Mediaboss Marketing

Published

2022-08-22 15:03

3:03

August 22, 2022

pm

After a year of escalating book bans and resulting backlash, public schools are increasingly relying on soft censorship to limit which books students can access.

In addition to banning books outright, school districts are separating titles about so-called sensitive subjects from others in school libraries, placing warning labels on them or requiring parents to sign opt-in slips allowing children to read them paperwork that can easily be missed among the piles of other forms families have to fill out at the start of the school year.

Free speech advocates say these practices are as troubling as bans particularly when the books singled out overwhelmingly have themes related to race, gender and sexuality and are written by authors who are women, LGBTQ+ and/or people of color.

The First Amendment actually prohibits viewpoint-based restrictions on access, said Jason Groth, deputy legal director for the ACLU of Utah, where the states largest district has put book restrictions in place. So putting disfavored books in another part of the library that needs parental permission, or adding some other sort of restricted access, goes against the First Amendment. One of the considerations to keep in mind is that it creates a stigma on the content of those books.

In a typical year, PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, receives a handful of reports related to book banning. That changed dramatically over a nine-month period from 2021 to 2022, when the organization identified 1,586 cases of book banning concerning 1,145 unique titles by 874 authors. Of the banned books, 41 percent contain protagonists or other major characters of color, 22 percent of the books discuss race, 33 percent have LGBTQ+ themes and 25 percent feature content about sex, puberty or relationships.

The rise of book bans comes after states have passed laws limiting what schools can teach about race, sex and gender. The legislation coincides with the rise of parents rights groups that have gained momentum during the pandemic and demanded more say in what children learn in class. Politicians have capitalized on the concerns of such parents, many of whom were spurred to action after conservatives began spreading the idea that public schools are teaching students critical race theory and indoctrinating them into a radical left agenda. As education has become the epicenter of the nations culture wars, teachers and administrators have faced harassment and hostility from the communities they serve.

Book restrictions, which include soft bans, are really creating a crisis situation for our educators and for students that just doesn't need to exist, said Shirley Robinson, executive director for the Texas Library Association, which recently formed a statewide advocacy coalition made up of more than 3,000 Texas residents to advocate for students to have the freedom of inquiry. The thing that's really scary to me is that parents don't realize that this is happening because obviously an opt-in policy means that if you missed that piece of paper, among the thousand pieces of paper that you get when your child goes back to school at the beginning of the year, your child will not have access.

Robinson added that some librarians and teachers are self-censoring by removing certain reading materials or genres before anyone complains or simply not purchasing books they suspect will lead to complaints. She added that the fears of these educators arent unreasonable given that conservative groups are teaching Texans how to run for school boards, oppose library books and monitor teachers and librarians on social media.

PEN America found that 41 percent of book-banning cases it tracked over nine months are connected to politicians calling for books to be removed from schools. Policymakers will continue to play an important role in book banning as PEN America expects school oversight bills to continue getting passed next year. These bills call for curriculum transparency, silence on LGBTQ+ issues in schools and book banning.

In Texas, a list of 850 books that state Rep. Matt Krause flagged for containing potentially objectionable content continues to influence which reading materials school districts feature in their collections. Krause first introduced the list last fall, and today, Texas leads the country in book bans, with 713 book removals during the nine-month period PEN America analyzed. Along with total bans of books, Texas schools are imposing soft censorship on titles. Districts such as Keller, Cy-Fair and Richardson allow parents to decide if students can access the entire catalog of books.

Restrictions on books largely stem from bias against historically marginalized groups, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.

The fact is that gay, queer and transgender people, African Americans, Latin people, Indigenous people have finally found a voice and a place in our society and have found a voice and a place in libraries, she said. Now we're seeing an effort to erase those voices, to stigmatize those individuals and send a message of exclusion that, given these are public institutions, should not be happening at all.

Using soft censorship to limit access to school book collections isnt unique to Texas. In states such as Utah, Virginia, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Florida and California, school districts have enacted policies that give parents more oversight of what students read, alarming critics who argue that these restrictions violate the free speech rights of students, ignore the training of school librarians and send harmful messages about the books targeted.

