The book was removed from the Henrico schools when the governor’s race centers banned the book

A novel about an interracial teen romance has been removed from high school libraries across Henrico County after a woman criticized the book’s sexual content at a Henrico school board meeting.

Challenging books under the banner of parental rights have been popular this academic year across the country. As school board meetings have become political battlegrounds, book bans are the latest battle.

The author of the book said that its removal is representative of the recent nationwide efforts to clean school libraries of books discussing race or center LGBTQ grades.

“All students should be able to find books that speak to them and relate to who they are, but books that contain pornography, pedophilia, child rape, glorify drug use, glorify anti-police narratives, come with a greater responsibility.” Susan DuPuis said at the Henrico School Board meeting on October 14th. “The book Out of the darkness by Ashley Hope Perez is one such book. ”

DuPuis then read a graphic excerpt from the young adult novel detailing a sexual interaction between a teenage girl and a grown man.

After the meeting, eight copies of the book, previously available at high school libraries across the division, were removed for review, according to HCPS spokeswoman Eileen Cox.

Out of the darkness was released in 2015 but was not challenged in any school department until this year, according to the book’s author.

“This confusion between an idea or a theme or some kind of experience being in a book and an author supporting that experience – I think the confusion is at the heart of any authentic concern about my book or other books,” Perez said. Citizen. And I say in the heart of authentic concern, because I do not think most objections to ‘Out of Darkness’ and ‘Lawn Boy’ and the other books that have suddenly been attacked are based on authentic parental concern. ”

Ashley Hope Perez

Books about LGBTQ characters and people of color targeted?

In Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district, the books are Lawn boy by Jonathan Evison and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe was removed from high school libraries after two people spoke at a school board meeting last month, according to the Washington Post.

Then in Virginia Beach, school board members challenged six books earlier this month with reference to “sexually explicit” and “divisive” language, according to The Virginian-Pilot.

“I think if you look at what books are being challenged, you will see that it is overwhelmingly books that center on experiences from non-white characters, queer characters, non-citizen characters,” Perez said. “It’s in many ways, I think, about pushing back against depictions of an America that is diverse and complex, and that is pushing back against any text that allows readers to confront racism as a historical reality.”

Perez ‘book sets the explosion at the New London School in 1937 as the backdrop to a romance between a young Mexican-American woman and a young African-American man. The book explores the rewards and costs of making love across color lines in that special historic moment in Texas.

“As a writer, I am not affected by insults from people who have not read my book,” Perez said. “But as an educator and as a parent, I’m so concerned about what that means for education and the work that teachers and librarians do for people’s children.”

Book challenges and removals from school libraries are nothing new. But this school year has been remarkable in the number and context of the challenges, said Nora Pelizzari, communications director of the National Coalition Against Censorship.

In recent years, the majority of book challenges have been related to stories of queer characters or characters with different gender identities. But in this academic year, NCAC has seen a significant increase in the challenges of books that address race or racism, according to Pelizzari.

“We’ve still seen a lot of challenges for books that deal with sexuality and gender,” Pelizzari said. “But there has been this huge increase in challenges for books that tell stories of racism, or that kind of center the experience of racialized violence or bigotry, or that just talk honestly about race.”

No left turn in education, an organization opposed to critical race theory and comprehensive sex education, lists on its website books which is “used to spread radical and racist ideologies to students.” These books include Out of the darkness and the two books removed from Fairfax County Public Schools libraries.

Much of the recent backlash against certain books in school libraries is driven by social media and sites like No Left Turn, according to Jonathan Friedman, director of free speech and education for PEN America, a nonprofit organization that works to defend and celebrate free speech.

No Left Turns founder, Elana Fishbein, did not immediately respond to emails from Citizen.

“This is no longer just a single book, and it is not isolated,” Friedman said. “My general feeling is that many of these complaints do not necessarily come from parents who have children who have actually read the books in question.

Republican Christopher Holmes, who is running against the sitting part. Schuyler VanValkenburg (D-Henrico) in the 72 District House of Delegates race, also attended the school board meeting. He did not mention a specific book, but said he is concerned about what children are being taught in schools.

“I’m standing here tonight because I’m sorry, because it’s coming to my attention that’s inappropriate – and I was going to say sexual material, but it’s pornographic material,” Holmes said. “I just got someone to send me a picture of the book cover. It’s disgusting. I do not know how other material was approved or what purpose it serves, other than the corruption of our children and the removal of their innocence. ”

Holmes later used the video of himself speaking at the school board meeting in a campaign announcement on Twitter.

