Is it 2025 or 1984? In an era that’s eerily similar to George Orwell’s dystopia, more than 4,200 books were banned during the last school year—and over half featured LGBTQ+ individuals or people of color. PEN America, which did the analysis, said that 60 percent of the banned titles are aimed at educating young adults about real life—how to confront grief, death, substance abuse, suicide and sexual violence. Despite librarians seeing this censorship firsthand and authors watching their books fly off shelves, the Trump administration has repeatedly called it a “hoax.” Still, ongoing bans in states like Florida, South Carolina, Iowa, Tennessee, and Missouri—where distributing certain material is a misdemeanor—are making this year’s school book fair a little different. Disproportionate to publishing rates, the banned books overwhelmingly include themes related to sex (57 percent), people of color (44 percent), LGBTQ+ people (39 percent), transgender and/or genderqueer people (28 percent), or individuals with disabilities (10 percent). There were more than 10,000 instances of book bans across the country, a number that has skyrocketed over the last few years and “amounts to a harmful assault on historically marginalized and underrepresented populations,” said Sabrina Baêta, a senior manager at PEN America. Some of these bans include classic reads like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
