Have you ever felt the weight of irony sitting heavy in your ribs? It feels as though that is all I have known this past year in Florida’s education system. Day four of class and I am assigned my first novel to read for the year. Fahrenheit 451 is boldly displayed across the cover. It is given to me as a thick packet with added margins for annotations. I briefly wondered how long it would be until the novel was removed from the state’s curriculum. 

I read the first of three parts of Fahrenheit 451 as my mother, an ELA teacher, goes through a district list of banned books and pulls many titles from her classroom library. We had discussed the banned books over the summer. Many of them sat bold as brass on my shelves at home. More would soon sit there, claimed from her classroom library. In my Honors English 2 class, we are lectured about the dangers of censorship, and the relation of our discussion to themes in the book. I nearly throw up trying to contain the vitriol and venom that threatens to spew from my lips. But this is not the place nor time for it. That will come later, but class is now. I have read Fahrenheit 451 before, and I knew precisely where the novel  was going. Bradbury’s winding sentences were acquaintances to me, but not so to last year’s graduating class. No, they were more familiar with 1984, a book not banned, but “challenged” in Florida. It was removed from the curriculum just to be “on the safe side”. 

Every time throughout the year that a new book was added to the list of those banned, I wanted to scream in the face of our school board, of our governor, of our “concerned parents”. One of the most striking anecdotes of their hypocrisy comes in the form of a national tragedy. One title among the many banned was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathen Safren Foer. For those who are unfamiliar with the text, it follows a grieving 9 year old in the wake of his father’s death during the terrorist events of 9/11. Shortly after it was banned, my Honors American Government class was shown videos of people throwing themselves out of the windows of the Twin Towers and to their deaths. Clearly the government concerns themselves with our mental well-being enough to only show us the violent and disturbing footage of suicide, but save us the trouble of sorting through the aftermath. Funny how that works, show students horrifying footage, leave us to stew in it and ultimately come to the conclusion that terrorism is the greatest threat to America right now, never mind the unrest and injustice within. 

The next thing that struck me about the book bannings was the blatant homophobia and transphobia that was not even shabbily disguised. Basically all of Becky Abertalli’s works have been banned. Anything authored by Adam Silvera was yanked from shelves. Even a children's book, And Tango Makes Three, has been deemed inappropriate. Memoirs of real experiences, of people’s lives, are gone. One-off queer novels have been eradicated. Even stories with light mentions of the LGBTQ+ community are no longer sitting in libraries. They say that discussions of sexuality are inappropriate while teaching heterosexual love stories (ex. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, a ninth-grade standard) with no eyebrows raised. The same levels of violence and promiscuity found in many required class novels are the reasons cited for banning several books.

Discussions of racism and Islamophobia have also caused book bannings. One book, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, was almost instantaneously banned. This was like a slap in the face for many students. This book was popular amongst the middle and high-school crowds for a reason. It gives a pointed look at racism, social action, and the realities of our messed-up policing system in America. It was banned for “profanity and violence” as if students do not listen to their peer’s foul mouths and then go home to watch the latest shooting’s aftermath. The real reason behind the book banning was likely anti-police sentiment. Islamophobia comes up with books challenged on the idea that characters of the Islamic faith are spreading the beliefs of Islam. This makes no sense considering the Bible is still in circulation in my county. If every book where Christian allusions merely exist were to be banned, many classic novels and a good chunk of modern literature would cease to be found in school libraries. Take the Chronicles of Narnia, for example: This series is commonly pointed to as an allegory for Christianity. I was assigned to read the first book of the series in fourth grade. Did that force me towards Christianity? Absolutely not. It made me aware of certain Christian beliefs, certainly, but it did not force me to believe in God. Between the logical fallacies and straight-up discriminatory bannings, I am led to conclude that bigotry is behind book bannings, not a legitimate concern for the safety and mental security of students. 

I have never been more disgusted with Florida than I am now. Unfortunately, I am to remain a high-school student for two more years. My mother continues to work in education, now as a media specialist at a recovering school. It is my only hope that this bigoted censorship will end soon for the Sunshine State.