bodies are dangerous. And this way of thinking, or consciousness, doesn’t just happen on the shelves of libraries or classrooms—it happens within us. The same cultural narratives that silence certain books also teach us how to silence parts of ourselves.

Whether from personality, neurological wiring, trauma, or cultural conditioning, I adopted a similar form of this story early in life: that the mind is more important than the body. For years, the narrative of mind-over-body felt not only dominant but singular, the only possible way of thinking about intelligence and my work in the world. And because of that, I learned to channel almost all of my energy into my head. I could read for hours, write endlessly, and lose myself in creating. I loved this about myself, and it was probably a big reason I was drawn to the teaching profession (specifically, teaching high school English!).

But there was a cost. While my mind moved, I ignored my body. I trained myself to push through exhaustion, skip meals, and silence physical needs so I could “get one more thing done.” Productivity was my priority, not presence. When I was stressed—which was often—I distracted my mind with books, shows, or a couple of drinks, while my body carried the weight of unprocessed tension. My shoulders ached, my teeth clenched, my gut tightened, but I didn’t listen. I thought my job was to control my body, not to hear it.

This pattern worked—well enough. I was anxious, busy, reactive, and always a little on edge, but it kept me surviving as a teacher in a demanding system. Until it didn’t.

The breaking point came during a banned book controversy in my own classroom. Unlike the usual stress of grading or managing tasks, this was a perfect storm: my inner critic listing all of the things I could have done differently, shame and self-doubt creeping in, anger at parents who challenged texts on policing and immigrant stories, frustration with the district’s performative support, and the sheer exhaustion of new motherhood layered on top. The stress felt unrelenting.

Just as banned books disrupt cultural stories of what it means to live in particular intersectional identities, this controversy disrupted my personal story of the mind-body split. I could no longer ignore that my body was saturated with stress even when my mind tried to reason through it. Sleepless nights, hyper-planning, impatience, reactivity—these weren’t just “mental” problems. They were signs of a body stuck in the stress cycle, caught in fight, flight, and freeze without relief.

I didn’t heal this overnight. In fact, it took years of tumbling between survival states before I began to recognize the depth of my mind-body disconnect. It was in an hour-long guided meditation that I could finally listen to what my body was telling me. For the first time, I was still enough to hear what my body had been saying all along. That moment was the beginning of a new narrative—one of integration rather than hierarchy.

This narrative isn’t unique to me. It’s deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions, somatic healing, Ayurveda, and Shamanic practices, and echoed in contemporary works like Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Hillary McBride’s The Wisdom of Your Body, and Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance. Each of these reminds us that healing and wholeness come when mind and body work together.

For me, learning the science of the stress cycle was a crucial step. A.Z. Reznick’s framework—resting state, tension and strain, response, and relief—helped me see why I stayed stuck in reactivity. Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s research showed me how to move through it: exercise that raises the heart rate, tightening and releasing muscles, a 20-second hug, deep rest. These practices gave my body pathways back to safety and relief.

But awareness alone wasn’t enough. Real change came when I layered this with what Pooja Lakshmin calls “real self-care”:

• Setting and enforcing boundaries
• Practicing self-compassion
• Aligning with my values
• Asserting my power

This kind of self-care wasn’t about buying products to mask symptoms—it was about creating conditions that supported real healing. And as I practiced, something surprising happened: caring for my own mind and body didn’t diminish my ability to care for students. It expanded it. I felt more patient, more generous, more attuned. By trusting my own body and emotions, I became more available to listen and adapt in the classroom.

Similarly, the stories in banned books often do the same: these stories don’t diminish our abilities to connect with each other, they expand our abilities to connect.

And finally, I learned that none of this work can be done alone. Teaching in this era of extreme book banning requires community—people who reflect compassion back to us, who help us hear our inner voice, who hold us when the fear and stress feel too heavy. Without support, it’s too easy to default back into survival mode.

So what does this all mean for teachers? It means that caring for ourselves is not optional—it is essential to the work of teaching and advocating for diverse stories. To hold space for marginalized narratives, we must also hold space for our own. Completing the stress cycle, practicing real self-care, and cultivating support systems aren’t luxuries; they are the conditions that make teaching banned books sustainable.

Reading and teaching banned books show us what it means to challenge dominant narratives and imagine fuller, richer ways of being human. Our bodies teach us the same. When we listen, we don’t need the status quo to provide false safety. We can imagine new, juicier possibilities of life—for ourselves, for our students, for our communities.

This is the power of banned books, and the power of embodied teaching. They both invite us to step out of a consciousness of hierarchy and control (both internally and externally) and to live in the wholeness of our humanity—and in doing so, to help co-create a world that liberates us all.

Essayist bio:

Sarah Bland is an educator, writer, and wellness advocate with over a decade of teaching experience in diverse classroom settings. She holds two degrees in English, one with an emphasis on Teaching Writing from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and is a certified mindfulness meditation instructor. She has dedicated her career to helping students and fellow educators cultivate creativity, reflection, and personal growth.

Sarah is the owner and creator of Enter Peace Print and Wellness Collective. And, she integrates mindfulness and holistic wellness practices into her writing workshops, helping participants slow down, tune into their inner voice, and approach writing with focus and intention. Her approach supports both the creative process and personal growth, creating a space where writers feel encouraged, centered, and inspired.

Through her workshops, Sarah guides writers to connect with their unique voices, build consistent writing habits, and gain the confidence to share their work with clarity and purpose—all while cultivating calm, awareness, and presence at every step of the journey.

Images:

Self-Care for Teachers navigating this era of extreme Book Banning:  Photo by Tasha Jolley on Unsplash

This pattern worked well enough…   Until it didn’t: Photo by Mubariz Mehdizadeh on Unsplash

Integration rather than hierarchy:   Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Teaching in this era requires community:  Photo by Blaz Photo on Unsplash

#Banned Books       #On Censorship      #Celebrations      #Right to Read Day

Endnotes:

[1] Eugenios, Jillian. “The next chapter in record U.S. book bans? ‘Soft censorship.’” NBC News. September 27, 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/soft-book-bans-censorship-lgbtq-race-rcna172855