MAGA’s book bans are coming back with a vengeance

Francis Wilkinson, Tribune News Service

“I’m not really fearful anymore,” Mary Wood told me. Wood, 49, doesn’t dodge uncomfortable topics. But I’m unsure how much to credit this claim. Over dinner in late November at a chain restaurant near her home outside Columbia, South Carolina, she recalled the “constant state of fear” that enveloped her in February 2023 when she was first accused of wayward thought. Two students in the AP language class that she taught at Chapin High School, a National Blue Ribbon School, had reported Wood, a white English teacher who had graduated from Chapin herself, to a school board recently recast by members aligned with the right-wing Moms for Liberty movement. Wood’s offense was showing two short videos about racial discrimination and teaching "Between the World and Me," a memoir of growing up, and living, Black in America by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The attack on Wood was not an isolated event: Book bans are back with a vengeance — nowhere more so than in South Carolina, which leads the US in statewide restrictions. This year, PEN America found that 6,870 book bans were enacted during the 2024-2025 school year across 23 states and 87 public school districts. Some 4,000 different titles were targeted, though many bans attack the same books — often those highlighted by Moms for Liberty. The US Supreme Court in December refused to hear an appeal of a court ruling that allowed public libraries in Texas to remove books dealing with content or characters related to race or gender, putting the high court’s imprimatur on a nationwide campaign to restrict access to books and information. According to a previous PEN America report, between January 1, 2021, and October 1, 2024, 23 states enacted 47 restrictions on K-12 classroom speech and another 10 restrictions on speech in higher education settings. Classrooms across the country face an organised campaign to alter the teaching of history under the guise of protecting the self-esteem of White children or other nebulous goals. In Florida, schools have been prohibited since 2022 from presenting information suggesting a person “must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, colour or national origin.”

To meet the demand for feel-good alternatives to historical realities, schools in Florida, South Carolina and at least eight other states have adopted educational materials from PragerU, a conservative content factory that offers what it calls “pro-American” content. The state of Oklahoma this year even partnered with Prager to produce an anti-woke test for teachers moving to Oklahoma from states where “anti-American narratives” have been prevalent. South Carolina had no explicit anti-woke diktats governing schools when Wood was attacked for teaching Coates’ book. But a language of oppression was already percolating among right-wing activists, many of whom transitioned from opposition to masks and Covid protocols to opposition to books. The biological virus was deemed insignificant or fraudulent while the book-borne virus induced panic. At a 2023 state school board meeting, one man condemned illicit content in books and complained about librarians and teachers propagating their “personal ideologies over the education and well-being of students in our public school system.” Book bans were already spreading through the state’s local libraries and school districts, with some parents challenging dozens of books at a time.

Complaints about prohibited content have fueled demands for book bans for more than a century. But the current censorship wave curls in a new direction. Right-wing Christian conspiracy culture has been preoccupied with the notion that teachers are grooming children, either for gender transition. Mary Wood said teachers are exhausted by such accusations. “Teachers were like, ‘Can you just shut the hell up’? We’re not indoctrinating your children,” Wood told me. “We are just trying to make it to the end of the day.”

Two South Carolina teachers sued a Hilton Head parent for defamation, charging that he had labelled them groomers. The cases are pending. Another man had sought criminal investigations targeting school district employees. “The school district, the administration and the librarians need to be held accountable for these books in our schools,” he told the Beaufort school board. When the Beaufort school district first pulled dozens of books in response to a complaint, it did so, it said, in order to protect employees from “harassment.”

The current book-ban movement is predominantly White, Christian and MAGA. Fox News, in one of multiple reports devoted to Wood’s case, quoted an anonymous Chapin student who stated that reading Coates’ book posed an emotional burden. “I actually felt ashamed to be Caucasian,” this student said, according to Fox. The article on the Fox website featured a photograph of Coates testifying “about reparations” on Capitol Hill and a headline about Woods “race-shaming against White people.”

Chapin, South Carolina, about 150 miles inland from coastal Beaufort, is a Fox sort of place: a largely White, relatively affluent community in a county that in 2024 gave Donald Trump 66% of its vote, a little more than 16% higher than his national share. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 4 in 5 students at Chapin High School are White; only 6% of the school is Black. (One quarter of South Carolina’s population is Black.) Wood’s AP classes tend to be all or nearly all white. She has made a point to expose her students to international literature and diverse points of view; Between the World and Me fit the bill. The book is the sort of work that educators and pupils might want to know something about. It was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It was a finalist for a National Book Award.

Yet faced with a complaint by teens that the book caused them discomfort, and under pressure from parents and board members, the school collected the books, put them on a shelf and left them there for the remainder of the school year — bound and effectively gagged. Wood was likewise in limbo. Some parents openly demanded that Wood be fired. Others did so quietly. The chair of the county GOP publicly complained about her. R.J. May, a Republican state legislator who was honoured as Moms for Liberty’s “legislator of the year” in 2023, showed up at a board meeting for Lexington-Richland school district 5 to object to people being viewed in classrooms as oppressors or oppressed “because of the colour of their skin.” Wood defended her lesson, but no one in a position of authority seemed much offended by the notion that she should be fired for it. South Carolina’s Department of Education soon signaled its preference for the easy-listening version of history by eliminating access to AP African American Studies in all its high schools.