[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
FREE SPEECH UNDER ATTACK:
BOOK BANS AND ACADEMIC CENSORSHIP
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
APRIL 7, 2022
__________
No. 117-77
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Reform
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available on: govinfo.gov
oversight.house.gov or
docs.house.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
47-266 PDF WASHINGTON : 2022
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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND REFORM
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York, Chairwoman
Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of James Comer, Kentucky, Ranking
Columbia Minority Member
Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts Jim Jordan, Ohio
Jim Cooper, Tennessee Virginia Foxx, North Carolina
Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia Jody B. Hice, Georgia
Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin
Jamie Raskin, Maryland Michael Cloud, Texas
Ro Khanna, California Bob Gibbs, Ohio
Kweisi Mfume, Maryland Clay Higgins, Louisiana
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Ralph Norman, South Carolina
Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Pete Sessions, Texas
Katie Porter, California Fred Keller, Pennsylvania
Cori Bush, Missouri Andy Biggs, Arizona
Shontel M. Brown, Ohio Andrew Clyde, Georgia
Danny K. Davis, Illinois Nancy Mace, South Carolina
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Scott Franklin, Florida
Peter Welch, Vermont Jake LaTurner, Kansas
Henry C. ``Hank'' Johnson, Jr., Pat Fallon, Texas
Georgia Yvette Herrell, New Mexico
John P. Sarbanes, Maryland Byron Donalds, Florida
Jackie Speier, California Vacancy
Robin L. Kelly, Illinois
Brenda L. Lawrence, Michigan
Mark DeSaulnier, California
Jimmy Gomez, California
Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts
Russ Anello, Staff Director
Devon Ombres, Subcommittee Staff Director
Amy Stratton, Deputy Chief Clerk
Contact Number: 202-225-5051
Mark Marin, Minority Staff Director
------
Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Jamie Raskin, Maryland, Chairman
Kweisi Mfume, Maryland Nancy Mace, South Carolina,
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Ranking Minority Member
Robin Kelly, Illinois Jim Jordan, Ohio
Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts Andy Biggs, Arizona
Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of Scott Franklin, Florida
Columbia Byron Donalds, Florida
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Clay Higgins, Louisiana
Rashida Tlaib, Michigan
Danny K. Davis, Illinois
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on April 7, 2022.................................... 1
Witnesses
Panel 1
Shreya Mehta, Student, Richland, Washington
Oral Statement................................................... 6
Olivia Pituch, Student, York County, Pennsylvania
Oral Statement................................................... 8
Christina Ellis, Student, York County, Pennsylvania
Oral Statement................................................... 9
Panel 2
Samantha Hull, Librarian, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Oral Statement................................................... 11
Mindy Freeman, Parent, Bucks County, Pennsylvania
Oral Statement................................................... 13
Jonathan W. Pidluzny (minority witness), Vice President of
Academic Affairs, American Counsel of Trustees and Alumni
Oral Statement................................................... 15
Jessica Berg, Teacher, Loudoun County, Virginia
Oral Statement................................................... 16
Ruby Bridges, Author
Oral Statement................................................... 18
Written opening statements and statements for the witnesses are
available on the U.S. House of Representatives Document
Repository at: docs.house.gov.
Index of Documents
----------
* Collection of Articles on Cancel Culture; submitted by Rep.
Biggs.
* Post and Courier Article on College of Charleston; submitted
by Rep. Mace.
Documents are available at: docs.house.gov.
FREE SPEECH UNDER ATTACK:
BOOK BANS AND ACADEMIC CENSORSHIP
----------
Thursday, April 7, 2022
House of Representatives
Committee on Oversight and Reform
Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 11:07 a.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, and via Zoom; Hon.
Jamie Raskin (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Raskin, Wasserman Schultz, Kelly, Pressley,
Norton, Tlaib, Davis, Mace, Jordan, Sessions, Biggs, and
Donalds.
Mr. Raskin. Good morning. Thank you to all of our witnesses
for joining us today. Thanks to all of the members
participating. We are in the middle of votes, so there is going
to be a little bit back and forth in classic congressional
style. And I am very happy to be here with the wonderful
ranking member of this subcommittee, Ms. Nancy Mace.
In 1943, in West Virginia v. Barnette, the Supreme Court
struck down compulsory flag salutes as a violation of the First
Amendment, stating, ``If there is any fixed star in our
constitutional constellation, it is that no official, no matter
how high or petty, shall prescribe what shall be orthodox in
matters of politics, religion, nationalism, or other matters of
opinion, or for citizens to confess by word or act or faith
therein.'' Then in 1969, in a case called Tinker v. Des Moines
School District, which struck down Mary Beth Tinker's
suspension from middle school for refusing to remove her black
armband in protest of the Vietnam War, the Court affirmed that
neither teachers nor students shed their First Amendment rights
at the schoolhouse gate.
In 1982, most relevant to our hearing today, in Board of
Education v. Pico, the Supreme Court rejected the effort by a
town school board in New York state to strip objectionable
books from public school libraries. The members had gone to a
conference promoting censorship of offensive and vulgar books,
and came back with a target hit lists, the kind of hit list,
which is now familiar to us, including ``Slaughterhouse-Five''
by Kurt Vonnegut, ``Best Short Stories of Negro Writers'',
edited by Langston Hughes, ``Go Ask Alice'' by an anonymous
author, ``Black Boy'' by Richard Wright. And after widely
brandishing a compilation of the most prurient and lurid and
profane passages, the board actually overrode its own
censorship committee, which had recommended purging only two
books from the schools, and went ahead and censored nine of
them. When the case made it to the Supreme Court, the majority
sided with the students who were claiming that the removal of
books from the school library affected a form of political and
ideological thought control, totally antithetical to the First
Amendment of the Constitution.
Justice Brennan, who had been nominated to the Court by
Republican President Eisenhower, announced the judgment of the
Court and delivered an opinion that was joined by Justice John
Paul Stevens, who had been nominated by President Ford, Justice
Harry Blackmun, who had been nominated to the Court by
President Nixon, and Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been
nominated to the Court by President Johnson. So this was a
decision dominated by Supreme Court justices who had been
nominated to the Court by GOP presidents, which is something
that we need to think about because I hope, Ms. Mace, that
everything we talk about today will transcend the traditional
party lines.
In Board of Education v. Pico, Justice Brennan found that
the Constitution protects not just the right to speak and to
write, but the right to receive information and ideas. The
First Amendment plays the central role in affording the public
access to discussion, debate, and the dissemination of
information and ideas. Freedom of inquiry, the Court ruled,
extends to school libraries, and the selective removal of books
from school libraries because someone considers the content
offensive directly and sharply implicates students' free speech
and thought. In school libraries, the regime of voluntary
inquiry holds sway. The answer to books whose content or
viewpoint you oppose or even deplore--check out this powerful
logic--is to not read them or to write a negative review or
even, shades of Voltaire here, to write your own book in
answer.
The First Amendment, I used to tell my constitution law
students, is like Abraham Lincoln's golden apple of liberty: it
is like an apple, and everybody just wants to take one bite out
of it. Somebody hates left-wing speech and somebody hates
right-wing speech and wants to censor it, and somebody hates
hate speech about gay people and someone wants to censor speech
about the love lives of gay people, and someone wants to censor
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, because it uses the N-word, and
someone else wants to censor Ibram Kendi's Antiracist Baby
because they think it means that babies can be racist.
Everybody wants to take just one or two bites out of the
apple. But if we allow all those bites, there is no apple left.
The freedom of speech disappears. The way to save the apple for
all of us is to learn to tolerate the speech you will bore as
well as the speech you agree with. It is not always easy, but
this is incumbent upon people living in a free democratic
society. If we cancel or censor everything that people find
offensive, nothing will be left. Everybody is offended by
something, and that is why other people's level of offense
cannot be the metric for defining whether your rights, or my
rights are vaporized.
There is a famous story about Lenny Bruce, the somewhat
risque comedian from the middle of the last century, and
someone said his show should be shut down because it offended
him. And Lenny Bruce said from the stage, ``My parents came to
America in order to be offensive and not to be thrown in jail
for it.''
Now during National Library Week, a time to celebrate
intellectual curiosity, scholarship, freedom of inquiry, and
free expression, basic intellectual freedoms are under attack
again. In 2021, the American Library Association's Office for
Intellectual Freedom reported the highest numbers of censorious
challenges to library books in its 20 years of tracking this
data, 729 efforts to censor nearly 1,600 books. And in Texas,
just one of these attempts to censor books implemented by a
state legislator, has initiated the systematic review of at
least 850 books in every school district in the state. There
are over 1,000 school districts and 8,000 public schools in the
Lone Star state. This challenge will require tens of thousands
of teachers, librarians, and administrators to spend hundreds
of thousands of hours reviewing the books to implement a regime
of censorship at a time when school resources are already
stretched thin and states across the country are facing teacher
and staff shortages.
The vast majority of books being targeted are not mandatory
or part of the curriculum. They are books of choice. Students
can pull them off the shelves if they want to and check them
out, or they can ignore them entirely. What books are being
targeted? Well, some old favorite targets are back like
``Catcher in the Rye'', ``Native Son'', ``Huckleberry Finn''.
There are also a bunch of these books I brought here:
``Seahorse''. We are going to hear today from the great Ruby
Bridges, whose book, ``Ruby Bridges Goes to School'', has been
the target of censorship. ``The Bluest Eye'' by Toni Morrison,
who is a Nobel Prize winning author. A kids book about racism
has been targeted for censorship, a book called ``Hair Love'',
the infamous ``Antiracist Baby Book'', ``Little Legends:
Exceptional Men in Black History'', and finally, ``Little
Dreamers: Visionary Women Around the World''. So these are some
of the most common books that are being targeted right now.
Obviously it is a legitimate subject for parents, teachers,
principals, and school boards to discuss which books are the
best and most age-appropriate curricular choices for different
age groups and grades. This is what educators do, and the best
ones include families, parents, and experts in the
decisionmaking process all across the country. But that normal
curricular and library selection process is completely
different from whipping people up into a moral panic over the
use of this or that word or passage in a book and then
demanding its removal from the school library.