Alpine School District, Utahs largest, decided in July to remove 52 books by 41 authors, including Jodi Picoults Nineteen Minutes, Judy Blumes Forever and Mariko Tamakis This One Summer, all books by women with sex scenes or LGBTQ+ storylines. In fact, 42 percent of the books the district singled out have LGBTQ+ characters or themes, PEN America found.

The decision stemmed from the March passage of House Bill 374, a Utah law prohibiting sensitive materials in public schools after groups such as Utah Parents United pressed policymakers to take action to get books deemed obscene or inappropriate removed from schools. After public outcry about its decision to pull dozens of books from school libraries, however, the Alpine school board temporarily held off on its plan to remove these books from library shelves. Instead, it will place these books in restricted areas of school libraries and allow parents to decide if their children may check out these titles.

The boards reversal of the book ban is a step in the right direction,Jonathan Friedman, PEN Americas director of free expression and education programs, said in a statement. But he added that the new policy still constitutes a barrier to the books.

Alpine School District did not respond to The 19ths request for comment.

One Florida district, Collier County Public Schools, recently garnered headlines for placing warning labels on more than 100 books, many of which featured racial or LGBTQ+ themes. The warnings explain that some community members have found the books unsuitable for students.

A Florida law enacted this year, House Bill 1467, will allow residents to challenge library books they deem pornographic or otherwise offensive. The law requires school districts to report all such complaints to the education commissioner, and from there, the state Department of Education can include the titles on a list of book challenges distributed to schools. The goal, PEN suspects, is to discourage schools from including any books on the list in their libraries.

Caldwell-Stone said that book challenges are spreading due to the efforts of a small number of groups that have been particularly vocal about reading materials. They have been able to seize control of the process and really cause a moral panic over books that are both age- and developmentally appropriate but address topics they disagree with, she said.

Started by two former Florida school board members, Moms for Liberty is a national group that advocates for parents to have more oversight over their childrens education. Cofounder Tiffany Justice told The 19th in March that some books in school libraries, such as George M. Johnsons All Boys Arent Blue, are too graphic for students. That book is a coming-of-age memoir, told through essays, about growing up Black and queer.

People say, Oh, the stuff that's in the books, the kids see all the time anyway, she said. It doesn't make it OK. George Johnson wrote a book [in which] he discusses the fact that he was molested by an adult. He was a victim of pedophilia. Horrible things happen to kids, but does every child have to be ready for that trauma?

A March 2022 American Library Association survey of 1,000 voters and 472 parents of public school students found that 82 percent of voters and 81 percent of parents agreed that the ability of young people to have access to books from which they can learn about and understand different perspectives should be protected. Seventy-six percent of voters and 72 percent of parents also agreed that individual parents can set rules for their own children, but they do not have the right to decide for other parents what books are available to their children. And 74 percent of parents said they have a great deal of confidence in public libraries in their local school district to make good decisions about what books to include in their collections.

In Utah, Groth raised concerns that Alpine School District failed to properly review the books it has restricted. In July, the school board said that it had reviewed 275 books in just three days, opting to remove the 52 in question, with plans to do the same to 32 other books when they could read them cover to cover. That admission led the boards detractors to doubt that school officials read any of the books singled out in such a short time frame, suggesting that those titles were targeted because of their themes.

The way they talked about it at the board meeting, they didn't actually read the books, said Marissa Bischoff, president of the Utah Library Association. So we don't know what kind of evaluation they got, but it wasn't the full evaluation that it needed. It's really concerning because we want tobe careful to look at and see the merit of these books and not just go by one passage or the title and make these big decisions.

Tamakis This One Summer was a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book, a label recognizing the graphic novel as a distinguished picture book. Other award-winners on Alpines restricted book list include The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow, who, like Tamaki, is a woman of color. Durrows book won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. All Boys Arent Blue has received multiple honors, including from the Young Adult Library Services Association. But last year, it was one of the nations most challenged books, according to the American Library Association.

