Why They Ban & Why We Fight
Inside The Trump-Hegseth Book Ban
If you’ve been following this newsletter, you already know that Can't Stop Won't Stop: A Hip Hop History, which my good friend
, and I wrote for young adult audiences and put out in 2021 was recently banned.There’s a lot more to the story that I want to tell you.
The Department of Defense ruled that the book, along with more than 200 others, needed to be “quarantined” from all of its schools — 161 of them serving 67,000 students, the children of military parents on bases in the US and around the world.
If this was a school district, it would be one of the biggest in the country. And it's one that looks a lot like the future of this country: it’s 41% white and 59% people of color.
Many of you have been asking us: how did this even happen, what's going on now and what can we do?
The bans came about because of Pete Hegseth — America's least favorite drunkard — who ordered the Department of Defense to force all of its schools to follow President Trump's executive orders.
If you see the titles of these EOs, you'll get the idea.
The first is called "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism, and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." Of course, this is part of their attacks on LGBTQ people, especially trans folks. They say they’re trying to get rid of "gender ideology."
The second one is called "Restoring America's Fighting Forces." Here they are going after what they call quote unquote "discriminatory equity ideology,” that they claim is divisive and un-American.
And the last one is called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in America's K through 12 schools.”
Because I guess telling the truth is radical indoctrination and must be stopped.
Earlier this year, they began pulling books from classrooms and libraries at military schools around the world. And they started with many of the titles that the Far Right has been trying to censor for years — including To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (an anti-racist gateway story), Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (giving women too many ideas about freedom), And of course the book to end all books on book bans — Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
They also went after kids' books like Jessica Love's award-winning book Julián is a Mermaid, or a picture book about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, No Truth Without Ruth. And they pulled a good friend of mine's book The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea,
Tokuda Hall's YA Novel that actually raises a lot of questions about misogyny and colonialism.But they didn't stop there. They banned books like A Queer History of the United States, An Indigenous People's History of the United States, and Asian American Histories of the United States.
Starting to see a pattern?
They banned books that are telling stories that we desperately need in this moment, such as Caste by Isabelle Wilkerson, or Days of Infamy, a book about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, or books about the #MeToo movement that tells stories of sexual assault on women.
You could see maybe why Pete Hegseth doesn't wanna read that book.
They also went after other books that might be surprising, such as Rise, a book by our friends,
, Phil Yu, and Philip Wang, about the rise of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.(They even banned a book called Terracotta Girl about a young girl who becomes a warrior to save the Chinese emperor. They don’t seem to like folks like us who know how to fight back.)
And because white supremacy is so fricking absurd, they even banned JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy — because I guess J.D.'s singular moment of being able to tell the truth about his background as a person coming from the white working class was radical indoctrination.
(Here’s the list of the books. You can bet the “parent’s groups” organizing against librarians and teachers around the country are going to be using this as a checklist.)
But they didn't stop with the book bans. They reached into the classrooms and told teachers that they needed to pull down posters of Martin Luther King Jr., Malala Yousafzai, and Frida Kahlo.
And then they banned celebration months — Black History Month, Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Pride Month.
When they found out that the AP Psychology test included a whole curriculum on gender, they got rid of that. When they found out elementary school students classrooms were learning about immigration by were reading President John F. Kennedy's book, A Nation of Immigrants, and they banned that, too.
If you ever wondered what education would look like under fascism — the Trump administration, Pete Hegseth, and all the rest are showing you right now.
But there is good news. You probably didn't hear about it but on April 10th, students around the world on military bases from Okinawa to Kentucky walked out. Thousands of them walked out, putting themselves and their families at great risk because the Department of Defense vowed to sanction them.
Out of this, 12 students — from elementary school to high school — became plaintiffs in a case that the ACLU filed to stop the Department of Defense's ban of these books. In E.K. vs. Department of Defense Activity, they have asked for an injunction against the Department of Defense to end these book bans at military schools across the country and around the world.
This school year might be over, but next school year we want students to be able to learn what they are there to learn, and for teachers to be able to teach what they must.
On June 3rd, a court in Virginia is going to hear the case. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, if you're angry about the way that the administration is trying to erase the past and remake the future in its image by suppressing all of the diverse images that are really representative of what the US is about, here are some resources:
American Library Association's Office on Intellectual Freedom
#TeachTruth National Day of Action - June 7th
For more info on #TeachTruth, tap in with
and the good folks at the Zinn Education Project.
Dave and I know why they wanted to ban Can't Stop Won't Stop. It's because it's the story of hip hop, the latest manifestation of Black Freedom Culture, which calls us all towards the America that we all want to be a part of. One that's open, that's inclusive, that's about the liberation of everyone.
They don't want that. They don't want to see us unite.
Because we're still the majority.