Fashions and censorship change. For a great deal of our
history, books were censored because they were considered
indecent or politically subversive, for example, of the slavery
system like ``Uncle Tom's Cabin'', which was seized, censored,
and burned in many Southern states as propaganda. Many books
are being targeted for censorship these days simply because
they address racism or white supremacy as historical or
sociological realities, or address human sexuality or LGBTQ
issues, because the protagonist or author is gay or a person of
color, or for some other allegedly objectionable reason.
Finally, not quite sure where this is, if you can give me
this, I wrote a book, which was censored called, ``We the
Students'', or, I am sorry, forgive me. I correct myself. It
has not been censored yet, but it is being targeted for removal
from the schools in Texas. ``We the Students'' was amazingly
sponsored by the Supreme Court's own Historical Society. It
analyzes the constitutional freedoms of young people in public
schools. It looks at a whole bunch of cases that affect kids in
public schools, like censorship of newspapers, and yearbooks,
and locker searchers, and drug testing. And I am certain now
that it must be the first book ever sponsored by the Supreme
Court's own Historical Society which is now being targeted for
censorship. I only wish that the aspiring censors would read my
discussion of Board of Education v. Pico on page 59 in my book
before they censor it, because it tells them everything they
need to know about how it is illegitimate to strip books from
school libraries because somebody disagrees with it.
OK. So the books on the poster boards have all been
targeted for censorship or actually banned from schools. ``This
Is Your Time'' by Ruby Bridges, a remarkable figure in the
American Civil Rights Movement and we have the honor of hearing
from today, has been challenged and targeted for censorship.
Why? Simply because it said that a book describing the story of
how a little girl who was one of the first to integrate public
schools in her native Louisiana in the midst of a racist
backlash may make white children feel uncomfortable. And this,
I think, radically understates the powers of empathy,
compassion, and solidarity that all children or most children
have and are capable of developing. It also suggests that the
actual lived experiences of people should be suppressed if
learning of their experiences would make other people
uncomfortable, a farfetched, unworkable, and unjust principle
that cuts against the fundamental American idea of free
expression.
All right. With that, I am going to turn it over to Ms.
Mace for your opening statement.
Ms. Mace. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I should have brought my
book ``In the Company of Men: A Woman at the Citadel'' this
morning----
Mr. Raskin. I brag about your book all the time.
Ms. Mace. Yes, but thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to
have the opportunity today to highlight the importance of
freedom of speech in our country, as well as the important work
to ensure that K through 12 curriculums in public schools serve
our students well.
The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the
right of freedom of speech to all Americans, and the First
Amendment states that Congress shall make no law abridging the
freedom of speech. The government may only set reasonable,
time, place, and manner restrictions in very limited
circumstances. The government cannot and should not police the
speech of its citizens even when that speech is disagreeable or
repugnant. When they say it aloud, sometimes we want to know
what they have to say. We don't punish thought criminals in
this country unless, of course, you are maybe a main character
in Orwell's ``1984''.
Freedom of speech isn't just a legal mandate enshrined in
our Constitution. It is an essential element to democracy. This
fundamental freedom ensures all views across the spectrum are
debated within the marketplace of ideas, and public
institutions of higher education are bound to abide by the
First Amendment's prohibition and restrictions on freedom of
speech. Yet often in this country, we see a tax on that very
freedom. Public universities and colleges frequently run afoul
the First Amendment freedom by enforcing broad or overly broad
speech codes or by chilling speech across college campuses
using bias response teams to investigate thought criminals.
There have also been disturbing campaigns on these campuses to
expel students by our faculty or disinvite speakers who hold
views that are considered to go against the progressive
consensus or groupthink. These universities and colleges are
unlawfully stifling speech to coddle young adults at a time in
their educational careers where they should be exposed to a
variety of ideas and perspectives.
While progressive activists shut down speech on college
campuses, they are trying to hyper-expose young children who
are still learning to read write, add, and subtract. And I can
personally remember a story when my kids were in elementary
school, and I was driving them home, picked them up from the
carpool line in school that day, and they had a government
lesson on government democracy versus socialism versus
communism. And I asked them, which one is best, and they said
socialism. So I pulled over on the closest exit off the
interstate and had a conversation about the differences. And
then they walked out of that conversation saying, ``No, mommy,
democracy is the best form of government for the United States
of America.''
In an effort to indoctrinate our young students,
progressives are burdening curricula with divisive and radical
ideologies such as race essentialism, racial scapegoating, and
content of a sexual nature that is not appropriate oftentimes
for very young children. All children should be taught the
academic skills they need to succeed, along with the history of
our country, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You must also
teach our children about the problematic chapters in our
history, and we must also teach them about the heroes who lead
us and have led us to a more perfect union. In fact, one of
those heroes today is joining our hearing today, Ruby Bridges,
who you mentioned earlier, a civil rights icon and author who
made history as a six-year-old girl, courageously braving a
hostile crowd to integrate an all-white elementary school in
Louisiana.
And in my home state of South Carolina, we have so many of
those heroic stories that should be taught in our schools from
Harriet Tubman, who rescued 750 slaves in one night in Beaufort
County, South Carolina, to Joseph Rainey, who was the first
African American to represent in the U.S. House of
Representatives, who represented, by the way, South Carolina's
1st congressional District, the seat that I sit in today.
Public schools should exercise discretion with parental
input and oversight to decide what is included in their
curricula and what books to include in their libraries,
especially for young elementary school students. But no child
attending our public schools should be subject to government
indoctrination, or exposed to radical ideologies while they are
still building the foundations of their education. Instead, we
ought to be teaching critical thinking skills so college-age
students can discern, argue, and act on those values when faced
with open and frank academic discourse. And, of course, our
high school students, even if they aren't going to college,
should be prepared to enter the work force when they graduate.
I thank all the witnesses for appearing today and looking
forward to a robust discussion on the First Amendment, freedom
of speech, and how we can work together to preserve that
freedom for every single American. Thank you, Chairman Raskin,
and I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Ms. Mace, for a very thoughtful
opening statement.
Before I introduce our witnesses and swear them in, I just
want to state that PEN America just released a report this
morning finding that from July 1 of last year to March 31 of
this year, there were 1,586 book bans that were implemented
across 86 school districts and 26 different states. Forty-one
percent of the banned titles had protagonists who are prominent
secondary characters of color, 22 percent directly address race
and racism, and 33 percent explicitly address LGBTQ issues. So
though that is not a majority, that is a lot of where the
action is. And of course there are the traditional targets that
we know of, like Catcher in the Rye, and Huckleberry Finn, and
George Orwell's 1984, and so on.
Now I want to introduce our first panel of witnesses who
are all high school students and will be testifying but not
answering questions. First, we have Shreya Mehta, who is a
student from Richland, Washington. Good morning. Then we are
going to hear from Olivia Pituch, who is a student from York
County, Pennsylvania. Finally, we will hear from Christina
Ellis, who is also a student from York County, Pennsylvania.
The witnesses will be unmuted, so we can swear them in.
Please stand and raise your right hands if you can do that.
Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to
give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
[A chorus of ayes.]
Mr. Raskin. Let the record reflect the witnesses have all
answered in the affirmative. Thank you.
Without objection, your written statements will be made
part of the record.
And with that, Ms. Mehta, you are now recognized for your
five minutes of testimony.
STATEMENT OF SHREYA MEHTA, HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, RICHLAND,
WASHINGTON
Ms. Mehta. Thank you so much. Hi. My name is Shreya Mehta.
I'm a senior this year at Hanford High School, a public school
in Eastern Washington state. I want to start off by thanking
the subcommittee for giving me the opportunity to testify
today. It's an honor to be representing the students in our
country, both as an organizer and as a booklover.
Mr. Raskin. Can you just speak directly into the camera and
the microphone, as close as you can just because you're fading
out a little bit.
Ms. Mehta. OK. So my district has had fewer outward book
challenges, but the internal damages, the culture of censorship
of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ voices and
[inaudible] it has caused is immense. I believe that the
rampant censorship is affecting even more districts than we
think and supporting the bullying of marginalized students
around the country. The rising book bans in my district has
created a lot of fear so that entire classes centering diverse
perspectives and plenty of new books that have been proposed
have been stopped in their tracks for no other reason than fear
of retaliation. I've spoken personally with educators who have
been coerced into putting away books with LGBTQ+ or racial
equity content.
Marginalized students have unfortunately become collateral
damage in this current moral panic. Just a week ago, I went to
a school board meeting where a man spoke out against homosexual
teachings and a woman spoke out against gender equality books.
And these are some of the same adults who scream for bans but
also misgender students and call them things and threats, which
is why I believe this censorship is, in large part, tied to a
lot of bullying happening, and oftentimes thinly veiled racist,
sexist, or homophobic political statements that impede a
student's right to intellectual freedom and to embrace their
individual identities.
I think students have their right to check out age-
appropriate material from their libraries, whether or not it
contains material that's divisive, because the fact of the
matter is that students are facing divisive topics in their
everyday life, and they need to know that they're not alone in
their struggle. And I keep on asking myself how many decades
will it take before we can erase a generation of LGBTQ+
students in particular, who aren't institutionally guided and
systemically educated to be as invisible and ashamed of
themselves as possible?
Mr. Raskin. Ms. Mehta, forgive me. I hate to interrupt you.
Ms. Mace and I just have to go vote. We're going to freeze your
clock right there at the halfway point. We'll be back as
quickly as we can. We're going to drive over there, and then
you can come finish it, and then we'll go to our next witness.
Thanks everybody for having [inaudible].
[Recess.]
Mr. Raskin. The hearing will resume. And Ms. Mehta, you
have two minutes and 30 seconds left to complete your
statement.
Ms. Mehta. Thank you. So I'm on spring break right now, but
as an experiment for the subcommittee, I counted the amount of
times I heard the f-slur used in the hallway the last day I was
at school. It was 15 uses within 30 minutes worth of passing
periods, one instance of bullying every two minutes, shorter
than, you know, I've been speaking by this time. And I think
that this kind of hatred is learned and entirely preventable,
but the bullying has only been amplified as book bans have
become more pervasive. And the political climate has made it
that censorship amplifies many peoples', especially
politicians', internalized homophobia and transphobia.
