Everyone’s Culture is for the Children: Encountering and Contextualizing the Rhetorical Strategies of Book Banners

Abstract

Commentators Stanley Kurtz and Christopher Rufo have been instrumental in developing the rhetoric used in the movement to remove books by and about BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people from school and public libraries. This article examines the rhetorical strategies used by Kurtz and Rufo, including the use of coded language which alludes to racial and sexual identity and the deployment of academic methods such as Foucauldian genealogy to misread and decontextualize efforts to make libraries more diverse and inclusive. This analysis suggests that book challenge campaigns can be understood as challenges to the validity of diversity, equity, and inclusion as values for public institutions such as libraries, and that libraries must counter these campaigns with a forceful defense of their commitment to diversity. In order to explore ways of expressing that commitment, and as a counterpoint to the strategic deployment of parents in book challenge campaigns, this article also includes both personal reflections on my own experience as a parent and an exploration of alternate views of the relationship between culture and childhood. Those reflections take as their inspiration Russell Jones’ famous phrase “Wu-Tang is for the children,” and go on to search for ways of expressing the value of encouraging children to experience our world as it is and to embrace the rich cultures that surround them.