Students and people in general should be able to experience art and literature that depict the rich human experience that is life as we know it, and that includes the experiences of LGBTQ people, said Marina Lowe, policy director of Equality Utah, which works to secure equal rights and protections for LGBTQ+ Utahns.

Singling out books with LGBTQ+ themes sends the message that the subject matter covered is a problem and, by extension, the students who belong to those communities are a problem, Lowe said. Shes also distrubed by restrictions on such books because she said no one is forcing students to read or check them out. They are available to patrons in school libraries who want to read them, she said.

They're not required reading, but they should be accessible, Lowe said. At the end of the day, we really do sort of a disservice to our students if we don't allow them to have access to materials that can be challenging in some circumstances, perhaps, but allow them to grow and learn.

Nationally, book bans took place in 86 school districts in 26 states from July 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022, PEN America found. The districts include 2,899 schools with a collective student population of more than two million. Ninety-eight percent of these book banning cases did not follow best practices developed by the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Library Association. These guidelines include the filing of complaints about books by community members; the development of book review committees made up of librarians, teachers, school leaders and local residents; and maintaining student access to the books in question until they are officially banned. Books should first be challenged at a specific school, and, if a decision is appealed, then the district would get involved. So, school board officials making unilateral decisions to restrict or ban books conflicts with established guidelines.

As banning and restrictions increase, the American Library Association is mobilizing its supporters. In April, it launched Unite Against Book Bans, an online toolkit that individuals can download to understand how book bans happen, the best way to fight them and how to team up with other community members as grassroots activists.

When individuals stand up and speak out against censorship at board meetings, boards are less likely to act in an arbitrary or precipitous manner and remove books simply because someone in the audience is complaining about a book, Caldwell-Stone said. But it also requires a long-term commitment of being engaged locally knowing who is being elected to school boards and library boards, participating in those elections, making sure you vote and making sure that your friends and relatives vote and support free access to information when they vote.

Continued here:
What is soft censorship? When school districts dont ban books, they still limit student access - The 19th*

The Ethereum community, which is known for a sunny rainbow-and-unicorns vibe, is unusually serious as of late. Following a recent move by the U.S. Treasury Department to target a batch of crypto-related open source code, one word keeps coming up in Ethereum circles: censorship.

The concern surfaced earlier this month when the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency mixer that allows users to obfuscate transactions, and a series of Ethereum addressesbarring all Americans from interacting with both the mixer and the addresses.

According to Treasury officials, Tornado Cash has laundered over $7 billion in cryptocurrency since its creation in 2019, and has become a favorite destination for the infamous North Korean hacking outfit known as the Lazarus Group.

The Tornado Cash announcement marked a watershed moment for the crypto world. Although the Treasury has long targeted financial criminals and those who support terrorist activity, its unusual for the agency to sanction a piece of technologyin this case a mixerdirectly.

All of this set off concern within the Ethereum community about whether the blockchain is resistant to government censorshipconcern that has only increased as Ethereum approaches its highly anticipated merge upgrade next month.

Though applications existing on Ethereum can be censored, as weve seen with Tornado Cash, whether the Ethereum blockchain itself can be subject to censorship has been a topic of debate, especially with Ethereums upcoming merge.

Thats because the merge will shift Ethereum from a proof of work (PoW) consensus model to proof of stake (PoS), and, in turn, validators will have the responsibility of creating new blocks on-chain and verifying transactions, rather than miners. To become a validator, one must deposit 32 Ethera sum, currently worth around $50,000, that is intended to ensure that participants have a stake in the success of the network.

A single entity, however, can also run multiple validators, so long as the entity can afford it, and in doing so arguably garner more control. As a result, some within the Ethereum community have become concerned about the emergence of powerful, centralized entities after the mergeentities that could be pliant when it comes to carrying out government censorship requests.

Those concerned about censorship have raised various hypotheticals: Might a validator refuse to confirm a block to the Ethereum blockchain because it contains Tornado Cash transactions? Would fear of legal repercussions lead them to ignore or reject such blocks?