I don't think LGBTQ+ characters subject matter is
inherently inappropriate for any specific age. I think there's
age-appropriate gay characters for five-year-olds and 15-year-
olds, and that school librarians know how to best use the
literature. I believe that words have a lot of power and that
they can teach us empathy and strengthen our democracy, and I
really wish that political polarization wasn't dictating our
education. I want to learn about my friends, even if I disagree
with them. I want us to understand one another.
But right now, my intellectual freedom and my students'
intellectual freedom is not being supported or fought for.
Please support this and support the fact that it's not
politicians, but librarians and educators in partnership with
the students they serve, who are best-suited and trained to
cultivate a collection of books that are age appropriate and
serve their diverse student bodies. And please make this the
last generation of marginalized youth that have to grow up and
feel invisible and ashamed of themselves.
Thank you to the subcommittee for amplifying student voices
today. That's all I have.
Mr. Raskin. And thank you very much for your thoughtful
testimony.
Ms. Pituch, you are now recognized for your five minutes.
STATEMENT OF OLIVIA PITUCH, HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, YORK COUNTY,
PENNSYLVANIA
Ms. Pituch. Good morning, and thank you, Chairman Raskin,
Ranking Member Mace, and members of the subcommittee for this
amazing opportunity. I'm Olivia Pituch. I'm a senior at Central
York High School, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, an
activist, and the secretary and social media advisor of the
Panther Anti-Racist Union, known as PARU, of Central York
School District in Pennsylvania.
In late August, an article published by a local news source
revealed that the Central York School Board had banned an
extensive list of resources, including books, articles, movies,
and more, all written by BIPOC or LGBTQ+ authors containing
BIPOC or LGBTQ+ characters, or about BIPOC or LGBTQ+ awareness
and history. The booklet specifically included materials such
as ``I Am Enough'' by Grace Byers, ``I Am Rosa Parks'' by Brad
Meltzer, and ``Malala: My Story of Standing Up for Girls'
Rights'' by Malala. All of these resources would help to not
only aid BIPOC and LGBTQ+ students in embracing themselves and
their identity, but would also spread awareness and educate all
students on the importance of diversity.
When this list was pushed out as a banned book list, I was
appalled. Central, being the second most diverse district in
the county, prided itself on diversity, but this ban silenced
BIPOC voices and frankly announced that their identities were
not welcome. With the help of my fellow students, Christina
Ellis, the vice president of PARU, Edha Gupta, the president of
PARU, Renee Ellis, our communications director, and Rebecca
Delgado, our artistic director, and our amazing advisors, Ben
Hodge and Patricia Jackson, we stood up to this act of
discrimination.
In the beginning, we organized small peaceful protests that
were located outside of the high school, ending 15 minutes
before the school day began. These caught the eye of local
press and news outlets. This was no longer between a few
students. Our story, voices, and messages were broadcast on
many local channels and expressed in articles through
interviews and coverage of the peaceful protests. Media
coverage helped the community receive 3,000 books from the list
to handout for free to community members and helped two
community protests take place.
It has been a hard journey in loving myself as a member of
the LGBTQ+ community. I've been surrounded by amazing people
who helped me through and offered advice, friends who are also
members of the community, but not everyone is this lucky.
Many kids find refuge in going to school and being within
an inclusive community, but as education on inclusion slips
away, that safe haven does too. I have heard slurs being thrown
around, LGBTQ+ kids being made fun of, verbally abused and
more. Ignorance is very real. It is important to teach
inclusion and equality. It is important to have representation.
I deserve to walk into my school library and find a book with
someone like me. This is why education on inclusion is
important and necessary. Without it, those kids who came to
school for safety and acceptance will no longer have that safe
spot.
Too many kids have attempted suicide, harmed themselves, or
been verbally or physically abused for who they are. Too many
kids are alone and don't have that safe haven. Books that
represent them offer them comfort and open conversations
provide that safe place for all students. It is important to
teach the students inclusion so that they can save a person's
life just by showing them compassion and respect. We can't
force LGBTQ+ kids into situations where the only time they hear
about their community and themselves is when their rights are
being debated between students. We have a place in this world
and in this community. If I would have had open discussions,
representation, and education, I would have been able to
embrace and love myself a lot earlier on. Rather than sitting
fearfully with my thoughts and feelings, I would have been able
to learn what my feelings mean, and that it is OK to be me.
Silence is deafening, but these books help to break through
the silence and allow children to flourish. Kids need to see
themselves, especially portrayed in a positive light. Provide a
space where they can celebrate who they are. Give them the
resources to help them love themselves for who they are. Don't
silence the voices that are finally beginning to be heard.
Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Ms. Pituch, thank you very much for your
thoughtful testimony.
And now, Ms. Ellis, you are recognized for your five
minutes.
STATEMENT OF CHRISTINA ELLIS, HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT, YORK COUNTY,
PENNSYLVANIA
Ms. Ellis. Good morning. My name is Christina Ellis, and
I'm a senior at Central York High School in York, Pennsylvania,
the vice president of PARU, The Panther Anti-Racist Union at
Central York. To start off, I'd like to extend my gratitude to
Chairman Raskin, Ranking Member Mace, and members of the
subcommittee, who made it possible for Olivia and I to come and
speak today.
I would like to discuss the book/resource ban that divided
our school district. These books and resources banned were
books such as, ``I Am Enough'' by Grace Byers, ``All Are
Welcome'' by Alexandra Penfold, and even ``Ven a Mi Casa'' by
Dr. Seuss. I remember the moment I heard about the ban. Edha
Gupta, who's the President of PARU, messages me an article
released by York Dispatch, a local news source, discussing in
great detail the type of ``divisive resources'' that were
banned.
It didn't take long for us and countless others to realize
these listed resources targeted the voice and representation of
BIPOC communities, authors, and creators. We knew this ban
didn't represent our district as the second most diverse
district within York County. Thus, we created an executive
board within PARU. Our first initiative was to peacefully
protest outside of my high school every morning until the ban
was reversed, and that is what we did. Seventy-plus students
and even staff at the high school stood outside with signs like
Black Lives Matter and Diversity Belongs in Education. We stood
in solidarity until our presence was known, and soon enough,
our presence was recognized. News anchors, like Fox News and
CNN, picked up our story, and after all of our news coverage,
our school board reversed the ban as of September 20, 2021. We
did not rejoice at this news for long because we realize that
there is so much more work that needs to be done.
Myself and those in PARU will continue to strive for
equality and diversity not only with our classrooms, but within
our community. The reason why I stood against my school
district's book ban was because I didn't want future African-
American kids to go through some of the things I went through
growing up because of the lack of cultural sensitivity in my
schooling experience. I didn't want students, in general,
feeling like their culture didn't matter because, in school,
there was little to no representation for them.
Here's one of my personal stories. In elementary school,
when the teacher would put a document on about slavery, some
kids would turn around and stare at me, the only Black girl in
the classroom. I found myself avoiding bringing my Caribbean
food to lunch in fear of the looks and snarky comments from
peers because the food was foreign to them. And sadly enough, I
spent the majority of my K through 12 schooling straightening
my hair so I wouldn't stand out. I wanted to blend in and not
be different. I didn't want random people touching my hair
without my permission. And sadly, still to this day, I
encounter people who think it's OK for them to run their hands
through my hair.
Books that highlight our differences and teach others how
to address diversity are crucial. These books shouldn't be up
for debate. A slideshow presentation at the beginning of school
year telling kids to be kind is not enough. It's not OK to joke
about the way a student chooses to dress or what they pack for
lunch. These books can help educate kids on various cultures
and ways of life, and we need to rely on our trained educators
to handle teaching these difficult and hard topics.
This will decrease bullying and judgmental stares because
kids will learn to approach their peers not from a place of
educational ignorance, but from a place of compassion and
understanding. This world needs more people who want to pay
attention to others and not only themselves. Banning books of
those of minority background and unique backgrounds, silences
their voices and erases their history, and arguably is taking
away the right to express themselves.
These are words in a page that have the power to change a
cold heart to warm. It's not indoctrination. It's education.
Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much to all the students for
your really powerful and illuminating testimony. It helps us a
lot.
The first panel is now excused. Please send our regards to
your families and your teachers as you get back and tell them
we're very proud of what you've done back at school and also
what you did for the country today here in Congress.
We will now welcome the second panel. I want to introduce
our second panel of witnesses, and I will begin to introduce
them as they enter and are seated.
First, we have Samantha Hull, who is a librarian from
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Then we will hear from Mindy
Freeman, who is a parent in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Then we
will hear from Dr. Jonathan W. Pidluzny, who is the vice
president of academic affairs at the American Council of
Trustees and Alumni. Next, we will hear from Jessica Berg, who
is a teacher in Loudoun County, Virginia, not far from where we
are. And last but not least, a witness who really needs no
elaborate introduction for America, Ruby Bridges, who is a
civil rights luminary and an author.
The witnesses will please be unmuted so we can swear them
in. If everybody would rise and raise your right hands.
Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you are about to
give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
so help you God?
[A chorus of ayes.]
Mr. Raskin. Let the record show that all the witnesses have
answered in the affirmative. Thank you.
Without objection, your written statements are going to be
put in the record so we have every word that you want to submit
officially for the congressional record.
But with that, you're now recognized for your verbal
testimony, and we've asked you to sum it up in five minutes, if
you can do that.
Ms. Hull, you are now recognized.
STATEMENT OF SAMANTHA HULL, LIBRARIAN, LANCASTER COUNTY,
PENNSYLVANIA
Ms. Hull. Good morning, and thank you, Chairman Raskin,
Ranking Member Mace, and members of the subcommittee for the
opportunity to speak on such an important issue. We are here
because books have been questioned, challenged, and banned at
record rates this school year, and there are students watching
from near and far. In fact, I've brought some of them with me
as support in notes that they have given to me.
