The Mobilization of Activists Fighting Against Book Banning

There has been a rise in the United States when it comes to censoring school curricula and materials available across school libraries. Especially books related to LGBTQ issues have been targeted. This has caused outrage amongst many students, and many of them are organizing to demand the right to read about such issues in their schools.

The mission of The Illegit Activist Blog is to blog is to inspire, challenge, and encourage people to become involved in activism topics, regardless of whether they label themselves as activists or not. It is for this reason that it is worth raising the topic of the demonstrating student in the United States, since many of those demonstrating are people who have become engaged and that might not usually engage in such activist activities. The fight against book bans across the nation has contributed to the mobilization of a whole new generation of student activists. As politicians on the far right are banning books on LGBTQ issues and racial justice, youth are getting a crash course in collective organizing. The conservative state of Texas is one of the states that have been hit hardest by the book banning. In this state, equal access to different types of stories have been attacked for years.

According to Zeynep Tufekci, digital tools have made it much easier for activists to organize themselves in a much more horizontal and egalitarian manner. A lot of activist work now operates more as a network or in peer-to-peer fashion rather than under a strict hierarchy. This viewpoint is highly applicable to the case of Cameron Samuels, a student in the Katy Independence School District in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, who in 2019 organized himself along with other students when he realized that several webpages relating to LGTBQ issues as well as suicide had been blocked online throughout the school district. Samuels did not particularly become a strictly hierarchical leader of the group, but instead created a network of students who wished to join his activist cause. Through their attempts at organizing themselves, they managed to raise their activist voices at the school board meeting, which ultimately led to the lifting of online filters throughout the school district.

Between 2020 and 2021, the American Library Association documented 729 attempts to ban books, which is over five times more than the previous year. That number doubled again in 2022, and Texas was home to more book bans than any other state throughout the United States. But as students use different methods to organize activist activities, this could very well change.