WASHINGTON — More than 1,600 book titles across 32 states were banned from public schools during the 2021-2022 school year, with the bulk of the ban requests coming from a handful of right-wing groups pushing for censorship of books that feature LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color, a new report issued Monday said.
“What I want to be really clear about is the books are a pretext,” Ashley Hope Pérez, an author of a banned book, said. “(Book banning) is a proxy war on students who share the marginalized identities of the authors and characters in the books under attack.”
In 2015, Pérez wrote “Out of Darkness,” a young adult romance about a Mexican American girl and an African American boy set in the 1930s, but the book was banned from school districts last year.