Administrators have made hasty decisions. School board
members have jumped to conclusions based on out-of-context
experts, and librarians scramble to play catch-up to fight for
our students' rights. When books are removed, communities lose
the voice that that book represents. Measuring the damage of
lost voices is daunting and longitudinal. We can measure the
soaring rates of mental health disorders in adolescents. Many
can directly correlate the teen mental health crisis to
feelings of discontent, loneliness, and a lack of belonging.
These are exactly the feelings that arise when we believe we
are alone in what we are experiencing, and these feelings can
be especially brutal and isolating in adolescents.
The ability to learn about and appreciate the diversity of
the human experience, perspective, and opinions is crucial to
gaining a sense of belonging. We can gain this ability through
our access to books and other resources. This is why a singular
reaction to a book should never result in the immediate removal
of a resource but instead be the basis for our conversation, to
understand the purpose of a library and the support and
resources that librarians offer.
If a student reacts strongly to a book, it can be the start
of a conversation with their family or trusted adult about the
topic that caused the reaction. During the eight years I've
been a librarian, I've seen the publishing industry react and
support the need among adolescents for books representing a
spectrum of thought and experience. Books have made a
difference in our kid's well-being, ability to think more
broadly, be more innovative, and be more empathetic. We see
this in the many students who are standing up for what they
believe in. Those students realized early that they have a
voice and that their voice matters.
School librarians have dedicated our careers to responding
to our students' needs, and it motivates us to work hard as we
keep our curated collections balanced. We work tirelessly to
provide a sanctuary for students in the library, the place that
they feel safe. Feeling safe, however, is not always the same
as feeling comfortable. Growth doesn't necessarily happen when
we're comfortable. It definitely will not occur when we are
stagnant, or when we're uninterested, or when we accept the way
things have always been done. Growth is uncomfortable, but it
builds grit and determination. To learn is to grow, and when
we're in an environment that fosters open-minded communication,
the discomfort is outweighed by the possibility of learning.
Open-minded communication is not fostered when we start
making individual, monolithic, or one-sided decisions,
especially without trained librarians' input about books based
on out-of-context readings. When we take this road, we are
limiting growth, we are stifling progress, and we are acting in
the most undemocratic way possible. Adhering to loud minority
viewpoints and not making space for all voices to be heard is
not progress.
Librarians urge everyone to take a minute, to consider why
a book or resource makes us uncomfortable, what it might be
trying to teach us, and what we are resisting to learn. While
we are willing to fight, and those fights are always worth it,
they take time, they take energy, and, most importantly, they
remove us from our students, from our classes, and from our
libraries.
For a while, those lights were lonely. It seems like
everything was happening behind closed doors, and many of us
have found the strength and space to speak out on the
injustices of self-censoring and outright book banning. Since
those brave moments, the army has grown. Parents, students,
community members, public librarians, store owners, authors,
lawyers, teachers, and local politicians have embraced the
discomfort and joined the fight. Librarians are in it for the
long gain. We fight with courage in our hearts to balance the
shelf so students can see themselves in what they read, find
what they need, when they need it, and have a safe place to do
so. If we don't have the answers, we'll help them find someone
who does.
Our democracy and our students' well-being hinge on the
access young people have to fully representative resources
curated by librarians and teachers with the education,
expertise, and experience to handle this work. Without
institutions that are curated by professionals to encapsulate
the wide range of historical perspectives, we have no history.
Without a location in our schools that is staffed by trained
librarians, we have lackluster resources and ill-informed
students. Without safe places to read, think, and discuss, we
have no future.
We librarians know firsthand our students, our world
problem solvers, are ever curious. Through our student's
curiosity, knowledge is generated and innovation occurs. That
is growth. That is progress. That is democracy.
Mr. Raskin. What a wonderful statement. Thank you very
much, Ms. Hull.
Ms. Freeman, you are now recognized for your testimony.
STATEMENT OF MINDY FREEMAN, PARENT, BUCKS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Ms. Freeman. Thank you, Chairman Raskin, Ranking Member
Mace, and members of the subcommittee. My name is Mindy
Freeman, and my pronouns are she/her. I'm a parent from Bucks
County, Pennsylvania, where I lived with my spouse since we
were married 25 years ago. I'm speaking from the heart as a
person who loves their children, as a former elementary school
teacher, and as someone who cares deeply about the education of
our youth.
I'm not a political person. I've been a registered
Republican and a registered Democrat. I didn't even know what
the House Oversight Subcommittee was until last week, and yet
I'm here in the most political place on earth. This is 2022,
and despite all the major issues needing our Nation's highest
attention, book banning and censorship is a subject that we are
now forced to be tackling, an attack on public education,
diversity of thought, inclusion of people, and the ability of
citizens to consume real, authentic stories of who we are.
Books have a critical role in people's lives. My youngest
child, Lily, who is here with me today, is a 15-year-old
sophomore honors student at our local public high school. She
acts, sings, dances, and draws beautifully. She loves to hang
out with her friends, ride her bike with her dad, spend time
with her grandparents and binge watch shows with me, you know,
kids' stuff. Lily also happens to be a female of trans
experience. She is proud to be trans, and we are proud of her.
Being able to be visible for others and seeing herself in the
books she reads is so very important. I want to be clear. If
there is one soundbite to arise from my appearance here today,
let it be this one: no book made my child become transgender
any more than a book could have turned her eyes from brown two
blue.
Let me tell you a little bit about Lily's journey. Lily
will tell you that as soon as she could recognize herself in
the mirror, the person looking back at her was not the person
she was. The male presenting person reflecting back at her did
not align correctly with her being. As Lily was growing up
during her younger years, she presented in what would be
considered a more feminine way. As someone that had never known
a transgender person, while this out-of-gender norm behavior
made my spouse and I question what was going on with Lily, we
did not discourage her from enjoying the thing she loved.
In early elementary school, Lily lacked the words, insight,
and confidence to describe what she was feeling. As school
activities began to separate boys from girls, this only
frustrated her. In fourth grade, when boys and girls were
separated to learn about what was going on in their bodies
during puberty, Lily began to panic. After sharing her feelings
with my older two daughters, she came to my spouse and me. We
did not have the knowledge of everything LGBTQ, especially
trans related, but what we did know is that we loved our child
and that we would support her no matter what, and this is when
our learning journey began.
We shared with Lily's fifth grade teacher what Lily was
going through, and her teacher brought to our attention Alex
Gino's book, ``George'', now ``Melissa'', an award-winning
children's novel about a trans fourth grader and said that Lily
had the option to read it. We appreciated the visibility that
this provided to Lily as well as the support not only by the
teacher, but by the school for having age-appropriate books
accessible on the shelves. Two years later, in seventh grade,
her social studies teacher made it easy for kids like Lily and
students who wanted to learn about their LGBTQ classmates to
check out age-appropriate books, LGBTQ literature from his
classroom shelves. These books helped Lily's friends better-
understand what she and others were going through. Still middle
school was a trial, and high school hasn't been easy either.
Three teens, two from her school, are accused and charged with
threatening and targeting Lily simply because she is
transgender.
It's no wonder LGBTQ youth have a higher rate of depression
and suicide than their cisgender straight counterparts. Having
age-appropriate LGBTQ books on our K through 12 library shelves
contributes to an affirming and safe environment in our public
schools. Banning and censoring books, especially LGBTQ books in
schools, promotes divisiveness, harm, and hate instead of
kindness, education and awareness. Schools are places of
learning, and when you take away access to books, it's a
discriminatory practice. Banning and censoring books benefits
absolutely nobody. It's a practice which limits freedoms of
speech and expression and facilitates exclusionary practices.
I have never lobbied on Capitol Hill, run for political
office, and I do not sit on a school board. I do not plan to
either. I'm a parent who knows firsthand how having access to
LGBTQ books in our K through 12 schools played a positive role
in my daughter's life. And we, all of us, need to ensure that
all of our children continue to have access to diverse books in
their school libraries.
Thank you so much.
Mr. Raskin. And thank you very much, and thanks for joining
us in the most political place on earth.
Ms. Freeman. That's right.
Mr. Raskin. And, Dr. Pidluzny, you are now recognized for
your five minutes of testimony.
STATEMENT OF JONATHAN PIDLUZNY, VICE PRESIDENT OF ACADEMIC
AFFAIRS, AMERICAN COUNCIL OF TRUSTEES AND ALUMNI
Mr. Pidluzny. It's an honor to address the Subcommittee on
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Thank you, Chairman Raskin,
Ranking Member Mace, and members of the subcommittee.
For the last 26 years, the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni has been working to protect academic freedom and free
expression in American higher education. We are grateful for
this opportunity to address these critical issues. The data
show conclusively, I think, that the problem of academic
censorship has reached crisis levels on our college campuses.
Instances of speaker disinvitations on the basis of viewpoint,
intimidating shutdowns, and academic cancellations are a
routine feature of campus life today, with documented examples
running well into the hundreds.
Mountains of survey research data demonstrate that the
current campus climate chills free and open discourse. To take
one of many examples, a forthcoming active survey of students
at 12 elite liberal arts colleges found that 59 percent report
that they are somewhat or very uncomfortable publicly
disagreeing with a professor, only 32 percent said that their
administration makes it very or extremely clear that free
speech is protected, 54 percent said that they self-censor
themselves at least occasionally, and 41 percent say that it is
always or sometimes acceptable to shut down a speaker.
Students' self-censorship appears to be linked to low
levels of ideological diversity among professors. Among
students who reported self-censoring very often, 67 percent
said that increasing the faculty viewpoint diversity would
improve the climate for campus expression. Studies of viewpoint
diversity in the professoriate have found severe imbalances by
political affiliation with registered Democrat to Republican
ratios reaching as high as 60 to 1 on some campuses. Available
evidence suggests that these disparities are not accidental.
Fifty-five percent of academic philosophers and 38 percent of
social psychologists admit to at least some level of
willingness to discriminate against conservatives in the
faculty hiring process.
Hundreds of universities have gone so far as to build bias
response teams to investigate student and faculty speech.