It is unknown whether any of this will happen, or whether the government will target validators, but such questions have been at the center of debate onlineespecially as it circulated on crypto Twitter that 66% of the Beacon Chain [or proof-of-stake chain] validators will adhere to OFAC regulations, including Coinbase and Kraken.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin weighed in on this discussion himself, and signaled his support in slashing the stake of any validators that censor the Ethereum protocol if asked by U.S. regulators.

Even Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong suggested hed rather stop the staking business of his cryptocurrency exchange than comply with any potential censorship.

Another concern post-merge involves MEVmaximal extractable value (formerly miner extractable value)and potential MEV-Boost issues, and how these could increase the potential for censorship.

MEV describes the profit a validator can earn by selecting or reordering transactions within blocks, while MEV-Boost is an optional software built for proof-of-stake Ethereum.

MEV-Boost allows validators to outsource block production to maximize their reward. Though there are upsides to MEV and MEV-Boost, both can also be used by bad actors in a malicious way. Specifically, some within the Ethereum community are worried about censorship of MEV-Boost relay operators, or entities that connect validators to block builders; the fear is that the existence of these relay operators offers a big new target for censorship.

The concern is so widespread that it was addressed during the most recent Ethereum Core Developers meeting.

If we allow censorship of user transactions on the network, then we basically failed. This is the hill that Im willing to die on, developer Marius van der Wijden said during the call. If we start allowing users to be censored on Ethereum then this whole thing doesnt make sense, and I will be leaving the ecosystem.

Most Ethereum developers, however, sounded hopeful that potential MEV-related issues, especially involving censorship, would not be prevalent threats, and remained focused on building Ethereum as a censorship-free protocol.

While some may take the topic more seriously than others, experts in the cryptocurrency space dont believe censorship-related fears are overblown, especially if blockchains are more widely used by normies as time goes on.

If crypto is going to go mainstreamits going to have to exist within a modern regulatory framework. That means adhering to OFAC sanctions, allowing for strong protections from money laundering, and so on, Matt Hougan, Bitwise CIO, tells Fortune. The question vis--vis ETH validators, however, is whether that adherence should occur at the foundational technological layer, or on the application and user side.

Hougan made an analogy involving the internet, asking whether libel and hate speech should be banned by the internet itself, or handled at the user and application layer instead. History suggests that freedom, innovation, and growth are best served when technologies are allowed to be credibly neutral, and we police bad acts by policing bad actors, he said.

And though the merge hasnt happened yet, weve already seen forms of censorship on Ethereum in a few ways.

Ethereum infrastructure companies Infura and Alchemy have blocked access to Tornado Cash. Circle, the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, froze Tornado Cashlinked addresses. Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum, has also reportedly blocked Tornado Cashlinked addresses. Even Ethermine, the largest Ethereum miner, stopped processing Tornado Cash transactions, being dubbed the first hard evidence seen of censorship actually happening in block production online.

Looking ahead, only time will tell how, or if, censorship resistance is maintained.

Some online predict the decentralized finance (DeFi) space will continue to split into two: one being a regulated, compliant version of DeFi, and the other being badlands DeFi, as Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at Delphi Labs, wrote on Twitter. Most blue-chip projects will embrace the former.

To Hougan, an interesting part of this process is that the Ethereum community is determining through discussion how important decentralization is as a core value. Different blockchains will decide on different answers to this question, and it will be interesting to see which answer the market rewards and punishes.

Until then, the debate surrounding censorship on Ethereum is likely to get louder.

The rest is here:
The Ethereum community is worried about censorship as the merge approaches. Heres why - Fortune

Elon Musk is back in the headlines this week. The founder and CEO of Tesla contributed a piece to China Cyberspace, the official publication of the Cyberspace Administration of China, which is the government's cyber censorship arm. It's a big deal, and proof of how deeply entangled Musk is with a regime hostile to free speech, and to the human rights of its people more broadly.

Worse, Musk's closeness with the Cyberspace Administration of China raises important questions about whether Musk, who has a Giga factory in China and has taken over $1 billion in loans from the country, has fallen prey to China's Military Civil Fusion disclosure laws. And the stakes are high: Is Musk supplying China with classified information he gains by working with the U.S. space program and other national security-sensitive projects?

