I was told not to teach a Ta-Nehisi Coates book. Elections do have consequences. | Opinion

The history of book banning is long and nefarious. In 1637, “New English Canaan” by Thomas Morton became the first book banned in the American colonies because of his criticism of Puritanical government. Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” about his theory of evolution was removed from the shelves of Trinity College, where Darwin had been a student, in 1859. Most notoriously, Hitler’s Nazi regime torched the texts of authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair and Sigmund Freud in 1933.

In these moments, as in countless others, the intention was to maintain the status quo, to protect religious practices, power structures and political ideologies that benefit some and marginalize others. Book banners have never been on the right side of history. We know this because the books have survived. And, yet, we haven’t learned from our past.

In February 2023, as I began teaching an Advanced Placement unit at Chapin High School on the topic of racism, I experienced first-hand the repercussions of surreptitious efforts to undermine public education. After years of watching so-called “culture wars” on the news in other states, I found myself propelled into the national spotlight, a target of a radical movement to censor teaching and ban literature in South Carolina.

There I was, fighting for academic freedom in the place that raised me, in the district that taught me, in the school where my father had once been principal — suddenly an outcast in my own hometown — all because I had shared with my upperclass high school students a literary perspective with which they were largely unfamiliar: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir of being a Black man in America.

As I later learned, Coates’ “Between the World and Me” and background information on systemic racism had caused some of my white students to feel, as one wrote , “ashamed to be Caucasian.” Perhaps. Or perhaps what they experienced was empathy.

Perhaps they had a human response to learning about the extreme disparity endured by so many in a state where 1 in 4 people are Black people. Perhaps the appropriate way to confront the trauma of others’ disempowerment would have been to dive deeper into the book, to search for understanding, to imagine a pathway toward healing and growth, to grow themselves.

Instead, South Carolina budget proviso 1.79 regarding “partisanship curriculum” was cited to remove Coates’ book from my students’ hands and, along with it, an opportunity to bring a fractured society closer together.

I believe this was the point: to prevent the development of perspective and maintain a divided status quo. History tells us this was often the aim of past bannings. Why should it be different now? To be sure, the narrative of protecting students’ comfort fails. The basic function of a plot line necessitates a level of unease in the flow of rising action into the climax. It’s the tension that attracts and maintains attention. If the goal is to prevent discomfort, we should go ahead and ban all literature.

That seems to be the direction we are headed. On the heels of the proviso, which focuses primarily on race and gender, our state superintendent of education issued a regulation on “ age and developmentally appropriate ” materials, which censors literature that includes “descriptions or visual descriptions of ‘sexual conduct.’” The ambiguity of this language is Machiavellian. No more “1984.” See ya later, Shakespeare. Thanks for the memories, Alice Walker.

If this sounds absurd, well, it is. So what are we to do? Not to be cliché, but voting matters.

We so often check ballot boxes along party lines, but this method is failing us now. Knowing the endorsements of candidates and understanding the platforms on which they campaign is vital to maintaining the integrity of education, which Franklin D. Roosevelt called “ the real safeguard of democracy .” Extremist groups have no business influencing those charged with considering the entirety of our state, yet thanks to those entities we are literally fighting to keep books in schools and begging teachers to not give up.

Vote wisely. In the end, the losers of these regulations are our children.