Students have used them to report on others for watching Ben
Shapiro for ableist comments like, ``on the other hand.''
They've reported faculty for giving a wrong look, and young
Republicans for every conceivable instance of wrong think, all
of this in the hope of setting off a burdensome investigation
that will at least be reputation-damaging even where the speech
is protected. Universities that encourage students to inform on
their peers and professors create an anti-intellectual dynamic
reminiscent of a Soviet police state where nobody knows what it
is safe to say or who it is safe to talk to. Two appeals courts
have ruled that bias response teams are exerting an
unconstitutional chilling effect and yet hundreds remain in
operation.
Since this hearing is also concerned with K-12, I'd like to
make three points specific to it. First, K-12 schools are
funded by taxpayers because their mission is to advance the
public interest. Curricula standards should, therefore, balance
the concerns of families, policymakers, school board officials,
and business leaders, while leveraging the expertise of
educators. Not long ago, school districts around the country
were removing ``To Kill a Mockingbird'' and ``Huck Finn'' from
reading lists because of the N-word which features prominently.
That doesn't mean Mark Twain and Harper Lee had their books
banned. It means communities made a judgment about curricula
value, however much many may disagree with it.
Second, conversations about public school curriculum should
be occurring at the state and local levels. The framers
understood that educating children is a paramount parental
responsibility. It can be delegated to others, but it is
precisely the kind of function that should be kept close to the
people. In a Federal democracy, local communities will settle
on different policies and teach different books. That is the
essence of representative government.
Third, it is the responsibility of public school systems to
teach materials that are age-appropriate. The American Library
Association's list of the top 10 most challenged books helps us
to understand what the real issue that brings us here is today.
The first and second entries on the list, ``Gender Queer'' and
``Lawn Boy'', are so graphic that parents reading them at
school board meetings have repeatedly been stopped because the
content is so obscene. When school board members judge content
too hot for adults to handle, it isn't censorship to remove
them from school libraries. It's their responsibility.
If public school systems were systematically targeting the
writings of, say, civil rights leaders, in response to parental
or political pressure, I would not be here testifying today. As
Justice Harry Blackmun has written, school officials may not
remove books for the purpose of restricting access to the
political ideas or social perspectives discussed in them. That
is not what is happening in the majority of these cases. These
books are being challenged generally because they contain age-
inappropriate sexual content that is neither necessary to
create an inclusive learning environment and are uniquely well-
suited to promote diversity of thought.
In conclusion, the most serious threats to free speech in
an academic context are occurring in higher education today,
not K-12. On our campuses, self-censorship is endemic,
viewpoint discrimination is the norm, and students and faculty
are routinely targeted by school-sponsored bias response teams
for the political content of their speech.
Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you very much for your thoughtful
testimony.
And, Ms. Berg, you are now recognized for your five
minutes.
STATEMENT OF JESSICA BERG, TEACHER, LOUDOUN COUNTY, VIRGINIA
Ms. Berg. Thank you, Chairman Raskin, Ranking Member Mace,
and the subcommittee, for inviting me here today to speak on
this very important issue. My name is Jessica Berg. I am a high
school English and women and gender studies teacher in Loudoun
County, Virginia, where I live with my husband and my two
extraordinary daughters. Teaching is not a profession I planned
on, but there is not a day that goes by that I'm not thankful
for whatever fates led me into the classroom because it has
been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
However, this past December, along with teachers across the
Nation, I was on the precipice of leaving the profession
because of what political groups and politicians have done to
education. The crusade against critical thinking has instilled
fear in teachers, fear of repercussions for speaking up, fear
of being fired for doing what we know to be right, fear of
receiving actual death threats from members in our own
community. And the continued challenge to our professionalism,
our expertise, our compassion, and empathy for all of our
students has cracked the will of underpaid and overworked
teachers.
Today, I hope to give a very brief insight as to what we
educators and English teachers aim to achieve in the classroom.
But more than that, I wanted to share some words for my
students because theirs is the voice that is often forgotten in
these discussions.
The one thing I save year to year is the letters my
students write, and rereading them, I was reminded that the
biggest thing students take away from their time in English is
the safe space created within the classroom walls and the books
that play a pivotal role in their lives, leading them to
lessons that extend beyond the classroom walls. But these are
the books you are banning. Books offer a mirror to readers so
they can see themselves reflected in some way, be it their
gender, their race, their culture, their identity or their
experience, and it make them feel less alone in the world. When
they see themselves reflected, students do not feel erased, and
they maintain their self-efficacy, the belief that their voice
matters. And when I think about the books frequently being
challenged, the only connection I see between them is that they
are the books that give voice to the most marginalized in our
society.
A few years ago, I taught a brilliant young woman who
almost missed her chance to attend college because she didn't
yet understand the power of her voice. In a letter she wrote,
``I will miss you so much when I go off to college, but I will
always remember you. You have taught me so many lessons inside
and outside the classroom. You have changed my life because you
showed me during a difficult time that my voice matters, and I
should stand up for what I believe in.'' But the political
groups and politicians out there banning books don't want that.
They don't want everyone to feel like they have a voice because
the status quo is predicated on silence. And not only is
banning these stories and censoring history, preventing
students from being able to find their voice, but it is
negatively impacting my ability as an educator to connect with
my students in a meaningful way.
The entrance into these life lessons that leave a lasting
impact on students is stories. As one student wrote, ``Ms. Berg
taught me a life lesson through her evident passion for the
worlds of novels. She lets us explore the world outside the
bubble that we rarely escape. This lesson is one I will never
forget.'' That is the power of books. They offer students a
window to see the world beyond themselves in the hopes that
they understand that what divides us as humans is infinitesimal
in the face of what unites us, but these are the books you're
banning. And it is a fallacy when political groups ban these
books under the guise of parental rights.
I am a parent. We have rights in our student's education,
but that parent-teacher team has been broken by the
divisiveness of the moment. The loud, angry subset of political
parents no longer communicate directly with teachers, and
instead, they go straight to the school board and yell. If you
do not want your child to read a book, that is absolutely fine.
But it does not give you the right to make that decision for
every other student in the county or across the Nation who
might find a lifeline in the very book you banned.
I understand wanting to protect kids. I want to protect my
two daughters fiercely and for as long as I can. But I also
want to prepare them for the real world so when I am not there
to be their shield, I want to know that I have armed them with
the sword of every story and the impenetrable power of
knowledge that just might give them the ability to survive. And
through my work as an educator, I hope to make the world my
daughters will head into a little bit better, one story and one
student at a time.
And it was a former student who defined what we aim to do
as educators so eloquently when she said, ``Ms. Berg, you are
the best and most inspirational teacher I've ever had. You
taught me more than grammar and writing skills. You opened my
mind and prepared me to seek understanding from a wide variety
of perspectives. I am better-equipped to process life and its
complexities because of the time I spent in your class, and I
can't thank you enough for that.''
Maybe if we all were prepared to seek understanding from a
wide variety of perspectives, we, too, would be better-equipped
to process life and all of its gorgeous complexities. Thank you
for your time.
Mr. Raskin. Well, that was just outstanding, and even with
36 seconds left over, so well done, Ms. Berg, a model to
witnesses throughout Capitol Hill.
Now I'm going to recognize myself for five minutes of
questions.
Oh, I'm sorry, Ms. Bridges. You've been so patient with us.
We've got the great Ruby Bridges with us, and you are now
recognized for your five minutes. Thank you.
STATEMENT OF RUBY BRIDGES, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST, AUTHOR
Ms. Bridges. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and Mrs. Mace,
Members of Congress, and the subcommittee. Thank you for having
me. I am indeed honored for this opportunity to speak on this
very important subject.
When I first heard about possible book bans, including the
targeting of my books, my initial thought was to avoid
responding altogether as I thought it didn't deserve more
attention, and the efforts would naturally subside. However, as
these bans have somehow gained even more momentum, I feel it is
now important to speak up. I cannot understand why are we
banning books, I thought. My books are written to bring people
together. Why would they be banned? But the real question is,
why are we banning any books at all? Surely, we are better than
this. We are the United States of America with freedom of
speech.
In every book I've written, I have purposely highlighted
and lifted up those human beings as Americans who were seeking
the best version of our country, like Supreme Court Justice
Thurgood Marshall, who helped to win the landmark case that set
me on this journey. As a six-year-old walking through the doors
of this all-white elementary school in 1960, I wanted my
readers to know I did not walk alone. I was protected by
dedicated Federal marshals, commissioned by a sitting President
of the United States. I was nurtured and taught by a
compassionate teacher, mentored by a world-renowned child
psychologist, all of whom were white, by the way, and mentioned
in these very same books that some wish to ban. They became a
part of my support system along with a supportive community, my
village, my courageous family, and friends. So when I share my
experiences, my story in these books, I share our shared
history, good, bad, and ugly.
As a six-year-old child, I had no idea I was taking a
historic walk. My parents were sharecroppers raised in rural
Mississippi, not activists. For them, education was a luxury
they could not afford. They only knew that they wanted better
for their own children: a mother that felt education would
provide that better life. A father, who was a decorated Korean
War vet, was skeptical, rightfully so, remembering his own
experiences in a segregated branch of the military. He said he
was always seen and treated as just another colored soldier,
war hero or not.
Needless to say, this historic walk put them at odds with
one another, even though the same walk helped to change the
face of education in this country, and I became the poster
child for the civil rights movement. My father never lived to
see the change that this walk helped to promote. As a six-year-
old, I had so many questions. What happened? How did it happen
to me? Why that school? Sadly, no one, including my parents,
could provide answers or they didn't want to. History happened,
and it was over.
Being six with limited capacity, I often wondered if it was
all just a dream. How was I to ever understand my own place in
history? This was a part of my identity. And yet, no one around
me was equipped to discuss it, or maybe they just didn't want
to. They didn't want to share it with me. I was always six.
Let's face it, there was no Black History Month then, and the
textbooks we use were obsolete then, and they are still
obsolete today.
