The last several months have seen a rapid, unprecedented increase in the ban of books across the United States. This recent banning has been known to target and censor books by or about people of underrepresented communities such as the LGBTQ+ community and people of color, but there have not been many extensive visualizations that shed light on the significant impact of book bans in more detail. In order to contribute further insight on this issue, we analyzed and visualized PEN America's dataset that covers all instances of book bans during this recent increase in bans from July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022.
Timeline of Book Bans by State (July 2021 - June 2022)
First, let's start with an overview of what the recent spur in bans have looked like from month to month. The visualization below is an interactive timeline of the past several months that show the top 10 states with the highest number of bans. You can click the “Play” button to animate the changes from month to month, or you can click on any of the months on the slider manually. You can also switch between the bar graph from showing the number of bans occurring in each individual month (i.e. non-cumulative) or the cumulative number of bans from July 2021. Play around with the visualization to see if there are any particularly interesting findings.
A couple of spikes in certain states that stand out — in August of 2021, there was a big spike in the number of books banned in Pennsylvania. This spike made news, which revealed that this book ban targeted black and Latinx authors specifically. Another huge spike followed in December of 2021 in Texas, where school districts began a massive banning on books related to race and sexuality. In February of 2022, Tennessee then follows suit in the nation-wide spur with a large spike of its own, banning “obscene” books on race and gender. Florida, another leading state in the book bans, seems to have relatively consistent and frequent jumps in bans from month to month starting from November 2021. Notably, these big spikes have occurred in mostly right-leaning states. More information and news regarding these specific spikes in bans can be found below:
- August 2021 — Pennsylvania targets Black and Latinx authors by banning their books.
- December 2021 — Texas begins a massive banning on books related to race and sexuality.
- February 2022 — Tennessee follows in the nation-wide spur by banning “obscene” books on race and gender.
- A look back on the book bans from the 2021-2022 school year in Florida.
This leads to the question of, where specifically within these states are we seeing these spikes? Are there particular school districts within these states that are dominating the bans?
Where do book bans in the US occur the most?
We'll now examine the geographic distribution of total bans initiated from this time period. To gain more insight into how these banning instances are distributed within a state, we'll explore the exact districts that instigated these bans and determine if there are certain districts that are overrepresented in the dataset. The visualization below is an interactive chloropleth map of the U.S. with gray mapping to zero bans and dark red mapping to the highest number of bans. You can hover over a state to see its total number of bans initiated and its number of unique districts that initiated a ban. If you click on a state, you can see a bar chart mapping the name of each banning district to the number of bans initiated by that district.
As expected from our findings in the book ban timeline, we notice that Texas (801) and Florida (566) are the top two contenders for the highest overall number of bans passed, with Pennsylvania (458) and Tennessee (349) following close behind. As a whole, states in the midwest and along the eastern and southern coasts show higher rates of banning than their western counterparts. We observe that the strongest hotspots of banning tend to occur in historically Republican states but that for states with no bans at all, there is little partisan correlation. Diving a little deeper, we notice that for each of the top 4 states, the total ban counts can be disproportionately assigned to just one or two districts in the state: Texas-North East Independent School District, Florida-Duval County Public Schools and Indian River County School District, Tennessee-Collierville Schools, and Pennsylvania-Central York School District. Let's examine a couple of the top banning districts at a closer level:
- Texas - North East Independent School District (NEISD) is the second-largest school district in San Antonio. This San Antonio Report news article details how in late 2021, NEISD librarians began removing books deemed “obscene or vulgar” based on a list of 850 books circulated by state Rep. Matt Krause (R-Fort Worth), ultimately choosing to review 431 titles for appropriateness. Much of the justification for NEISD book removals has included "lack of professional reviews" or "outdated content" with librarians sourcing more recently published replacements on the same subject, even for books containing personal, irreplacable anecdotes on navigating racial and sexual discrimination. As Amy Senia, an NEISD alumna and civil rights attorney, puts it, NEISD's aggressive removal strategy is a "violation of NEISD students' First Amendment rights.”
- Florida - Duval County Public Schools began the process of reviewing 1.5 million titles since the passing of House Bill 1467 in March 2022 by Governor Ron DeSantis that required library books to be reviewed for pornography themes and sources of potential “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress” related to race or gender. At the start of 2023, similar laws were passed that have required districts to continue banning books of the same themes. In fact, in a recent round of staff training, Duval's chief academic officer, Paula Renfro, informed teachers that they would have to “cover or store” any unapproved books. The full list of titles can be found here.
The observations from this visualization and the context behind them give us a better sense of the motivation of the dominating states and districts for the recent banning of books en masse. But do the books that are being banned actually fit the criteria of being harmful or causing "guilt, anguish, or distress", as dictated by these states and districts? Let's take a closer look into exactly what kinds of books are actually being banned.
What kinds of books are being targeted?
