Dangerous, Harmful, Age-Inappropriate Children
When They Explain Which Books They Must Ban, They're Naming Which Children Sicken Them The Most
On this day in U.S. history, in 1960, the city of Greenville, South Carolina closed all of its library branches rather than comply with an order to integrate them.
They didn’t want Black people to be in the library – and they were not about to share the library either. They’d rather promote the entire community’s ignorance than allow consenting people to share that public space.
They are using the same playbook in 2024. Mostly (but far from exclusively) it’s pointed at trans-identities because they know that’s the demographic they can most easily isolate – winning over approval for book bannings from groups that they will eventually target for further segregation and book censorship when it suits them.
“They,” by the way, for those curious about that pronoun here, are the highly vocal, small clusters of people who wrap themselves up in pious hatred as they infiltrate the public square in communities across America. They unironically profess to be “on a mission for God.” They promote the betterment of a community they have no business pretending they represent. Their performative religion is concerned more with hastening the resurrection of Jim Crow than it’s concerned with the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“They pretend they’re simply talking about books and that they’re not speaking ill of the actual, living, breathing children who sicken them to their core.”
It’s this little bit of legitimate knowledge they do possess: their deep-seated insecurity from knowing that they are the outsiders, the fringe element, the weirdos and freaks – that seems to impel them to root their loathsome thoughts in traditions they’ve barely honored, in a sense of normalcy they’ve often been denied, and in a fan-fiction version of scriptural narrative - that’s useful in deluding themselves into believing there’s some semblance of appropriateness to the bigotry they promote.
Among their flagship arguments they like to push out is the claim that books with trans-characters or trans-themes are not appropriate in the children’s section of the public library…
…as if children who are independently experimenting with or curious about gender are not in there already,
…as if parents of children in the children’s section could not possibly be trans folx already,
…as if the creepy thoughts that their minds are consumed with when trans identities are mentioned are written out on the pages of children’s books written by authors who, like most of us, are not mired in creepy, genital-speculating thoughts that the book banners choose to wallow in before applying their filters, bans, and censorship policies.
”When library board members say “books about trans characters are dangerous, harmful and age inappropriate” we need to recognize that they’re also saying that “the gender curious children exploring our library today are dangerous, harmful and age inappropriate.”
Much to their chagrin, they cannot directly and explicitly ban the children who are questioning and curious. Nor can they restrict the parents who are trans.
What’s left are the books.
They can still ban and curate the books: the well-written books written by decidedly non-creepy authors whose pages are filled with messages and themes and thoughts that get twisted and perverted within the rambling internal monologues of the intolerant pseudo-Christian zealots who yearn to define normalcy in a way that only the most extreme people will qualify for.
They say they’re “merely” banning the books, by moving them out-of-sight, checking them out indefinitely, moving them into “repair” (and thus out of circulation), and by not acquiring the titles they dislike in the first place.
What they’re doing now is exactly what they were doing in the 1960s: they’re creating a space that’s only for them and for nobody else.
It's as if they’re conducting their own privately-run Rapture-on-Earth, building a society that only the Chosen (where they are the choosers) are accepted.
We’re not really talking about books being banned because they’re not merely trying to ban books.
They’re getting rid of people – children, largely - who they unabashedly contend in open meetings are “dangerous,” and “harmful” and – almost laughably – “not age appropriate” to be in the children’s section where their own children may explore what’s on the shelves and in the stacks.
Imagine the temerity it must take to walk into a public meeting and declare, directly into a microphone, for the public record, that the kids who don’t dress the way you want them to dress need to be relegated to a far off corner of the library (if they must be allowed inside at all) because those kids are inherently harmful, dangerous and age inappropriate.
Apart from the extraordinary personal restraint the parents of targeted children must summon, the only reason these outrageous people can safely walk back to their cars, by my reckoning, is that they’re adequate enough, so far, at getting away with playing the make-believe game where they pretend they’re simply talking about books and that they’re not speaking ill of the actual, living, breathing children who sicken them to their core.
Normal people, on the other hand, don’t openly declare that anyone else’s child is like a disease on society. These vomitous Moms For Liberty types – and all of their cos-playing variants – can slide in and out of public spaces , speaking their profane views without any filter, secure in the knowledge that the people who are opposed to their wretched views – being minimally humane and socially adept - won’t reciprocate with unhinged attacks on the Moms For Liberty children.
That would be creepy.
If it wasn’t for their shield of “Christianity” and the willingness of people to go along with the charade that we’re talking about books, not people – and certainly not children – no school or library or youth sports league would allow that hostility to be present within 200 feet of children in their care. A reasonable citizen would not allow such a horrid adult to chaperone a school field trip, yet they’ve appointed themselves the guardians of what all of the county’s children may read.
