Watch This: The Growing Movement to Ban Books

As instances of book bans continue to skyrocket year over year, it’s important to know that they overwhelmingly target stories about people or characters from marginalized groups.

According to PEN America, from 2021-2023:

  • 37% of all book bans targeted books about race, racism, or books with characters of color;
  • 36% targeted books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes; 8% featuring transgender characters or stories.

We read last week about how diversity in books is invaluable to students. Now hear more about this from someone who knows firsthand.

Ellen Oh is an author and founding member of We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that strives to diversify the publishing industry. Their goal is to create a world where everyone can find themselves in the pages of a book. Ellen tells us why this is so important — even life-saving.

 

We Need Diverse Books has helped fuel an increase in new children’s books featuring characters of color. Twelve years ago, only 7% of children’s books published were about children of color. Now that figure is 40%. As we celebrate this, we also have to protect these stories from becoming the next targets of book bans. Next week, we’ll tell you how!

Recent Posts

Do This: Empower Your Friends to Help Protect our Reproductive Rights

We’ve spent the last two weeks learning about the ongoing threats to our reproductive freedom. These threats are particularly dangerous because extremists are intentionally trying to keep them under the radar. We’re not gonna let that happen! We’ve just added a great...

Watch This: The New Attacks on our Reproductive Rights

Last week, we learned about the new ways that extremists are coming for our reproductive rights. We know that they have a plan to take away the abortion pill everywhere, even in states where abortion is legal. We also know that they’re testing a variety of state and...

Read This: The New Attacks on our Reproductive Rights

The majority — 63% — of abortions in the U.S. are performed using medication, not surgery. The FDA-approved drug mifepristone is one of the main pills used in medication abortions. Its safety has been proven for decades through more than 100 studies. It’s safer than...

Do This: Spotting and Stopping Disinformation

Disinformation is everywhere, from social media posts to blogs to online influencers. It works because it’s convincing and easy to share quickly. Disinformation is not just pervasive and persuasive, it’s also persistent! That means we need to create routine, online...

Watch This: Spotting and Stopping Disinformation

We learned last week that 1 in 4 Americans know that they’ve shared misinformation or disinformation online. We also know that a lot of disinformation intentionally comes from bad actors, like other governments that want to interfere with our democratic elections. A...