Liberals decry book bans — then ban ‘Huckleberry Finn’

Last month, Pennsylvania took home the bronze medal in a newly revived American sport: book banning.

A September report about book bans from the free-speech group PEN America found that, during the 2021-22 academic year, only Texas and Florida beat out the Keystone State, where 11 different school districts removed or restricted 457 books from classrooms and libraries.

Across the country, 1,648 different book titles were banned in 138 school districts across 32 states, with a combined enrollment of almost 4 million students. The most commonly targeted books were the Maia Kobabe memoir Gender Queer and George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, which both contain LGBTQ themes. Almost all of the state bills designed to remove books came from conservative organizations and their friends who regularly appear on Fox News.

» READ MORE: School book bans are in the midst of an unprecedented surge, a report says

But here’s one title that didn’t appear on any lists of commonly challenged books in 2022: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. That’s because many school districts dropped Huck Finn from their reading lists years ago. And the people demanding its removal were on the left, not the right.

That’s not something that my fellow liberals like to acknowledge these days. We’re outraged by the latest burst of censorship in American schools, which reflects a profound lack of faith in our teachers as well as our students. But so does the purge of Huck Finn. And liberals can’t rebut book bans if they are banning books themselves.

Liberals can’t rebut book bans if they are banning books themselves.

Consider a 2019 resolution in the New Jersey Legislature to remove Huck Finn from school curricula, introduced by two Democratic lawmakers. “I think this is a racist book,” declared one of the sponsors, Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, a Democrat from Mercer County, citing the novel’s frequent use of the N-word. “To use this book in this climate is not doing the African American community any justice at all.”

Never mind that Twain wrote Huck Finn to critique slavery and racism, or that some leading Black authors — including Toni Morrison — have defended the book. It “can cause students to feel upset, marginalized, or humiliated and can create an uncomfortable atmosphere in the classroom,” the New Jersey resolution states.

Sound familiar? Although the bill never became law in New Jersey, it reflects the voice of the school censor in all times and places: A book is going to harm young people, so it has to go. It was the rallying cry of the Virginia mom who denounced Morrison’s Beloved for giving her son nightmares, which was highlighted in a campaign ad by Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who’s now governor of the state. And you can hear it in the words of Texas GOP state representative Matt Krause, who has demanded an investigation of 850 books that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.”

Of course they might. All good literature can upset us, because it addresses the full breadth of the human experience. That includes our worst traits — violence, bigotry, and racism — as well as our best ones: courage, dignity, and altruism.

But censors don’t trust our teachers to address those themes in sensitive and age-appropriate ways. As Rep. Reynolds-Jackson acknowledged, some New Jersey teachers told her that they wanted to retain Huck Finn. “You have to make sure you have a strong instructor to lead that conversation,” she said.

Translation: She doesn’t believe our instructors are strong enough to do that. Why would she want to ban the book, otherwise?

And we certainly don’t trust our young people to make sense of it, either. That’s why the staunchly liberal school board of Burbank, Calif., removed Huck Finn — along with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, another classic American novel that the left loves to hate. It uses the N-word, too, and it also allegedly promotes a “white-savior” mentality.

Not according to Sungjoo Yoon, a student at Burbank High School. Writing in the New York Times, he noted that Atticus Finch’s defense of Black client Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird taught him “the danger of complacency,” while the bond between Huck and Jim in Huck Finn demonstrated that “love transcends any and all differences.”

You don’t have to agree with him, of course. But if you want to ban these novels, you’re going to have to tell me why they’re more dangerous than Gender Queer, Beloved, and all of the other books that Republicans are attempting to remove. Good luck with that.

Either you believe in freedom, or you don’t. And you can’t defend it with one hand if you’re undermining it with the other.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which will be published in a revised 20th-anniversary edition this fall by the University of Chicago Press.