Book bans have increased nearly 200%. Florida and Iowa are partly to blame

Over 10,000 books have been banned across the entire United States over the past school year. The trend has seen a particularly strong increase in states with a strong Republican presence, according to the free-speech nonprofit PEN America.

This is a major increase compared to the 2022-2023 year, which saw a total of 3,362 books banned across the country.

Related:

School district will return 36 books removed under anti-LGBTQ+ book ban law

The books were accused of having “obscene” material. One of them was a children’s picture book about gay penguins.

Florida and Iowa are leading in the total number of bans, with over 8,000 recorded between the two states. This number is largely due to the increasingly strict laws on book bans. 

The banned books include Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie; the famous work on anti-Black racism Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois; Alex Haley’s book about the lived experience of slaves, Roots: The Saga of an American Family; and James Baldwin’s autobiography Go Tell It On the Mountain.

Iowa’s bans stem from Senate File 496, a law restricting LGBTQ+ books from grade seven and below along with total bans on books deemed to contain sexual content. Florida’s House Bill 1069, backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), resulted in a similar ban, albeit a much more strict one.

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PEN America cites other laws from Utah, Tennessee, and South Carolina as contributing to these increase in banned books as well.

Individual school districts have also had a hand in banning many books. The Elkhorn Area School District in Wisconsin, for example, banned over 300 books over a several month period.

PEN America says that the types of books banned “includes books featuring romance, books about women’s sexual experiences, and books about rape or sexual abuse as well as continued attacks on books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, or books about race or racism and featuring characters of color.”

The organization also emphasizes that these numbers are an undercount of the actual amount of banned books since many book bans go unreported. Additionally, the organization says schools have also implemented “soft” book bans, including policies that cause greater hesitancy to check out books from libraries, restrictions on who can check out restricted books out, book fair cancellations, and the removal of classroom collections.

Six major book publishers are currently suing the Floridian government after hundreds of their books were pulled from libraries, cutting severely into their profits and discriminating against their authors.

A Florida school district recently agreed to re-shelve 36 books to settle a lawsuit concerning multiple banned books, including And Tango Makes Three, an often banned children’s book about a gay penguin couple raising a chick.

Iowa’s book ban was recently brought back into law when a permanent injunction against the ban was overturned by an appeals court.

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