Librarians in the schools of 66,000 children of American service members are being directed to pull books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” at Department of Defense-run schools, according to a memo viewed by Task & Purpose.
But they’re doing so without a list of specific titles or even clear guidance on what books to target.
Among the books selected for review were 2003’s “Kite Runner,” a story about a boy growing up in Afghanistan amid the rise of the Taliban by Khaled Hosseini, and 2016’s “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” by Vice President JD Vance about his upbringing in Ohio as part of a white working-class community. […]
A Feb. 6 memo to DoDEA administrators, librarians, and teachers directed a review of library books to ensure they’re in line with two of President Donald Trump’s executive orders disavowing the use of gender identities instead of sex and “ending radical indoctrination” which the memo describes as treating people as part of groups defined by race, sex, national origin and blaming or stereotyping people for actions committed in the past by their own groups.
DoDEA librarians have been instructed to remove physical and online copies of books on gender and inequity topics and catalog them in a spreadsheet, the librarian said. The memo states that the books will be relocated to the school’s professional collection — which is off-limits to students. Task & Purpose asked DoDEA officials what would happen to those books but they did not elaborate.
“Teaching students about the lives and experiences of people from different backgrounds than their own is part of the high-quality education DoDEA offers. However, there are some resources that appear to be in violation of the spirit of recent directives,” said Will Griffin, a spokesperson for DoDEA, in a statement.
The censorship is not even remotely surprising, obviously, this is entirely in keeping with Trump’s Reich. The article notes the following books are a partial selection of the ones removed so far:
“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini
“Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” by Vice President JD Vance
“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
“An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves” by Glory Edim
“War: How Conflict Shaped Us” by Margaret MacMillan
Not particularly surprised by most of these particular titles (Brave New World having always raised a stink with the right wing)… but, obviously, one of these things is not like the other:
I found this a little… bizarre and unlikely when I first saw this posted on Bluesky earlier, but, bafflingly, it was evidently true. I’m still wondering what the hell’s happened here. I see the order cited above attacks “blaming or stereotyping people for actions committed in the past by their own groups”, and from what I can gather Hillbilly Elegy does very much do that, it’s part of why the good people of Appalachia hate it and Vance so much… so, technically, I suppose it fits the description, but… it feels somehow like that’s not why it was done. It feels a bit more like those instances of the Bible being banned as a sort of malicious compliance:
House Bill 900 – also called the Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (Reader) Act – took effect in September 2023 and requires library vendors to rate materials for explicit content, inform parents of potentially explicit books and recall materials already in circulation when required. More broadly, the law requires library content to align with state educational standards.
While the bill, sponsored by Representative Jared Patterson, was intended to shield students from obscene content, critics say it could restrict their constitutional freedoms, and the bill has faced legal challenges since before its implementation.
Citing HB900, the full text of the Bible was temporarily banned from Canyon independent school district, which serves 11,000 students across 21 schools in Amarillo and Canyon counties.
For some reason this banning of J. Divans’ book gives me a similar vibe to this, like the librarian ordering its withdrawal did so out of spite more than anything… Surprising how little reaction there seems to have been so far, though, you’d think the government would be less than pleased that a book written by one of their own number had been pulled like that. But then again, we’re talking about that couch-fucking clown. Do they even remember he’s the vice-president?
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