Not only does the Cyberspace Administration of China control and often choke the flow of information into and out of the country, but it also provides data security for Tencent, a giant logistics conglomerate controlled by the Communist Party of China that owns 5 percent of Tesla.

The scale of Musk's operations in China makes him vulnerable to intimidation by its communist leadership, and should make us wary of his pending deal to buy Twitter. Do we really want Twitter's owner to be someone entangled substantially with one of the most repressive governments on earth, one with a long history of forcing private companies to serve its interests?

Twitter is banned in China, along with many other media companies that don't toe the party line. But some Chinese dissidents do manage to use the platform inside the country, as do many outside the country to coordinate resistance. While Musk initially claimed to be a free speech absolutist, on April 27, he clarified that he would comply with the government laws that restrict free speech.

Of course, Musk is far from the only tech magnate who has raised concerns. Amazon has catered even more directly to the censorship needs of the Communist Party of China, like when it partnered with a propaganda arm of the government to market a collection of President Xi Jinping's speeches and writings published on a Chinese website in 2020. When Amazon customers began to publish unflattering reviews of the collection, the Chinese government ordered the reviews removed and the comment feature disabled for not just this but all products sold in China.

Moreover, the CCP has partnered with Amazon on a project known as China Books, which offers 90,000 Chinese books for sale but generates little revenue. The project is widely seen as a sop to keep the government happy so Amazon can function. The company stated in an internal document back in 2018 that "ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the Communist Party to achieve and maintain its success. We are not making judgment on whether it is right or wrong."

Meanwhile, Google is working on a China-only search engine that will black out websites and search terms the government considers threateninglike those pertaining to human rights, democracy and religion.

And Twitter has worked with the Chinese Communist Party to whitewash the abuse of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government. According to reports, Twitter promoted more than 50 tweets from the Global Times, a Chinese state-run media outfit, that deliberately mislead users on how the Uyghurs are treated in the detention camps in which they're forced to live.

Every day, we see stories of corporations making the choice to participate in everything from censorship to masking drastic human rights violations, in order to retain access to China's lucrative market of 1.3 billion people.

Fortunately, the days of this problem being ignored are ending. Already Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) and Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) are working to learn more and perhaps develop legislation to guide these exchanges.

Stewart wants hearings to determine exactly what confidential information may fall into China's hands as a result of Big Tech's cowardly capitulation, and Rubio is interested in reforming contracting procedures to make sure we're not going into business with Chinese Communist Party-aligned businesses.

A variety of approaches are possible. But one thing is clear: It is past time we learn more about what it means for an American corporation to do business in sensitive industries in China. We may be shocked at what we find.

Jianli Yang is founder and president ofCitizen Power Initiatives for China and the author of For Us, the Living: A Journey to Shine the Light on Truth.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

The rest is here:
Big Tech Is Fully Cooperating With China's Censorship Regime. It's Got to Stop | Opinion - Newsweek

Largest US Exchange Accounts For 14% Of All Staked ETH

After several days of mounting pressure, Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said that he would rather shut down the companys Ethereum staking service than comply with a government order to censor sanctioned transactions.

Its a hypothetical we hopefully wont actually face. But if we did wed go with B i think, Armstrong tweeted in response to Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas, who had asked Coinbase and its peers whether they would censor or leave the staking business if pressured by regulators.

Got to focus on the bigger picture. There may be some better option (C) or a legal challenge as well that could help reach a better outcome, Armstrong continued.

Coinbase accounts for about 14% of all staked Ether, with more than 1.9M ETH locked on behalf of its users in the networks Beacon chain. Ether is trading at $1,850 on Wednesday evening in New York, making Coinbases stake worth more than $3.5B.

The sanctions levied on Tornado Cash and the subsequent arrest of a developer who contributed to its code have kicked off an existential debate within the Ethereum community. And prominent members are demanding that billion-dollar players like Coinbase take sides.

