On Friday, I attended training for the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District for the Library Reconsideration Committee, which deals with challenged books in the school libraries. It’s a system ripe for members to be harassed by ideologues.
Following the passage of the READER Act, Texas school districts were required to create a reconsideration process for challenged books, though each district was left to form their framework. This is part of a larger push by the Republican-dominated state government to empower conservative parents to strip out content that deals with LGBT people, racial equality, and labor rights.
The CFISD system starts with an informal discussion between the challenger and the campus librarian. This can hopefully assuage legitimate concerns while also ensuring the challenger has actually read the book in question. If the challenger is unsatisfied, it moves into the reconsideration stage.
Once there, parents from the school who have undergone reconsideration training are selected randomly to deal with the challenge. They are required to read the book in question from cover to cover before a committee meeting is held. Also, the names of committee members are made public as part of the process.
This is where it becomes an avenue for harassment and abuse. The issue is heavily charged with conspiracy theories about “woke” indoctrination, forced gender transition, anti-white bias, and claims that secular schools are trying to outlaw mention of Christianity in schools. Many school boards have been invaded by conspiracy theorists making outrageous claims, and members have been sent death threats and other obscene material.
One person in training I spoke to had served on a similar committee. A person who was unhappy with their support for challenged books had a box of the titles delivered to their door. The underlying message was clear: I know where you live and I want you to know that.
As a journalist, death threats from extremists have long been an unfortunate part of my life. Members of right-wing hate groups have texted me my own address, contacted my family members to accuse me of various crimes, and sometimes even driven me off social media. It’s a debilitating, painful thing to go through that is meant to terrorize people away from standing up against extremism.
It works, too. One person in the training seminar asked if the committee meetings would get “political” and heated, and said they wanted no part of it if that was the case. What should be a sober, scholarly consideration of texts in accordance with state decency laws and community standards becomes an existential battle between radical right-wing actors the targets of their ire.
The challengers do not have the same fear, by the way. The fact that nearly all of CFISD’s book challenges came from members of the school board and their spouses had to be found out by Freedom of Information Act requests by journalists. People who want to strip libraries of titles can operate in anonymity, while parents who want to protect them must do so openly. That seems like a feature, not a bug, considering the general antipathy towards diversity that spawned the law in the first place.
