“By Word and By Context”: A Political Analysis of Contemporary U.S. Censorship

Abstract

In a democracy like the United States, it is common and expected for citizens to engage in debate about what should or shouldn’t be offered as a part of the country’s educational curriculum. What is not common or expected, however, is for this debate to turn into a national movement for mass literary censorship within the public sphere. In 2020, the American Library Association reported challenges to 277 individual titles; in 2021, they reported challenges to 2,532 individual titles, a 914% increase in just one year. In the five years since, there have been over 22,810 book challenges in public schools, spanning across dozens of states and municipalities; a larger, more wide-spread censorship movement than the U.S. has possibly ever experienced in its history. This thesis aims to parse out the meaning for this sudden, unprecedented rise in censorship across the United States. And, in doing so, it asks what is encouraging and allowing for this intense, public-school focused censorial movement? As such, this thesis argues that through a variety of institutions at the local, state, and federal levels, it is an increasingly prominent conservative movement and ideology that is ultimately pushing for this censorship across the nation. More specifically, this brand of conservatism, rooted in White supremacy and hierarchy, encourages censorship with the hope that such suppression and narrative control will allow them to instill inequality in both the law and broader society, and enable them to enforce it on an everyday basis, even in the most mundane places, like the classroom.