You had one jobONE JOB: censorship resistance, Lane Rettig, a former Ethereum core developer, wrote on Twitter, addressing the Ethereum community. Its the ONE THING that makes all the pain worthwhile: all the obnoxious, slow, painful decentralization theater. If you cant do that one thing, then theres no point in any of this and we should all pack up and go home already.

Four entities Lido, Coinbase, Kraken and Binance control about 60% of the Ether used to secure Ethereums Beacon Chain, the proof-of-stake consensus layer running in parallel with Ethereums current proof-of-work chain. When the two merge a long-anticipated event currently scheduled for mid-September the Beacon Chain will effectively absorb the proof-of-work chain, reducing Ethereums energy use by over 99%.

But it will also give major staking entities the power to, in theory, reject certain transactions.

That once far-fetched hypothetical scenario now seems all too real, after the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the Tornado Cash protocol and some four dozen affiliated crypto wallets on the grounds that they facilitated money laundering by state-sponsored North Korean hackers and other cybercriminals.

Earlier this week, Karapetsas posed a question to Lido, Coinbase and other major stakers. If regulators demand they censor Ethereum transactions, would they [A] comply? Or would they [B] exit the staking business to preserve network integrity, forfeiting billions of dollars in the process?

If any of them choose [to comply] we should actively strive to move away from them as they are an existential threat to the permissionless nature of the network, he wrote in a subsequent tweet.

The question has sparked a heated, multifaceted debate Would regulators really do that? Could they? What would Lido, Coinbase and other staking entities have to do in order to comply? And, perhaps most importantly: if they did comply, how could the community fight back?

Crypto attorney Geoff Costeloe said centralized staking entities would have no choice but to comply with government censorship orders.

These arent individuals. They are entities with shareholders and an obligation to profit, he tweeted. Only if A was less profitable than B (or similar) would it be a real question.

Luke Youngblood, a developer at DeFi protocol Moonwell who formerly worked on Coinbases ETH staking offering, disputed the claim.

One thing you might not know is that all of Coinbase retail Ethereum validators operate outside the US (for tax purposes). So not only will they fight censorship to their last, dying breath, it is a stretch for US regulators to censor transactions.

In the event Coinbase and company do comply, however, the Ethereum community would be left with little recourse other than a user activated soft fork, or USAF, according to observers.

Such a move would eliminate the stake of any entity that systematically engages in baselayer censorship to comply with government regulation, according to Twitter personality and self-described bitcoiner Eric Wall.

In a series of threads serving as a call to action, Wall is urging his followers to pressure large stakes to take a stand against censorship.

Blake West, the co-founder of Goldfinch, believes that Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, effectively has veto power over Ethereum, given USDCs importance in the ecosystem. To illustrate his point, he cites an attempt by some to keep Ethereums proof-of-work chain alive after The Merge.

Miners, the operators who contribute vast amounts of computing power to secure Ethereum today, will find their expensive equipment useless after the Merge and have pledged to fork the network in other words, to copy and paste Ethereum as it exists today and continue operating it as though nothing has changed.

West believes this effort will prove futile.

When the [proof-of-work] fork goes live, the supply of USDC will on-chain at least immediately double, he wrote. But of course, the dollars in Circles bank account will not. Thus Circle must choose one and only one chain. They chose Proof of Stake. And that alone kills the PoW fork. b/c the on-chain state becomes chaos if USDC value immediately drops to zero.

Blockworks research analyst Matt Fiebach believes this could doom an anti-censorship USAF.

Will Circle (USDC) support the censored chain or the not censored one? he mused on Twitter. If they choose the censored one (as is likely), well, we might be screwed my permissionless-supporting friends.

Go here to see the original:
Coinbase CEO: Would Exit Staking Biz If Forced To Censor Transactions - The Defiant - DeFi News

This week, the local-to-me Moms For Liberty contingent lost their bid to get Gender Queer removed from Barrington School District 220. Parents and community members who supported the right to read and queer students and educators in the district showed up to the meeting, and the committee reviewing the book found it to be appropriate for their high school library.