To get an initial sense of what kinds of books are being banned, let's examine and explore their titles. Below are the titles of the most banned books, ordered from most frequently banned to least. Clicking on a title will show the districts and states in which it is banned. You can also search for any title or author you are interested in seeing whether it has been banned or not.
Titles of the Most Banned Books
Looking at even just the top ten titles allows us to gain insight on what kinds of books are being targeted. One can reasonably infer that top two most banned titles, "Gender Queer: A Memoir" and "All Boys Aren't Blue" not only are about or have themes of queerness and sexual orientation, but were also likely written with the intention of helping LGBTQ+ kids feel more included and less othered. Looking at number 7, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian", also reveals that themes of indigenous culture and Native American authors have been targeted as well. Let's now dive a little deeper and conduct a more systematic analysis of the most commonly shared words across the titles of all of the banned books.
What words are shared most across titles?
Below is a word cloud of the most commonly occurring words in the titles of the banned books. The size of the word correlates to its frequency, and clicking on a word will reveal all of the books with that word in its title. Hovering over a listed book title will show the districts in which that book is banned. Play around with this visualization to explore how the words in this cloud are connected to certain book titles and/or districts.
Titles with word
There is a lot to be revealed here. This word cloud makes very clear what kinds of books are being targeted by these bans. With the words “girl” and “boy” being the two most prominent, it seems as though school districts care most about making sure their kids conform to outdated gender norms and are not exposed to ideas of queerness or sexual orientation. This is further compounded by the words “sex”, “gender”, “identity”, and even “guide” being among the most common words — when you click on the word “guide” to show the titles with the word in it, it shows that many of the books are guides for navigating things like sexual identity and orientation, queerness, and more.
Another important observation is that among the most common words are “white” and “black”. It is made quite clear these school districts care more about white authors and protecting their image of whiteness than supporting black authors. The titles of the banned books with the word “white” hint toward their books being about criticism of whiteness and racial divide, while the titles of the books with “black” are related to the black American experience and uplifting the marginalized voices of the community. It is certainly no longer a coincidence that the states that are leading the charge in these book bannings are and have been known to be very much right-leaning. It does not actually seem as though these banned books are causing harm or are being banned for the reasons laid out by the states — more so that the books don't fit into what they deem to be in line with their political values.
Conclusion
We have observed a heavy underlying theme in the onset of these bans: strong demands in historically Republican states to remove books that explore topics including race, sexual identity, civil rights, resulting in further isolation of students from historically marginalized backgrounds, with stories that perhaps once gave them a feeling of belonging, now disappearing from shelves. Thankfully, these actions are not met without resistance from the local community — we have also found that for every story criticizing the decisions made by district leadership, there are uplifting stories of local communities and organizations coming together to fight back against the injustice.
For example, in early March of 2023, two organizations (MomsRising.org and JaxbyJax Literary Arts Festival) are partnering up to provide Duval County students access to books that have already been banned. Last month, Jacksonville bookstore Chamblin Bookmine proudly put up a “Books Recently Banned in Duval County” display.
In Texas, NEISD has been heavily criticized by the ACLU and its teacher's union for its compliance with Krause's demands and in late August of 2022, students of the district banded together to sign a petition decrying NEISD's restriction of their access to reading material on critical social and racial issues, safe sex resources, and LGBTQ relationships. Details of NEISD's decision to keep or remove particular titles from Krause's list can be found here.
We hope that there is further justice from the community to unban the books that give the underrepresented and marginalized communities a sense of belonging. We also hope that this data explainer and its visualizations have helped for gaining a better understanding of this recent spur in book bans across America.
Data and Methods
Our visualizations rely on data generated by Pen America covering all instances of book bans from July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022 and is directly linked here. Briefly, PEN America is a non profit organization that aims to unite writers in the celebration and protection of creative expression, standing at "the intersection of literature and human rights." To generate the data, PEN America studied news articles, corresponded with educators and authors, and reviewed letters to school districts from the NCAC to identify as many counts of challenges, restrictions, and bans on school library books across the US between July 2021 and March 2022. More details about PEN's methodology can be found here.
We conducted initial exploratory data analysis in Tableau. Further filtering and aggregation of data to generate the data underlying each of the visualizations — the state-district breakdown, the banning date timeline, the Search, and the title word frequencies — were done using Excel and plain JavaScript. The word frequencies in the titles were calculated using the COUNT and SEARCH functions in Excel. JSON object arrays to represent the data for each of the visualizations were constructed in Excel, added to the JS file, and used for the visualizations using d3.js.
Resources
The following references cite additional media we incorporated on our site and coding resources/examples for generating the specific visualizations we designed using D3.
- Book Storm GIF: foreshortening.tumblr.com
- Cloropleth Map: https://observablehq.com/@robertmreedy/fivethirtyeight-2020-presidential-election-forecast
- Cover Photo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/assorted-title-novel-book-photo-775998/
- D3 Word Cloud: https://github.com/jasondavies/d3-cloud
- Search: https://listjs.com/
- Sharing: https://ellisonleao.github.io/sharer.js/