Open Letter to the SC Board of Education

On the procedures used by the book ban committee

This is an email I sent this morning to the South Carolina State Board of Education following the decision of its Instructional Materials Review Committee to recommend the removal of seven books from every school in the state. I’m keeping most of this piece behind a paywall because it contains explicit content, presented in an out-of-context way, something I argue is not an appropriate way to evaluate books. I certainly don’t want people of bad faith to use these arguments to justify book bans. If you aren’t able to become a paid subscriber and need access to this for some reason, please send me a message.

The full State Board of Education will meet on Election Day, Tuesday November 5 at 1PM to discuss final decisions about these recommendations to ban the books.

Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash

My email to the Board:

Chair O’Shields, members of the Instructional Materials Review Committee, and members of the Board,

I appreciated the opportunity to briefly testify before the Instructional Materials Review Committee yesterday.  As a former high school English teacher, I also appreciated that the committee did decide to postpone its decision on the novel CRANK. I believe the testimony, guidance from staff, and supplemental materials the committee relied on in making their decision do create ambiguity about whether that book violates the language of the regulation.

I do have to say that the process of reducing complex works of literature to smutty passages, as the supplemental materials have done, is disturbing to me as a teacher.  The reason the Courts have consistently held that sexual content must be considered in context is that to reduce that content to out-of-context phrases is what makes it seem dirty and obscene. 

Ironically, 1984 includes a lot of implicit and explicit sexual context because it is trying to make exactly this point: as Winston realizes in the novel, “The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it.”  This is why he repeatedly finds that "The sexual act, successfully performed, is rebellion".

Reducing sexuality to something dirty doesn't serve our students, and I found the process of reviewing the out-of-context BookLooks passages used in the packets to be frankly disturbing, particularly as much of the "sexual content"  (including in 1984) includes depictions of sexual assault which are tolerable in context only because they support a positive aim of the works, but which out of context become sickening. 

Unfortunately, that's what the regulation, as written, and the procedures adopted by the committee, have forced us all to do if we are to fairly evaluate these texts. I hope in the future there is a way forward which does not require anyone to read through “sexual content” presented in this way (that is, separate from the context of the larger work, which often justifies that content in a way that an out-of-context read could never do). 

I am also, as I shared during the meeting, very concerned about the process that was used for these reviews:

1. Mr. Cathcart explicitly acknowledged that the committee (and potentially the unnamed staff member who reviewed the books) did not need to read the books to make a determination of age-appropriateness. Indeed, I believe the reviewer did not read 1984 before making their recommendation-- and how could they have been expected to read these eleven books carefully between the passage of the regulation and now? (I have included my remarks from yesterday, in which I shared specific examples to support this conclusion, at the bottom of this email.)

2. As multiple members of the public testified, the reviewer seems to have relied on BookLooks or a similar site to obtain quotes for all or most of the non-"classics". (This is evidenced by the fact that, for example, every quote in the materials for Crank appears verbatim on the BookLooks entry for that book, and by the fact that the three “classics” do not have any quotes, and two of these-- 1984 and Romeo and Juliet-- do not appear on BookLooks.) It is highly problematic to rely on a biased site associated with Moms for Liberty (according to multiple media outlets) over the informed recommendations of the librarians and district book review committees who previously voted to retain these books in multiple districts.

3. There is overtly a separate process for both choosing and evaluating the books identified as “classics” and the other books. Chair Hanley has acknowledged that the non- “classics” are frequently-banned materials. In addition, the “classics,” despite arguably containing “Age-Inappropriate” content as defined in State Board Regulation 43-170, were presented by staff to the committee without a single quotation or piece of direct evidence from the texts. All three were retained, in other words, without the committee members reviewing a single word, and despite public comment that two of them did contain potentially violative language.  Indeed, Chair Hanley told The State Gazette, in reference to the "classics" "If people think these are going to get removed from South Carolina schools, if they’re reasonable books, why don’t we look at them now and say, ‘Yeah, they’re fine’?”

4. Mr. Hanley has indicated an expansive approach to “preemptively” considering texts. At one point, he raised a pointed question about whether every single book by author Sarah J. Maas should be considered for removal by the committee. Considering every work by a specific author without even receiving challenges from the public would create obvious First Amendment issues beyond those already raised by this process.