A school where even Banned Book Week was banned | Will Bunch Newsletter

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In the early weeks of a bitterly contentious year for Pennridge High School — in central Bucks County where the exurban sprawl north of Philadelphia gives way to rural Rust Belt foothills — 17-year-old senior Robin Reid noticed a familiar and, in an odd sense, comforting display at the school library last Monday.

It was an array of books like George Orwell’s Animal Farm and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas that critics had once tried to censor but which the library now hailed in an annual celebration of September’s Banned Book Week, a tradition — Reid had been told — in the Perkasie high school for longer than 15 years. In a district rocked by a right-wing school board whose president rallied for Donald Trump in D.C. before the Jan. 6 insurrection, Reid and her progressive-minded friends were relieved this tradition had survived.

But only until Wednesday.

That’s when Reid went back to the library and saw the display had vanished. It was way too reminiscent of the famous scene in Orwell’s other oft-banned book, 1984, in which the totalitarian Ministry of Truth tossed articles, documents, and other inconvenient truths down a “memory hole.” Banned Book Week had been abruptly banned in Pennridge — ordered down, Reid’s adult contacts in the school confirmed to her, by their higher-ups.

“How Orwellian is that?” Reid asked as we spoke by phone Monday. “You can’t even talk about things that are banned. What does that say about what Pennridge is teaching its students?”

That’s a great question. At the place where Philly’s more liberal suburbs intersect with “Trump Country,” Pennridge has increasingly been on the cutting edge of a culture war for control of America’s classrooms. In the spring of 2018, on the Saturday morning of the youth-led March for Our Lives against gun violence, I traveled to Perkasie to instead cover students who spent that morning serving detention for a school walkout, punished by administrators in thrall to a conservative school-board majority, pushed by a Trump supporter named Joan Cullen who’d called these student activists “Marxist truants.”

Flash forward to 2022 and Cullen is now school board president, despite an online effort to remove her from the panel after her Jan. 6 adventure. The new year at Pennridge has been mired in political turmoil over free expression, as chronicled recently by my Inquirer colleague Oona Goodin-Smith.

After scrapping the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion program last spring, the all-Republican board turned its attention toward student expression — controversial curbs on flyers and other materials have been scaled back after vocal protests — and “teacher advocacy” over what classroom instructors can or can’t say that might somehow touch on politics. The board is now arguing over the future of rainbow pro-LGBTQ “Pride” flags; one board member called them “offensive to Christians.”

But while Pennridge might be ahead of the culture-war curve, it’s hardly an outlier. For example, the nearby Central Bucks School District has been roiled in controversy over a list of banned books that contain what critics call “sexualized content.” In fact, the literary advocacy group PEN America said recently that Pennsylvania ranked third in the nation for recently banned books in school libraries, with 11 districts pulling 457 titles from their shelves.

What’s going on? The right’s obsession with classroom learning shifted into high gear following the huge nationwide protests in the spring of 2020 over the police murder of George Floyd, which threatened traditional hierarchies forged in white supremacy. Conservative activists like Chris Rufo blamed classroom teaching about race — “critical race theory,” it was falsely dubbed — but that freak-out soon spread to books around gender or sexuality.

What’s been couched as a crusade for parental rights has increasingly turned to state power to chill free expression in classroom settings, not just in K-12 schools but also on college campuses. In Florida, state officials just argued in a court case that lectures at its public universities are “government speech” that can be controlled by the Sunshine State’s authoritarian governor, Ron DeSantis, or his handpicked trustees. At the University of Idaho, employees were told Monday they can be charged with a felony under a new state law for promoting abortion or contraception to students there.

The real harm here isn’t the extra hassle in finding an LGBTQ-friendly book or even the failure to observe Banned Book Week, but the constant attitude of fear, when teachers are petrified about what they can or cannot say, when students worry their presentations might get judged for political meaning, when academic freedom drowns in a new McCarthyism.