I learned the full impact of my own story at the age of 17
when a reporter showed up on my doorstep with the Norman
Rockwell painting which depicted my walk. Until that moment, I
thought my experience in 1960 was contained to my own
neighborhood, in my own community, on my own street. I
questioned if it really even mattered at all. But finally,
seeing this painting, now I understood my role in history, and
it didn't come from the textbooks used to teach me that very
same history, unfortunately. The truth is that rarely do
children of color or immigrants see themselves in these
textbooks we are forced to use. I write because I want them to
understand the contributions their ancestors have made to our
great country, whether that contribution was made as slaves or
volunteers. My books are written to inspire a new generation to
contribute to building this great country for indeed there is
much work to be done.
So I say if we are going to have a conversation about
banning books, then I say that conversation is long overdue.
Let's have it, but it must include all books. If we are to ban
books from being too truthful, then surely we must ban those
books that distort or omit the truth. I do empathize with
parents who are faced with answering questions that they do not
feel equipped to answer. Remember, my parents once stood in
those very same shoes.
Even when my own grandson at seven came to me with a book
about the United States presidents, their names and their
faces, asking me, ``Mommy, do you have to be white to be
President?'' As a grandparent, that truth was hard for me to
look at. I had to be creative in my response while also being
truthful because my grandson needed to feel good about the
person he sees in the mirror as well. My response was, no, of
course not. You don't have to be white to be President. They
are waiting on you. You can be the first Black president of the
United States. That held him at bay for a while.
So you see, I encourage parents and teachers to be
creative, without lying of course, because our children deserve
the truth. The truth is pure. The truth is good. And we all
know the saying the truth shall set us free. As I stated in my
2014 TED Talks, teachers should be given the flexibility to
teach. We must untie the hands of these very qualified
educators. Books celebrate----
Mr. Raskin. Ms. Bridges, forgive me, we are just over the
time, but I am going to come right to you with my questioning,
and I hope you will be able to complete the thought, if that is
all right.
Ms. Bridges. Yes.
Mr. Raskin. So, we will now begin member questioning, and I
will go right to you to finish that point and then I want to
ask you another question. So please be as brief as you can be.
Ms. Bridges. Books celebrate our shared history and they
should not be banned. The integrity of books and history and
stories within their pages must be embraced and preserved by
all, for all. History is sacred and should not be changed and
altered in any way.
In closing, I would like to say the purpose of my books is
to extend and expand education to children, all children, no
matter their color of the skin. I write to remind children that
we should embrace both our truth and our progress and I write
to show them that we are truly better together than apart. In
order for us to be the United States of America, we have to
live up to our name. We, the people, must be united. Our
babies, all of them, need to see themselves in our books,
particularly in school. Representation doesn't just matter,
it's vital, especially in the pages of the books that we teach
from. When children read about President Dwight Eisenhower,
they should also be able to read about the little six-year-old
girl who made a difference during his presidency. That little
girl was me, Ruby Bridges, and I am proud of my story as are
thousands and thousands of kids, not just in this country, but
around the world.
Mr. Raskin. Well, thank you so much. I am holding up right
now the famous Norman Rockwell painting, the rendition of it
that is in your book, which is so wonderful and is indeed
iconic.
Your book has been objected by the people who want to
censor your book because they say it may make white children
feel uncomfortable, which struck me as just bizarre given that
you have a beautiful tribute to the teacher you love the most,
I take it, Mrs. Henry, with her picture and she was white. You
have a picture of you with a bunch of kids who are white
friends, a picture of John Steinbeck who wrote a beautiful
essay about you, a tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt and so on. But
I guess they were rubbed the wrong way by this. It must be the
most clean-cut looking photo I have ever seen of a racist
protester, ``We won't go to school with Negroes.'' And I
imagine they had a search far and wide to find the use of that
N-word as opposed to the other one.
But what is your reaction to those people who say your book
doesn't belong in school libraries or doesn't belong in a
curriculum about the civil rights period because it might make
some white kids feel uncomfortable? Do you think it will make
white kids feel uncomfortable and what is your response to
that?
Ms. Bridges. My response to that is that I have thousands
and thousands of kids that write to me constantly, who lift up
my books and talk about how they have learned so much from my
own story. I believe that, yes, there are some parents who
might find the truth very hard to look at. As I mentioned in my
talk, I understand that, but we cannot hide the truth from our
kids. It is history, and history is sacred and we shouldn't
change or alter it in anyway.
Mr. Raskin. Well, thank you for writing this beautiful
book, ``Ruby Bridges Goes to School'', and thank you for
defending everybody's academic and intellectual freedom.
I want to come next to Ms. Hull and Ms. Berg. Ms. Hull, you
are a librarian. Ms. Berg, you are a teacher. And first I would
wonder if you can concretely tell us what has been your
experience of this new wave of attempts to ban books, censor
books, challenge books, and so on. How has it affected you in
your work? Ms. Hull, you can start.
Ms. Hull. Thank you. I think it all stems from a
misunderstanding of what the purpose of libraries are and what
librarians can do, and how books end up on shelves. If those
who are upset could understand the collection policy,
development, and all the pieces that go into curating those
collections. I think a lot of the misunderstandings could be
avoided.
Mr. Raskin. Great, and Ms. Berg.
Ms. Berg. Yes. And so to my experience as a classroom
teacher, it has not really changed anything because these books
that are being banned are choice. They are not being forced on
any student. They are books in the library. The curriculum is
very different from the books that exist in the library. So the
thing is, you can decide for your own child not to have them
read the book. You don't get to make that choice for every
other child in my school, in my school district, or in the
Nation. And, in fact, we all had a commonality in ``The Great
Gatsby'', which is a book on the curriculum we are all
currently reading. Even Lilly is, I think, missing a quiz on it
today. So, there are two very different sets of books when you
are talking about a classroom curriculum and a library for
choice.
Mr. Raskin. Very nice. My time is up, but, Lilly, I am
happy to write you a note if you need one. That might help, I
am not sure.
I am going to come now to Mr. Donalds for his five minutes
of questioning.
Mr. Donalds. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Witnesses, thanks for
being here. I appreciate it.
By way of background. I served in Florida's legislature. I
was a chair of two education subcommittees. I wrote legislation
about providing people who live within a county the ability to
review all material, whether it is classroom or library
material, and that all taxpayers, whether they are parents or
reside in a county, should have an ability to review that
material and examine it because they are the ones that pay for
it. Ms. Berg, I know you are Virginia. Ms. Hull, I know you are
Pennsylvania. I will describe for you the procurement process
in Florida.
Any material, whether it is in the library or in the
classroom, is actually approved by the State Board of
Education. The State Board of Education goes through their
material procurement. They give a list of what they view as
being responsible material for the school system. That list
then goes down to the school districts. School district
administrators review the list. They provide a list of what
they feel should be acquired. The school board then votes on
the recommendations from the administrators in order to provide
the dollars to actually purchase those materials. And that is
what actually ends up in the classroom or in the library. There
might be a slight variation of that with the library, but, by
and large, the administrators bring a list of materials to be
acquired, school boards vote on them, and that is how they show
up. Is that true?
Ms. Berg. Yes, to my knowledge.
Ms. Hull. It is a little different in Pennsylvania. There
is a lot more local control.
Mr. Donalds. OK. Fair enough. That is fair. Well, can we at
least agree for the premise of what we are discussing that
school boards are the ones that authorize purchases?
Ms. Hull. Yes.
Mr. Donalds. Does the school board have the legal authority
and the taxing authority to decide what goes in and out of
libraries and classrooms?
Ms. Hull. It is my understanding that school board policy
places the superintendent in a position to make those and
delegate those decisions.
Mr. Donalds. Does the elected school board have a
responsibility to decide on the funding necessary to either
acquire material or keep material in classrooms and/or
libraries? ``yes'' or ``no.''
Ms. Berg. I think in terms of Loudoun County, we also have
a board of supervisors, which approves our budget and, again,
like Ms. Hull said, it is our superintendent who has decisions
in both staffing and allocation of resources.
Mr. Donalds. So when the material is allowed to come in or
there is a decision to remove material, is it just done at the
behest of, A, group or is there actually a vote of some body,
whether it is the school board, the board of supervisors, or
even the decision of the superintendent? Is it that person's
decision or that body's decision to remove said material?
Ms. Hull. Not always. Most libraries have weeding processes
with the removal of books in a general consensus, especially in
nonfiction literature, where we need to keep updated
information accurate. And that is a process that is trusted to
the experts, the librarians, to be able to do that process
without any voting.
Mr. Donalds. Well, I would argue, Ms. Hull, that at the end
of the day, you might decide what is going to sit in a library,
but the funding comes from the taxing authority. And if they
choose not to fund that purchase, they choose to remove that
purchase, the responsibility falls with them. So, if the body
politic, the parents that live in a community decide that they
find material objectionable and they go to their elected
representatives who have authority over the school district and
they vote to remove material, wouldn't you say that is the
appropriate way of representative democracy is supposed to
work?
Here is a better question. Should parents have the ability
to have their voices heard about material that they think
should be in front of their children, whether it is mandatory
or whether it is optional? Do you think parents should have
that ability to voice their opinions?
Ms. Berg. Yes, absolutely. As I said in my statement, and
they do have that right. The books that are being banned or a
majority of the books from library, which are complete choice,
they are not the books in our curriculum are required reading.
You absolutely have a say in what your child should be able to
read, but they are no longer coming to us, the professionals,
the expert----
Mr. Donalds. Ms. Berg, I have got one question.
Ms. Berg. Wait. I would like to finish my answer.
Mr. Donalds. I know but----
Mr. Raskin. The gentleman has the time.
Mr. Donalds. I have got 45 seconds. I got to focus this
thing.
Ms. Berg. Parents have a say. They don't have a say for
every other parent.
Mr. Raskin. Ms. Berg, you will get a chance.
Mr. Donalds. I would not say that parents have the right to
say for other parents. What I am saying is do parents or a
large part of the community at large have an ability to lobby
or engage with their elected officials on the local level to
decide what's in the room? I would say the answer to that is
yes.
Ms. Freeman, quick question for you. I understand the
situation that you laid out with your child. I have three sons.