In Greenville, “separate but (not actually) equal” in 2024 isn’t a second water fountain. Nor is it the other half of the bus. Nor is it in the form of a defiantly-segregated school. In the libraries, it’s called “PEC” – the name for the Parenting and Early Childhood section of the library, strategically placed as far away as possible from the Children’s section in the library branches, and therefore out of reach of parents who visit the library with their children. You know, as actual parents do.
PEC is where books, banned from the Children’s section are exiled to (at least for as long as the burning of books continues to be a bad look). It’s where all the thoughts go if they challenge the supremacist constructs of the library’s board members.
Again, while this is – for the time being – an openly trans-exclusive pogrom, the intent is not to stop there - which is plain because the intent to exclude undesirable children didn’t begin there. It began with racial exclusion. It will circle back to those origins once enough Black leaders give license, even if it’s by silence, are complicit in the trans-exclusionary curation of library content.
Once a typically marginalized group signs on and approves of trans-exclusionary banishments to PEC (or worse), that group will have helped refute its own objections when the library inevitably comes after their stories. The library board members may not be intelligent, but they are that savvy and conniving.
Books like Black Boy Joy…
…and Something Happened In Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice…
…have already been banished to the PEC section.
Book displays are known to brighten library spaces and introduce patrons to titles of widespread interest, but in Greenville book displays with themes like “Juneteenth” and “Black History Month” have been prohibited under newly concocted policies that eviscerate nearly all book displays, in very much the same, “if we have to let Black folks into our libraries, let’s shut the whole thing down” spirit that we’re recognizing on this anniversary of the sweeping 1960 library shut-down.
They no more wish to have Black people in the library now than they did in 1960 so they ban the books to ban the people, knowing that Book Bans Are People Bans. As long as they can garner acceptance of their trans-bans (or at least legitimize those bans with community apathy), they’ll ramp up the other bans that are coming…
…which they might sum up as a long-term intent to ban “all things ‘woke.’”
Using such a vague term, which everyone gets to define for themselves, would help win the book banning support from people who would be unwittingly agreeing to eventually being banned themselves given how these library zealots are fierce gatekeepers of who, among us, ends up being “appropriate” across all of their wacky metrics for disapproval and shaming.
This if not just a library thing. It’s a pogrom against children in general.
That’s why, across town, the Greenville County School District is also playing the “we’ll close it for everyone game” by taking notice of a state Department of Education policy about vetting books and deciding, across-the-board, that there should be no “book fairs” in the schools until they can figure out what’s going on. (You can get an “inside baseball” take on the school district’s machinations in a guest post by Dr. Amanda McDougald Scott in Prof. Emily Taylor’s Substack, Hot Feminism: Letters from South Carolina.)
Remarkably-not-remarkably, right wing groups, including leadership in the South Carolina Department of Education, have applauded the sweeping book fair cancellations. (The book fair cancellations are also a replication of another anti-human campaign – the “extreme vetting” of Muslims “until we can figure out what’s going on.”) (Read up on state-level banning efforts here and in Steve Nuzum’s Substack, Other Duties As Assigned.)
The people-banning bigots who dress up and self-identify as book banners are well aware that people bans don’t go over so well with the general public. Knowing this much about human nature, they’re insisting that they’re just benignly moving some books around to inconveniently-located shelves.
They depend on the public believing that it’s no big deal - and on the public not seeing just how utterly disgusting and brazenly hostile to children they are when they wage their assault on books - and people - who don’t mirror their wretched lives.
I suspect that as long as their big fib continues to be reported and received at face value, they’re going to receive the public indifference they crave and rely upon to implement the people-banning they’re actually practicing. These bans will continue, which is an outrage primarily for what it’s doing to people, and less for the crimes committed against the books they want you to think they’re focused on.
I’m resigned to this status quo for Greenville – which is likely coming to a community near you (if not now, then eventually). We can’t reasonably expect America’s on-going series of book bans to abate until the people who hear the library board members say “books about trans characters are dangerous and age inappropriate” begin to recognize that they’re also saying “the gender curious children in our library today are dangerous and age inappropriate.”
If anyone is suffering under the impression that the book banners are “only” targeting trans folx or members of the LGBTQ alphabet, they need to read more history, some of which is being relegated to the PEC section.
I mean, are there any people who cannot fathom how banishing books like Black Boy Joy is the inevitable product of an internalized racist view that Black boys themselves are dangerous, harmful and age inappropriate? This wave of censorship is absolutely about banning CRT and DEI, too. They’re coming after all the alphabets. And nearly all of the children, too.
Call me unprincipled or a hypocrite, but there is one book I’d very much like to ban: the stale, unoriginal playbook of Team Bigotry that they keep pulling out. It’s a book that’s not appropriate for any age at all.
Devastating.