I learned of the Banned Book Week incident at Pennridge and Reid’s dismay over the move because of a pointed op-ed that the teenager — who volunteers for Democratic causes in her community — published in the Bucks County Beacon, a small news organization that’s been punching above its weight in covering censorship and rising Christian nationalism in Pennsylvania. Looking ahead to applying to colleges and possibly studying political science or international relations, Reid has seen angry ”grown-up” politics hover over her entire high school experience.

“Books can be lifelines,” Reid wrote of the validation they can bring to teens who are queer, or Black, or somehow looking to belong. “My school’s outlook on these books is heartbreaking, and heavily influenced by outside politics that have no place in schools.”

What happened last week in Pennridge is the kind of thing that one might describe as a “microaggression” against free expression and critical thinking in our public schools. But it also feels very in line with the macroaggressions of creeping authoritarianism that are suddenly everywhere you look — from the resurgence of Mussolini-inspired neo-fascism in Italy on the 100th anniversary of the March on Rome to the raised right-arm salutes for GOP candidate Doug Mastriano right here in Pennsylvania. The 20th-century disasters that inspired Orwell to publish 1984 some 73 years ago are happening all over again, and there could not be a worse week to toss his ideas down some dark memory hole.

Question: How are we to react to the GOPs fawning over the win by a fascist from Mussolini’s old party in Italy? They seem to have an unnatural love for ex 3rd Reich allies. — Via Democracy Rules (@WasserL) on Twitter

Answer: I never thought I’d witness something as disturbing as the political party created by Benito Mussolini’s fascist chief-of-staff in the dark shadows right after World War II seizing power in my lifetime — until I watched the new avatars of today’s extremist GOP parade onto Fox News Monday night to heap praise on Italy’s new far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. Kari Lake, the Republican gubernatorial candidate and Big Lie enthusiast with Mussolini-like designs on the state of Arizona, went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to voice her admiration, claiming that if people don’t brand you as a “fascist” and a “racist” then “you’re probably not representing the people of your country.” How do we react? I’m glad that Trump Republicans are openly branding themselves themselves as fascists in the run-up to the Nov. 8 midterms. The majority of voters who back democracy should see this as the five-alarm fire that it’s become.

One of the thornier consequences of the Supreme Court overturning its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion across the United States is that some of these states are still figuring out what was on the books 49 years ago — and whether those laws are still valid. In the divided, purple state of Arizona, a county judge in Tucson sent shock waves through the 2022 election season on Friday by ruling that a law codified in 1864 — when Arizona was still a U.S. territory, decades away from statehood — that bans all abortions except to save the life of the mother is still in force. This draconian law from 158 years ago also makes doctors who perform the procedure criminally liable. The ruling sparked outrage from abortion-rights advocates who vowed to challenge the ruling and to amp up voter registration for November, but a viral post from a prominent historian raised even deeper questions about the morality of Arizona’s penal code.

Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston University historian who writes the wildly popular Letters from an American newsletter on Substack and has written extensively on the Civil War era, provided her readers with some of the backstory on what was happening when Arizona settlers decided to outlaw abortion. Richardson noted that the peculiar language of the statute largely seems aimed at the lawless behavior of men in the Wild West territory, including concerns they might harm pregnant women who otherwise were taking care of themselves pretty well. But she further explains both the authoritarian, racist, and sexist nature of Arizona’s 19th-century codes. Wrote Richardson: “So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as 10 able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man. And in 2022, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it? America may be a relatively young nation on the world stage, but so many of our laws — and, even more controversially, our constitution — are pulled down by the rotting dead weight of the ancient hierarchies around race or gender under which they were written. This includes articles, laws, longstanding rules like the Electoral College, a Senate that gives a Wyoming voter many times more power than one from California, and the filibuster which arose largely to protect white supremacy. How much of this construct would we create if we were starting from scratch today? Why can’t we just do what’s right — instead of suffocating by tradition?