Parents are beginning to express their concerns about what their children are being taught. I spoke to the Henrico County School Board about explicit material in their libraries and urged HCPS to keep politics and personal agendas out of the classroom. pic.twitter.com/sI0D8aRYQd

– Christopher Holmes (@ Holmes4Delegate) October 17, 2021

Another Henrico parent, Dana Delucia, took the stand at the meeting to describe a book she said her sixth-grade daughter was asked to read last year about Killer Kane, a fictional character who murdered his wife.

“This, I suppose, was meant to teach resilience to sixth graders, but I argue that there are other ways of teaching resilience and other books,” Delucia said. “I have lost confidence in who makes choices… It is important to us and we will do what we have to, because it is important.”

Delucia also spoke against HCPS’s mask rule, saying that “covering a child’s vital airways should be a choice.”

Book review process

According to the HCPS Policy Manual, the Henrico School Board adheres to the principles of the School Library Bill of Rights and agrees that schools are responsible for providing materials on opposite sides of controversial issues and providing materials that are representative of many religious, ethnic, and cultural groups, and puts the principle of personal opinion and reason over prejudice in material choice.

Henrico Schools division has one politics and supportive regulation dealing with the selection and reassessment of teaching materials.

The committee for reviewing teaching materials has 41 members and changes every year, and the members serve for three years. In general, the committee includes a school board member, the chief learning officer, teaching leaders, reading and writing specialists, parents, school administrators, librarians, and teachers. The school board representative is Alicia Atkins, who represents the Varina district.

The audit process, which should be triggered by the complainant, is lengthy and can take a few months from start to finish.

School staff must first try to resolve the situation in a number of ways before encouraging the complainant to submit his or her objections in writing. If the complainant submits the completed form, the IMRC will read the book in its entirety and make a recommendation to Superintendent Amy Cashwell, who will then present the report to the school board.

The last time the audit process was completed was in 2011, according to Cox.

HCPS’s regulation does not contain any language about what is supposed to happen to the book while the review process is taking place.

NCAC advises school departments to keep the challenged book in the curriculum or on the library shelves until the formal review has taken place. If the book is withdrawn immediately, it privileges the complainant’s opinion and personal beliefs as opposed to professional decision-making, which went into including the book in the classroom or in the library in the first place, Pilizzari said.

“That book came on the shelf because a librarian made a choice based on guidelines or recommendations or reviews or some other form of professional guidance,” Pilizzari said. “When a person or a small group’s personal views and beliefs are allowed to determine what’s left on the shelf, it’s censorship, and it hurts students.”

Governor campaign participates in discussion of book ban

With one week until election day, Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin published an ad with Laura Murphy, a Fairfax County mother who in 2013 launched a campaign to convince the school board to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beloved by Toni Morrison, Washington Post reported in 2013. She said at the time that her son, then a high school senior, had nightmares after reading a book awarded to him in his senior Advanced Placement English class.

The book, which tells the story of a mother who kills her child to save her from slavery, contains scenes of rape and animals.

Murphy’s struggle reached the Republican-led General Assembly, which adopted two versions of a bill in 2016 and 2017 that would have given parents the right to opt out of their children these books that contain sexually explicit material.

If the bill were passed, it would have been the first law in the United States to allow red-flagged literature for sexually explicit language in schools. Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed both bills.

Education has been at the heart of the tight gubernatorial race since McAuliffe, a Democrat seeking re-election, said he did not mean that “parents should tell schools what to teach.”

Informing parents of all books with sexually explicit language would involve red flag for a significant portion of the classical literary canon.

“We have to be very careful about this,” Friedman said, “because next thing you know, you may have a parent who wants to dissuade their child from learning about science, evolution, vaccines, American history, slavery, global political norms. ., I mean, no matter what kind of taboo subject there is. ”

Another state where book bans are a popular culture war problem is Texas, where Perez’s book was challenged in three school districts. ONE Republican state legislature launched an investigation into what books Texas school districts have, and provided school districts with a list of about 850 book titles, asking if they had those books and how many copies.

“The next thing you know, you want other lawmakers and other parents to take all the list of 850 books to their school districts and, in a way, comb the libraries for any of those books,” Friedman said. “It’s the tongue in cheek, but it would be almost easier just to get rid of the library completely.”

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Anna Bryson is Henrico Citizen’s education reporter and member of the Report for America Corps. Make a deductible donation to support her work, and the RFA will match it dollar for dollar.

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