Book removed from Henrico schools as governor's race centers book-banning

A novel about an interracial teenage romance has been removed from high school libraries across Henrico County after a woman criticized the book’s sexual content at a Henrico School Board meeting.

Challenging books under the banner of parents’ rights has been popular this academic year across the nation. As school board meetings have become political battlegrounds, book banning is the latest fight.

The author of the book said its removal is representative of recent nationwide efforts to purge school libraries of books that discuss race or center LGBTQ characters.

“All students should be able to find books that speak to them and relate to who they are, however books that contain pornography, pedophilia, child rape, glorify drug use, glorify anti police narratives, come with greater responsibility,” Susan DuPuis said at the Henrico School Board meeting Oct. 14. “The book Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez is one such book.”

DuPuis then read a graphic excerpt from the young adult novel that detailed a sexual interaction between a teenage girl and an adult man.

Following the meeting, eight copies of the book which were previously available in high school libraries across the division were removed for review, according to HCPS spokeswoman Eileen Cox.

Out of Darkness was published in 2015 but wasn’t challenged in any school division until this year, according to the book’s author.

“That confusion between an idea, or a theme, or a kind of experience being in a book and an author endorsing that experience — I think that confusion is at the heart of any authentic concern about my book or other books,” Perez told the Citizen. “And I say at the heart of authentic concern, because I don't think that most of the objections to ‘Out of Darkness’ and ‘Lawn Boy’ and the other books that have come under attack suddenly are based on authentic parental concern.”

Books on LGBTQ characters and people of color targeted?

In Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school division, the books Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe were removed from high school libraries after two people spoke at a school board meeting last month, according to the Washington Post.

Then in Virginia Beach, school board members challenged six books earlier this month citing “sexually explicit” and “divisive” language, according to The Virginian-Pilot.

“I think that if you look at which books are being challenged, you will see that overwhelmingly, they are books that center experiences of non-white characters, queer characters, non-citizen characters,” Perez said. “It's about in many ways, I think, pushing back against portrayals of an America that is diverse and complex, and it's pushing back against any texts that are providing opportunities for readers to confront racism as a historical reality.”

Perez’s book sets the 1937 New London School explosion as the backdrop for a romance between a young Mexican American woman and a young African American man. The book explores the rewards and the costs of loving across color lines in that particular historical moment in Texas.

“As a writer, I'm unfazed by the insults of people who haven't read my book,” Perez said. “But as an educator, and as a parent, I'm so concerned about what this means for education and the work that teachers and librarians are doing for people's children.”

Book challenges and removals from school libraries are nothing new. But this school year has been remarkable in the number and consistency of the challenges, said Nora Pelizzari, the communications director for the National Coalition Against Censorship.

In recent years, the majority of book challenges have been related to stories about queer characters or characters with diverse gender identities. But this academic year, the NCAC has seen a significant uptick in challenges to books that address race or racism, according to Pelizzari.

“We've still seen a lot of challenges to books that deal with sexuality and gender,” Pelizzari said. “But there's been this huge increase in challenges to books that tell stories about racism, or that sort of center the experience of racialized violence or bigotry, or that just talk frankly about race.”

No Left Turn in Education, an organization that opposes critical race theory and comprehensive sex education, lists on its website books that are “used to spread radical and racist ideologies to students.” These books include Out of Darkness and the two books that were removed from Fairfax County Public Schools libraries.

Much of the recent backlash against certain books in school libraries is being driven by social media and websites like No Left Turn, according to Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education for PEN America, a nonprofit that works to defend and celebrate free expression.

No Left Turn’s founder, Elana Fishbein, did not immediately respond to emails from the Citizen.

“This is no longer just a single book, and it's not isolated,” Friedman said. “My general sense is that a lot of these complaints aren't necessarily coming from parents who have children who have actually read the books in question.

Republican Christopher Holmes, who is running against incumbent Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg (D-Henrico) in the the 72 District House of Delegates race, also chimed in at the school board meeting. He didn't name a specific book, but said he’s concerned about what children are being taught in schools.

“I stand here tonight because I'm upset because it's coming to my attention that there is inappropriate — and I was gonna say sexual material, but it's pornographic material,” Holmes said. “I just had someone send me a picture of the book cover. It's disgusting. I don't know how other material was approved, or what purpose it serves, other than the corruption of our children, and the taking away of their innocence.”