As this was happening, a new billboard showed up in Crystal Lake, Illinois, which is just a few miles west of Barrington. The billboard said that districts in the town needed to stop sexualizing children, and at their school board meeting the same night, a regular right-wing staple showed up and spoke about government conspiracies related to the 1918 pandemic (shes been mad about a book in their school library since at least January). That individual filed three FOIA requests in a span of minutes to the school district. The first, which was denied, demanded to know the sexuality of educators and students in the district. The second and third were requests that could be Googled.

Snuggled in between Crystal Lake and Barrington is Cary, which has its own breed of right-wing parents itching to get their say in education.

Today In Books Newsletter

Sign up to Today In Books to receive daily news and miscellany from the world of books.

Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox.

Barrington, Cary, and Crystal Lake are close to Lake In The Hills, where UpRising Bakery was vandalized in July because they were hosting an all-ages drag show brunch in their private business. The event was canceled as they cleaned up the damage from the individual who drove over an hour to destroy the space the night before the show, and what followed was a lawsuit from the ACLU against the town because of how it decided to proceed. The queer-owned bakery was able to host the show to a sold-out crowd just days later.

UpRising also sent educators in Barrington a welcome back feast to kick off the school year and support them as they endure continued attacks by groups who have agendas and no background in education.

Never fear, though. The local Moms For Liberty group tweeted their support of educators as parnets (yes, misspelled that way), then showed up to the board meeting to talk about indoctrination.

Im sure Im not saying anything that will shock readers here, but if its not clear already, perhaps this makes it clear: while this is about the books, it is in no way about the books. Its about the systemic erasure of queer people. If the books arent available and the teachers are called any number of names, then queer people disappear, right? And if a private business is vandalized by someone who was at the January 6 insurrection its not about education or indoctrination, is it?

I was unable to make the board meeting in Barrington to support queer members of the district. Despite that, and despite not being a citizen of the community but one of a town nearby, I wrote a letter. Im sharing it here in hopes that this can help others looking for ways to act and how to approach letter writing. You are welcome to copy and modify as appropriate.

Ive shared a template before. This is that template expanded. In addition to offering support for the book and for queer community members, I took the time to lay out who the people behind these pushes to curtail intellectual freedom are and the where and how of these coordinated movements.

In addition to sending the letter to the board, I also emailed every teacher librarian in the district and thanked them for their hard work. One board member thanked me for that, as they knew how much ugly rhetoric and discussion around these hard-working members of the school community were fielding.

So much for the Joyful Warrior parnets supporting educators.

I wanted to share the above story because much of this is news to me this week. I live here, I spend a lot of time researching book bans and access to information, and yet, I did not know what was happening in Crystal Lake. It was a reminder how wide-spread this right-wing nationalism is and, more, how local media fails to keep their eye on these things its being put on citizens to share this information and to band together, show up, and make sure that student rights are at the forefront of education.

This is not the beginning nor the end of challenges in Barrington. The district retained Lawn Boy earlier this year, and several other books are on the docket for review. Those include Flamer, This Book is Gay, Fighting Words, and All Boys Arent Blue.

It is equally disturbing that, aside from Chicago Media Collective, not a single Chicagoland media outlet had reported on this story until Thursday (the meeting was on Tuesday). They gave space to those who created the queer panic earlier this summer, but it has been radio silence still. This means parents who want to show up in support of education as a means to expanding world views remain completely in the dark about whats happening.

The lack of local media, as well as the focus of legacy media on only the clickiest stories, is in no small part why we are where we are and why well continue to be plowed by these well-organized, well-funded hate groups.

The Get Ready Stay Ready toolkit, built by parents and librarians, is one way to be prepared as an average citizen. This on-going effort is an incredible resource for staying up to date on issues relating to censorship and how you can prepare and fight back against these agendas. There are letters and templates you can use to contact school and library boards, training and educational resources to up your knowledge, and and resources aplenty for civic engagement, for supporting queer people, and for seeing and boosting voices of marginalized people. Save this and refer to it often as you continue your work ensuring access to information and ongoing support for queer and BIPOC students, educators, and library workers across the country.

Visit link:
Defending the Right to Read: Book Censorship News, August 19, 2022 - Book Riot