By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor The Whittemore Library and the Education Department hosted the event “Books Not Bans: Preserving Access to Diverse Perspectives” in the McCarthy Center Forum Sept. 25. The event started off with a visiting speaker, state Sen. Jake R. Oliveira. He introduced himself as a Framingham State University alum, Class of 2008. He represents some communities in Western Massachusetts. Oliveira said he used to serve on the school committee of his hometown of Ludlow. He added the races for school committees and library trustees are getting more attention because of the issue of book banning and the question of what schools can teach. Highlighting the education majors in the room, he said, “Educators are the backbone of our democracy, along with our librarians, and that’s why it’s such an honor to be here today.” Most of his early years on the school committee were focused on budgetary concerns due to the recent recession, he said, and added it slowly has shifted into focusing more on social issues. Oliveira shared one of his first experiences with book banning from 2019, before the pandemic. A parent complained about a book containing passages about the LGBTQ+ community being in a middle school library, he said. That same library had a non-binary librarian, he added. Ludlow was a conservative community, so “she rubbed a few people in the community the wrong way.” Despite that, she was kind and influential to everyone and made the library an inclusive space, he said. He treated the complaint with respect while emphasizing how to judge these sorts of books, he said. “We will take a look at it and we’ll read these passages because you can’t just look at a line in a book. You got to look at the totality of the message of that book that you’re reading, not just snippets that you want to pick and choose to fit your political ideology or a way in which you can create more fissures in a community,” Oliveira added. After reading the book, he realized there was nothing age inappropriate for middle-schoolers in it, he said. But because the parent had complained, she returned to the committee meetings and read specific passages of books she found there and didn’t like, he added. He said this led to more members of the committee “feeding into this narrative and creating some kind of loud noises regarding what was in these books.” When the parent took to social media, it caused certain groups to start seeing Ludlow as a conservative and targetable community, Oliveira said. There was one group with “affiliations and ties with far, far right-wing groups that have been deemed as terrorist organizations by the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center,” he added. “They began reaching out to churches within our community and organizing meetings at local coffee shops and restaurants to try to invite more like-minded people in order to create more of a firestorm around the books that were in the school,” he said. Oliveira said he was part of another committee, one that was made up of teachers, parents, and a representative of the school committee. This group would review any challenged book, he added. After “12 or 13 book challenges,” they realized that all of these books were, in fact, age appropriate, he said. Even the committee members who had different ideological ideas agreed, he added. He said because of this, the questionable group has tried to get “like minded people into our town government that could then begin to remove books and create a culture within our schools that was really hostile to the LGBTQ+ communities and communities of color.” Oliveira said this “small but loud” group also caused several educators to leave the school district. The kind librarian mentioned before sought other employment, he added. He stressed the importance of public libraries, calling them centers of democracy where people can get unfiltered information. Throughout the country, Massachusetts has the fourth largest number of book challenges out of any state, he said, and added fifty-four percent of those challenges are in public libraries. Book bannings are not anything new, he said. “We have gone through waves throughout our history where people have challenged books, where they’ve organized a small group within a community to be loud voices in order to try to drive their own political ideology,” he added. He recognizes that this is nothing new, but while these people used to be on the sidelines, they’re now running for office, Oliveira said. Not only are books being challenged, he said, but so are organizations such as LGBTQ+ Alliances in schools. “This is happening not in Florida, or in Texas, or in places that are far from here. It’s happening right down the road. It’s happening within our communities,” Oliveira said. Local elections are extremely important, he said. Low voter turnout allows these small but loud groups to get into power and makes our schools “not inclusive places, but places where we build walls against individuals instead of lifting people up,” he added. He urged people to vote in both the presidential election and the local elections because the local elections can have serious consequences for our communities. “The most important thing that you can do is educate yourself on the candidates that are running and show up to vote,” he said. Without that vote, banned books could become the new normal. Next, the panel discussion began. The panel had five members - Amanda Landry, Class of ’20 and a librarian for the Framingham Public Library; Elizabeth Thompson, a Framingham Public Schools librarian; Laura Hudock, professor of education; Jerome Burke, director of the CIE. After his speech, Oliveira joined the other panel members. In response to a question about what happens behind the scenes in these situations, Thompson shared what sometimes happens in her school. “So in my particular school, there hasn’t been any formal challenge. What happens more often - students will take books focused on LGBTQ+ issues or things like that and they will misshelve them, or hide them, or flip the titles,” she said. “Staff members will come to me and say, ‘This isn’t appropriate. How could you have this? How dare you?’” she added. She said she works across the street from the school’s health teacher, and from her, Thompson learned more parents have asked for their kids to opt out of certain aspects of health class, or even the class in general, she added. She specified the lessons around sex education and consent, saying parents ask for their kids not to be included. “That never happened when I started, and now every year there’s two or three more kids where this is happening.” Landry said in her library she’ll have books on display that she keeps needing to reorganize. Books that she “will continuously have to take out from the majority to put back on so you see the cover that has a Black person’s face on it,” she said. “How is it constantly ending up back up in that same spot that’s not right in front of people’s faces like I want it to be?” she asked. She said she supports Oliviera’s bill on this matter because “it’s handing power back to librarians. It is showing that librarians have an authority and that we aren’t just making willy-nilly decisions.” One person asked Burke, “What do you do in your research? What do you find are some long term implications of banning books, particularly those from marginalized communities?” He said they made the Diversity Dialogues program in direct response to book banning. He added they wanted to create a space where “we’re having conversations about issues that we’re often told not to be talking about. “Appreciating all those issues and trying to create spaces where we’re encouraging persons to be highlighted and urging persons to be to be advocates was really the idea behind the program,” he said. An attendee asked Hudock, “What do you see as the role of higher education in this arena of book banning?” She said if teachers are limited in what titles they can adopt, there’s a risk that those titles won’t reflect the students fully. “Then we’re excluding students from fully learning in the schools. And so we have to know how to create those spaces, to have the books in the classroom, to have those conversations in the classroom, how to supplement the system? And to do that, teachers have to be trusted,” she said.
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