I could completely understand what you and your spouse are
having to deal with, go through, explain. Support your child,
completely understand that. If the material was not in your
child's library, would you be able to still acquire that
material through Amazon, through Barnes & Noble's, or anywhere
else?
Ms. Freeman. Personally me, yes, but not every parent has
that opportunity to do that or every child feels safe enough
and has been----
Mr. Donalds. And I think this is important.
Mr. Raskin. The gentleman's time is expired, but you can
finish.
Mr. Donalds. I mean, Ms. Freeman, I appreciate your answer.
The point I am really trying to make is, is that we have many
parents who have very different objectives and they all should
be respected in this discussion. So to make the argument that
books are being banned when they are going through the legal
course of action to talk to their representatives, I think is
very hyperbolic and is not actually correct about the process
that is being used to decide what materials are in or out of
the classroom.
With that I yield back. Thank you for the leeway, Mr.
Chairman.
Mr. Raskin. Yes, you bet. Mr. Donalds, I would also just
ask you to read page 59 in my book, We the Students about Board
of Education v. PICO, which dealt with just precisely the
process you are talking about, but where the Supreme Court
still said you can't strip books from public school libraries
because someone disagrees with the viewpoint or the content
there. But check it out.
All right. Let's see now. Ms. Wasserman Schultz, you are
recognized for five minutes.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And
shifting away from process for a moment, I am going to read
some excerpts from the book, which is a Pulitzer Prize-winning
book called ``Maus'' where some characters speak in broken
English about anti-Semitism in this graphic novel account of
the Holocaust. And so the excerpts go as follows: ``The mother
is always told so, be careful. A Jew will catch you to bag and
eat you. So they talked to their children. It was very hard
there for the Jews, terrible: synagogues burned, Jews beaten
with no reason, whole towns pushing out all Jews,'' each story
worse than the other.
Look, we know that bigotry is learned, but when children
access worlds like this outside their own, we know it can also
be unlearned. When a Tennessee School District pulled ``Maus''
from its eighth grade curriculum, it mirrored a national wave
to ban so-called objectionable material from schools. White
nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racism are on the rise, but
purging books which candidly confront the genocide of 6 million
Jews will only breed more ignorance fueled hate. ``Maus'''
author Art Spiegelman said: It's as if the Tennessee School
Board wants to ``Teach a nicer Holocaust.''
Ms. Hull, books were removed from your library shelves
overnight. My question is, targeting books like ``Maus'' sends
what signal to students, in your opinion?
Ms. Hull. It is my opinion that when books are removed,
especially without conversation, without going through a
process that includes all voices, out of concern to parents
that of students and experts that students are erased, they
feel that their identities are not as valued in the school and
outside the school walls. It is also my opinion that when books
like ``Maus'', when books like ``All Are Welcome'' are removed,
that not only our community, but the teachers, the school
community itself doesn't value students for who they are or
what they might feel.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you. These book bans coincide
with spikes in anti LGBTQ+ attitudes and legislation where
schools and libraries are the battlefield. Ms. Freeman, as a
mother, what message does it send to your daughter and other
LGBTQ+ students when books reflecting their identities and
experiences are pulled from their library shelves?
Ms. Freeman. It is sending a message that they are not
welcome and they are not seen. And it is also encouraging this
behavior of, you know, bullying, sending a message that it is
OK to treat LGBTQ individuals in a negative way. That is the
kind of message it is sending that they are not welcome in
schools. Thank you.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. Thank you. Thank you. Censoring
LGBTQ+ books in class discussions tells these students that
their identities are shameful or to be feared. And as a mother
of three children myself who attended Florida public schools, I
am frightened by the suppressive forces that are taking hold
there. It is being challenged, but Florida's Don't Say Gay law
would, ``prohibit any discussion about sexual orientation or
gender identity in certain grade levels.'' So if you think the
book bans and pulling from curriculum is bad now, just wait
till this is fully implemented. God forbid. That is a law you
expect to find in Putin's Russia, not America.
And last, Ms. Berg, if Virginia were to pass such a law,
would that change your day-to-day life as a teacher?
Ms. Berg. Yes. It changed my life as a teacher because it
changes the lives of my students. And already I have seen with
the Don't Say Gay Bill in Florida, it is having repercussions
on the mental health of LGBTQIA students across the country
because they see what's happening. They see the writing on the
wall. And I had a student say to me, ``I would rather kill
myself than not be allowed to be who I am.'' That is absolutely
affecting me as a teacher because I carry that with me.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz. And just to wrap up, and I am going
to hold ``Maus'' up again, another excerpt from this book.
``People haven't changed. Maybe they need a newer, bigger
Holocaust.'' We have an obligation to ensure this passage from
``Maus'' remains just that, a line from a book. But if we
censor our unpleasant history and deny who we really are, that
line of fiction may someday be a frightening new reality. And I
want to just close with thanking Ms. Bridges for her
perseverance for staying in the fight, for making sure that she
gave meaning. Even though she didn't understand it when she was
six years old, that she gave full meaning to what her parents
did for her and for all school children, all across this
country.
Thank you so much. I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. The gentlelady yields back. Thank you for your
questioning, Ms. Wasserman Schultz.
Now Mr. Biggs is recognized for his five minutes of
questioning.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am going to approach
the portion of our titled hearing that talks about academic
censorship. And so with that, I would ask that we watch a
videotape that my staff has prepared.
Mr. Raskin. Without objection.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you.
[Video shown.]
Mr. Biggs. Thank you, Mr. Chairman to let us show that
video.
Mr. Raskin. By all means.
Mr. Biggs. One of the things that I have seen repeatedly,
and I will be submitting some stuff for the record. I will just
save it till after I question some witnesses. A CBP, Customs
and Border Patrol, agent showed up at an invited event on the
University of Arizona campus in March 2019. He was attacked,
and this presentation was disrupted and the type of speech used
against him was outrageous, calling him ``murder patrol,''
``KKK,'' ``anti-campus,'' that type of thing. Kyrsten Sinema,
actually senior senator from Arizona, who is also an adjunct
professor at ASU, recently, last October as a matter of fact,
was teaching her class. She went to the restroom. She was
followed into the restroom, into the stall, and was raided by
students who were upset by a vote she had taken in her role as
senator. Recently, UVA, the Cavalier Daily put out a piece
saying former Vice President Mike Pence, it would be dangerous
for him to come and just speak on campus. Concerned Faculty
published a counterpoint to that, which is included in my
documents that I will be submitting. In 2021, 111 scholars were
targeted because of not even political ideology, just
expressing thoughts contrary or heterodox to the entire left
wing campus at these universities.
I am almost at time already. I just have to say I was 40
with six kids. I had worked at the United Nations, and I went
back to get a graduate degree at a local university. And even I
felt cowed actually expressing my true opinion because you
understand one thing when you are in graduate school: the
professor has your future in their hands. And if you don't
acquiesce to what they are saying or at least solve their point
of view sufficiently, you don't get welcomed into the club.
So I will go to Mr. Pidluzny. The First Amendment would
apply to state institutions like public colleges and
universities. Is that right? And you will need the mic on. Can
you explain the importance of free speech in our society,
particularly on college campuses and the dangers to civil
society where we stifle that free speech?
Mr. Pidluzny. Absolutely. As Chairman Raskin pointed out,
we need to learn to tolerate the speech that we abhor. That is
the only way to rebuild a civil discourse. And the only way for
that to occur is for us to feel like we can talk to people who
disagree with us fervently to learn that they are people of
goodwill who often want the same good things for society, but
just have different ways of getting there.
Mr. Biggs. And can you provide some examples where
university administrators at public institutions have sought to
constrain speech in a way that runs afoul of the First
Amendment's protection for freedom of speech?
Mr. Pidluzny. I mean, absolutely. They do it in dozens and
dozens of ways. One example is overbroad speech policies where
basically offensive speech is forbidden. If offensive speech is
forbidden, there are a lot of things you cannot talk about,
basically anything that is controversial in our sort of social
lives. And so they use bias response teams to then enforce
these, right, which allows any member of the campus community
to file a complaint. The process to investigate the complaint
is then deliberately burdensome, right? So, I think sometimes
police officers are actually on these committees as well, which
are called to have a discussion with the dean. Often it goes
public. They publicize it. There may be social media involved
for other students who are bystanders and the goal is to
destroy the reputation of the conservative student.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you. I know my time is expired. May I give
a----
Mr. Raskin. Well, the problem is we are about, they are
calling votes in just a few minutes. I want to try to get at
least another person in.
Mr. Biggs. OK.
Mr. Raskin. We are going to do a second round. So I may----
Mr. Biggs. OK. I may not be here for a second round. Are
you content with me just giving you a stack of these documents
and submitting it for the record?
Mr. Raskin. Oh, sure. By all means. By unanimous consent.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. No objection.
Mr. Raskin. Mr. Raskin. No objection. And now I am going to
come to Ms. Tlaib for her five minutes of questioning.
Ms. Tlaib. Thank you so much, Mr. Raskin. Hi, Lilly. How
are you? You know, I am a mother of two, raising, you know, two
Muslim boys in our country. And it has been very difficult.
But, you know, Ms. Bridges, I want to thank you so much because
what you said really resonated with me. I know I get emotional
every time I think of my two boys. You know, our children, they
just simply want to exist as they are. They want to be loved.
They want to feel human. You know, there is so much
dehumanization happening just even at a young age, and they may
want to feel like they belong.
And it is so hard because I think my colleague, Wasserman
Schultz, was right, and there are some things that we just have
to understand that even some of this stuff that we just don't
want to see, right, that it also has to be available so that we
know just the impact and the detriment that it can have on our
society. You know, I can't imagine, I mean, 850 books,
Chairman, have been challenged in Texas. Sixty-two percent of
them address LGBTQ+ issues. Eight percent address race and
racism. When we have an issue in our country, anti-Blackness
exists in our country, we should be constantly right now
working and addressing it because it is a disease that kills,
if by suicide or by violence, and so much more.
