Students in Texas Form Book Clubs to Counter Far Right Bans
Students in Texas school districts are pushing back against right-wing book-banning campaigns by forming book clubs and distributing banned titles to their peers.
Last year, Rep. Matt Krause, a Republican in the state legislature, sent a letter to school districts in Texas, inquiring whether they had any of the 850 books that he deemed to be offensive or inappropriate in their libraries. Soon after, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) sent an order to the Texas Education Agency to investigate whether schools were providing students access to these books, describing them as “pornography.”
The books being challenged by right-wingers in the state are far from being sexually explicit – but many of them do explore themes like race, gender identity and sexuality, and depict characters that are nonwhite and/or non-heterosexual. Indeed, several students have noted that while some books have been banned for containing age-appropriate sexual content, several others have been allowed, so long as they feature heteronormative situations.
“They’re OK with heterosexual scenes, heterosexual ideas. But the second something turns slightly, slightly queer, slightly homosexual, it discomforts them,” said Maghan Sadeghi, a senior at a high school in Katy Independent School District (ISD), a suburb of Houston. “It’s the same thing with [people of color] viewpoints. Why do we have to remove books about Black people and Asian Americans simply for the sake of white people’s comfort?”
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Yet in the next action, they turn around and start banning and burning books and policing what people can say about race and racism. That is the definition of hypocrisy! 