Holmes later used the video of himself speaking at the school board meeting in a campaign message on Twitter.

Another Henrico parent, Dana Delucia, took the stand at the meeting to describe a book that she said her sixth grade daughter was assigned to read last year about Killer Kane, a fictional character who murdered his wife.

“This, I suppose, was meant to teach resilience to sixth-graders, but I argue that there are other ways to teach resilience and other books,” Delucia said. “I've lost confidence in who’s making choices. . . This matters to us and we will do whatever we have to do, because it's important.”

Delucia also spoke out against HCPS’s mask rule, and said that “covering up a child's vital airways should be a choice.”

Book review process

According to the HCPS policy manual, the Henrico School Board subscribes to the principles set forth in the School Library Bill of Rights and concurs that schools are responsible for providing materials on opposing sides of controversial issues, providing materials representative of many religious, ethnic and cultural groups, and placing principle above personal opinion and reason above prejudice in the selection of materials.

The Henrico Schools division has a policy and supporting regulation that address the selection and reassessment of instructional materials.

The Instructional Materials Review Committee has 41 members and changes every year, with members serving for three years. In general, the committee includes a school board member, the chief learning officer, directors of instruction, literacy specialists, parents, school administrators, librarians, and teachers. The school board representative is Alicia Atkins, who represents the Varina District.

The review process, which should be triggered by the complainant, is lengthy, and can take a few months from start to finish.

School staff members first are supposed to attempt resolving the situation in a number of ways before inviting the complainant to file his or her objections in writing. If the complainant turns in the completed form, the IMRC will read the book in its entirety and provide a recommendation to Superintendent Amy Cashwell, who then will present the report to the school board.

The last time the review process was conducted was in 2011, according to Cox.

HCPS’s regulation does not include any language about what's supposed to happen to the book while the review process is taking place.

The NCAC advises school divisions to keep the challenged book in the curriculum or on the library shelves until the formal review has taken place. If the book is pulled immediately, that privileges the opinion and the personal beliefs of the complainant as opposed to professional decision making that went into including that book in the classroom or in the library in the first place, Pilizzari said.

“That book made it onto the shelf because a librarian made a choice based on guidelines or recommendations or reviews, or other sort of professional guidance,” Pilizzari said. “When an individual or small group’s personal viewpoints and beliefs are allowed to determine what gets to stay on the shelf, that is censorship, and it hurts students.”

Gubernatorial campaign joins in on book banning discussion

With one week until election day, Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin released an ad featuring Laura Murphy, a Fairfax County mother who in 2013 launched a campaign to convince the school board to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beloved by Toni Morrison, the Washington Post reported in 2013. She said at the time that her son, then a high school senior, had nightmares after reading a book assigned to him in his senior Advanced Placement English class.

The book, which tells the story of a mother who kills her child to save her from slavery, contains scenes of rape and bestiality.

Murphy’s fight made its way to the Republican-led General Assembly which passed two versions of a bill in 2016 and 2017 that would have given parents the right to opt their children out of these books containing sexually explicit material.

If enacted, the bill would have been the first law in the U.S. to allow red flagging literature for sexually explicit language in schools. Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed both bills.

Education has been at the center of the tight gubernatorial race since McAuliffe, a Democrat who is seeking the office again, said that he didn't think "parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

Notifying parents of all books with sexually explicit language would involve red flagging a significant portion of the classical literary canon.

“We have to be very cautious around this,” Friedman said, “Because next thing you know, you could have a parent who wants to opt their child out of learning about science, evolution, vaccines, American history, slavery, global political norms, I mean, whatever kind of taboo topic there is.”

Another state where book banning is a hot-button culture war issue is Texas, where Perez’s book was challenged in three school districts. A Republican state lawmaker launched an investigation into what books Texas school districts have, and provided school districts with a list of about 850 book titles asking if they have these books and how many copies.

“The next thing you know, you're going to have other legislature legislators and other parents taking all the list of 850 books to their school districts and kind of combing the libraries for any of these books,” Friedman said. “It's tongue in cheek, but it would almost be simpler to just get rid of the library entirely.”

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Anna Bryson is the Henrico Citizen's education reporter and a Report for America corps member. Make a tax-deductible donation to support her work, and RFA will match it dollar for dollar.