Is it "Book Banning" to Ban Books?

In their recent Post and Courier editorial, South Carolina Board of Education member Cheryl Collier and Richland 2 School Board member Angela Nash state that they “feel compelled to set the record straight about Regulation 43-710,” the regulation under which the State Board has formally restricted a growing number of books from use by any South Carolina public school, because of what they characterize as misinformation from opponents of the regulation. (One of their most notable claims is that removing books from every school in the state is somehow not actually “book banning”.)

Cheryl Collier, bottom right, attends the January virtual meeting of the South Carolina Instructional Materials Revie Committee.

In a way, as a lifetime South Carolina resident, I’m glad they wrote something, since Collier, who is a member of the Board’s Instructional Materials Review Committee, has offered little, if any, explanation for her decisions during public hearings on the regulation and on book challenges, and has, like most members of the committee, never responded to my own repeated emails on the topic.

That said, it does undermine Collier’s claims of ideological objectivity somewhat to be co-writing the piece with Nash, who was endorsed by the Richland County branch of the pro-book ban group Moms for Liberty during her run for the school board in 2022.

A screenshot of one of multiple emails I’ve sent to Collier and the rest of the Instructional Materials Review Committee and/ or full board.

That said, I didn’t find much clarity in Collier and Nash’s piece, which mainly repeats talking points about the regulation South Carolinians have already heard from its author, Miles Coleman, during the hearings leading up to its passage. During those hearings, which saw an unprecedented level of public comment and feedback, the Board essentially rubber-stamped the regulation, evidently commissioned by State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver (herself a Moms for Liberty ally), adding a single minor amendment limiting the number of book challenges parents could bring at once.

While Collier and Nash argue the regulation has laid out “a single, clear process for everyone” in respect to challenging books, the process of deciding on the outcomes of these challenges has been largely opaque.

One of the main criticisms of the process during public hearings has been that the language of the regulation treats “age appropriateness” (something it never defines in a technical sense) as a sweeping quality to be applied uniformly to all students, at all ability levels, in all age groups, particularly when it comes to “sexual content” where the standard is the same for a kindergartner as it is for an eighteen-year-old high school senior about to leave for college.

This is absurd on its face. For example, Romeo and Juliet probably is not appropriate, even in its arguably mild depictions of and innuendos about sex and romance, for a kindergartner, while many would consider it essential reading for, say, a high school freshman. In the same way, Flamer, which the Board voted to remove from all public schools in South Carolina, is probably not appropriate for very young children, but is certainly not going to scar any older students for life. The Board could, of course, argue that another quality, like literary merit, was a part of it’s calculations, but it has instead repeatedly argued that it is only considering

Instructional Materials Review Committee meetings are generally short, rushed affairs. Members of the public are offered a cumulative three minutes to either argue a book should be removed from all schools, or that it should not be removed at all, meaning in practice that if three people want to defend a book, those giving testimony have only a minute each. This public testimony is rarely met with a substantive response from the committee, though it is often met with snarky legalese from staff attorneys.

I have attended every virtual Instructional Materials Review Committee meeting (which is at least one more than Collier, who missed the first one), and have heard almost no substantive discussion about the books during any of those meetings. There is little to no indication that committee members have read any of the challenged books, and generally committee members provide no rationale for their decisions to accept staff recommendations on which books to remove and which to keep.

During public meetings, staff attorney Cathcart has explicitly stated that neither Department of Education staff who offer recommendations to the committee, nor Instructional Materials Review Committee members, themselves, are required to have read the challenged books— only to confirm whether they contain “sexual content”. While the authors of the editorial focus, as the committee has, on this “sexual content” as a major component in determining which books should be removed from every school in South Carolina, they offer no clarity on a central question raised by the public in multiple meetings. Namely: what does “sexual content” even mean?

Any clarity on that topic that could be provided by the law cited in the regulation has been obscured by conflicting advice from Cathcart, other Department staff, and Instructional Materials Review Committee Christian Hanley.

The committee and Board (rightly, in my opinion) chose to retain 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Romeo and Juliet, despite the presence of varying levels of what must objectively be called sexual content in those books. Department staff and Hanley have claimed that the depictions of sex in the books didn’t rise to the level of the regulation, but of course the regulation does not require, as Collier and Nash point out themselves in their op-ed, that sexual content be “explicit” or “pornographic”. The fact is, those books do contain sex. 1984, in particular, contains some fairly disturbing and graphic depictions of sex and sexual violence.

When the authors claim that removing books from schools does not constitute a “ban,” they are repeating a talking point often used by Moms for Liberty, and by the Superintendent, herself. But although the authors suggest that parents can simply buy restricted books or access them at their local library, Collier represents Greenville, where public libraries have seen exactly the same kinds of book bans and restrictions, particularly on books with LGBTQ+ content, like most of the recently-banned books at the state level. And telling a child who may not have the resources to buy books “go buy it on Amazon” strikes me as particularly cruel in a state like South Carolina, where over 200,000 children are estimated to live in poverty.

The process of bringing these books forward has also been inconsistent: members of the State Board of Education evidently chose the first round of books, themselves, as test cases, not because they had been formally challenged, but because they had been mentioned during testimony on the regulation. Committee Chair Christian Hanley told the South Carolina Gazette he had chosen “classic” books like 1984 preemptively to show they would not be banned. (Unfortunately for this strategy, no one seems to have closely read 1984 before adding it to this list.)

These three classics (which also included Romeo and Juliet and To Kill a Mockingbird) were presented to the committee- which, again, was not required to read any of the books— with no quotes or excerpts from district staff. The non-classics, all of which were ultimately banned or restricted from schools, were offered to the committee with numerous out-of-context excerpts of sexual content. With very little discussion, the committee voted to uphold most of the staff recommendations, and thus the “classics” were saved while several popular titles were removed.

The prudent approach would have been to amend the regulation. Instead, members of the Board and staff attorneys offered changing, conflicting explanations of just how much sexual content equaled “sexual content” under the regulation.

And then, when judging books like Flamer, which contains no explicit sexual content at all— only a few juvenile jokes about sex from its adolescent characters, and no scenes or descriptions of anyone actually having sex— they decided that even a mention of sex was enough to ban that book, which is about a young LGBTQ+ character’s journey away from suicidal ideation and towards self-acceptance. This is why it’s hard to take Collier and Nash seriously when they claim the regulation has not intended to attack diversity in books.

Here’s hoping we’ll get more in the ways of discussion and explanations during future Board and committee meetings, which might negate the need to scold the public for allegedly not understanding the regulation in future editorials.