You know, Ms. Bridges, something that you testified that
when you were in school, you didn't see any of those stories,
the images. I want to tell you, you know, my son saw this
image. He had heard me talking about it. There was this image
in USA Today depicting Muslims as like Nazis. It was awful. It
was like a skeleton image. And it said ``Allahu Akbar,'' which
means ``God is great,'' on the form. And, you know, I am
talking to his dad and I am just like, oh my God, if people see
this, they are going to want to kill us, right?
My son walks in, Ms. Bridges, and you know what he says? He
goes, ``Mamma, don't worry.'' He was 9. He goes, ``Don't worry.
If somebody asks if I am Muslim, I will lie and tell them I am
not.' Ms. Freeman that devastated me that my child didn't feel
like he could exist because he's hearing me talk about these
things. But also I want him to be able to pick up a book and
see somebody of his faith or somebody that had that same lived
experiences of being Muslim in America or being a child of a
Palestinian father or a mother who grew up, you know, in
Detroit in the most beautiful, Blackest city in the country.
So, this is a really, really hard hearing. I mean, I love
you Raskin, but you always have the most difficult hearings,
Chairman. And I just, you know, I have so many questions, but I
just hope my colleagues do understand the importance and the
human impact. You know, you have a huge role, Ms. Hull. You
know, I grew up with the Bookmobile, if you remember the
Bookmobile, and I didn't speak English when I started school,
and I was able to get up there and get the book that I needed.
And I loved it because, of course, it was a Latina that was
there that helped me understand, oh wow, you know, brown girls
are in books, you know. And it was also the teacher that I was
really shy, if you can imagine me being shy, Ms. Berg. But my
first debate hearing, I got up and choked, but it was an
amazing teacher, Mrs. Marshall, who showed me that I had a
voice.
This is so difficult because it is not just about the
books, right? It is about being human in our country and stop
politicizing it. We need to see ourselves in our country. And
so I just look forward to the day when our children can read
the history, right, in a class about the sad, hateful bigots,
who tried to drag America backward, and I hope it inspires them
to also be fighters like Lilly and like the witnesses here
today, who stopped them dead in their tracks. I am with you.
I just want you all to know, I really appreciate your
courage being here. I could ask you all kinds of questions, but
I feel like I am speaking to the choir. But I am happy that we
are doing this because I think bringing it to the halls of
Congress makes it more real and at least they can see some of
us do see them and we do see them as human beings.
Thank you, and I yield.
Mr. Raskin. Well, thank you for that beautiful, moving
statement, Ms. Tlaib. What an honor it is to get to serve with
her.
I am going to ask everybody's indulgence and patience one
last time. We have to go vote. Nobody has been more patient
than the great ranking member of this committee, Nancy Mace.
She is going to come back and as soon as we get back. She is
going to get to do the questioning. But we have a lot more
questions for you. We have to get more to say, so please hang
tough, everybody. And, Ms. Tlaib, we can give you a ride, if
you want one. Thanks.
[Recess.]
Mr. Raskin. Back to order. We resume with questioning from
our distinguished ranking member, Ms. Mace of South Carolina.
Ms. Mace.
[Presiding.] Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for
your patience today.
Ms. Ruby Bridges great to have you, someone who is such a
historical figure in the civil rights movement here today. We
want to thank you for your time and for everyone who's here
today. I know it took probably most of the time out of your
day, and out of work and school, and everything. And I
appreciate Mr. Chairman.
I do have a unanimous consent that I want to enter into the
record when this is over. And if we are waving books around,
here is mine, ``In the Company of Men: A Woman at the
Citadel'', that has not been banned yet, as far as I know, and
probably can get it used for $1 on eBay.
Ms. Mace. But nonetheless, I had some questions I wanted to
followup on from my colleagues earlier today. And, Ms. Berg, I
want to thank you for your time today. I have a few ``yes'' or
``no'' questions that I want to ask the panelists this
afternoon. And the first one, Ms. Berg, does a state
superintendent of education have a role in defining curriculum
for students of that state? ``Yes'' or ``no.''
Ms. Berg. So, that is more than a ``yes'' or ``no''
question?
Ms. Mace. ``Yes'' or ``no.'' Does the State Superintendent
of Education have a role in determining the curriculum----
Ms. Berg. That is not how curriculum works.
Ms. Mace. What about the school board? So do school boards
have a say in shaping curriculum in state's education?
Ms. Berg. That is not how curriculum works.
Ms. Mace. What about parents? Do parents have a say in
curriculum in their kids' education? ``Yes'' or ``no.''
Ms. Berg. I wrote a curriculum. That is not how it works,
how the approval process works.
Ms. Mace. OK. So, we don't want them to say ``yes'' or
``no.'' So I believe that----
Ms. Berg. Well, because it is not a ``yes'' or ``no''
question.
Ms. Mace. OK. It is a ``yes'' or ``no'' in a democracy and
in determining the outcome of education. As a daughter of a
retired schoolteacher, as a parent, single working mom of two
kids, I do believe that myself and their dad have a say in the
outcome and the curriculum of my kids' education. Ms. Hull,
thank you for being here today. And thank you for bringing your
experience as a librarian with us this afternoon. So, are the
only libraries in the United States school libraries? Are those
the only public libraries in the U.S.?
Ms. Hull. No.
Ms. Mace. So, are there libraries that maybe
municipalities, states, or counties also create in different
states across the country?
Ms. Hull. I believe they are known as public libraries.
Ms. Mace. Right. So, is there anything that prevents a
student from going to a public library if they can't find a
book they want to read in their school library?
Ms. Hull. Transportation would be the main one.
Ms. Mace. OK. Are they allowed to go to a public library?
Are students allowed to go a public library or only school
libraries if they have transportation?
Ms. Hull. That would be a parent decision.
Ms. Mace. OK. Are there other places where students or
parents can get books, maybe a bookstore, like a physical
bookstore, like a Barnes & Noble's bookstore?
Ms. Hull. Perhaps, if they have the financial means.
Ms. Mace. Can parents buy books online, like from Amazon?
Ms. Hull. Perhaps, if they have the financial means.
Ms. Mace. Can you go to a place like Goodwill and buy a
book for less than $1 or maybe even get it for free?
Ms. Hull. Goodwill selection is certainly not as expansive
as those carry----
Ms. Mace. Or other bookstores? So, what you are saying is
there is more than one opportunity for a student or a parent to
get a book to their kid's liking. It is not just they are not
only limited to public schools. They can get a book from a lot
of different places, even in a coffee shop if they wanted to,
right?
Ms. Hull. Yes.
Ms. Mace. And you mentioned in your testimony earlier today
about students having safe spaces to read. Is a classroom a
safe space to read?
Ms. Hull. I believe that depends on the classroom.
Ms. Mace. OK. What about school libraries? Are school
libraries safe places to read?
Ms. Hull. I also think that depends on the individual
library space.
Ms. Mace. Are kids safe to read when they are at home?
Ms. Hull. Not always.
Ms. Mace. Are most kids, do you think, safe to read while
they are at home?
Ms. Hull. I do not have the numbers to represent that.
Ms. Mace. OK. And then I had some additional questions. If
a student wanted to get an LGBTQ book that wasn't in a school
library, could they get it at a public library? Would it be
available in a public library?
Ms. Hull. If they had the transportation and means to get
there.
Ms. Mace. But would a LGBTQ book be available in a public
library?
Ms. Hull. Of course.
Ms. Mace. OK. Or a book of any other nature. And I don't
have much time left. I want to get to Mr. Pidluzny. I apologize
if I am not saying your name right. And you talked extensively
about free speech, about free speech on college campuses, for
example. There are a lot of examples of censored speech. Even
people who are against censoring want to censor people because
they don't believe in their beliefs. Like, there are some
people out there that want to ban me from going on Fox News
because they don't agree with me. But we are going to not stop
doing that, and in even some cases, people are attacked for
their beliefs. I have had my house spray painted last summer by
someone who disagreed with my political beliefs. I have had my
car keyed for the same thing. And sometimes on college campuses
students don't have the freedom of speech. So, can you explain
to us why freedom of speech is so important in the United
States of America?
Mr. Pidluzny. Absolutely. Many reasons. I talked about the
importance of expressing different viewpoints to learn about
other people's goodwill. You have to come in contact with those
things already. Universities are also places where you have
political scientists, economists. If everybody can freely
explore issues, we are going to refine public policy, and the
student leaders in those classrooms are going to learn how to
solve today's problems a lot better. And if faculty are afraid
to talk about things like racial inequality and do so in a
truly wide ranging way, we are not going to come up with the
new solutions that the country needs.
Ms. Mace. Thank you. And before I run out of time, Chairman
Raskin, I did want to ask unanimous consent to enter the
following article into the record from my local hometown paper,
the Post and Courier, regarding a college that banned a
political club, a non-partisan political club. A lawsuit was
filed, and the college had to pay the students' legal fees in
$20,000. And this article details how the local college tried
to deny access to funding and meeting spaces on a college
campus for a political group that had no political affiliation.
And after that lawsuit, the college changed its policy
regarding how they treat students and freedom of speech.
Thank you, and I yield back.
Mr. Raskin.
[Presiding.] Without objection. Thank you for your
questioning.
We now recognize the distinguished gentlelady from the
District of Columbia, Ms. Norton, for her five minutes of
questioning.
Ms. Norton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
This is a very important hearing. Every challenge to a book
or conversation in a classroom drains valuable resources from
schools that are already stretched thin. Reviewing a challenged
book imposes hours of additional labor on teachers and
librarians and administrators. And then those hours could
perhaps be better spent working with students or creating
lessons or not trying to look at what books should be in the
library.
Ms. Hull, as a school librarian as well as a leader for
librarians in your area, you have played a large role in
reviewing books that were being challenged by parents and
school administrators. How much time does it take to review a
single challenged book and what extra administrative steps do
you have to undertake?
Ms. Hull. So, I will answer the first part of your question
about timing. Generally the challenge process happens between 2
and 3 weeks and the time out of the classroom, out of the
library, the instructional time is around 1 to 2 hours per day
during that 2 to 3 week period.
Ms. Norton. So that is time that is not spent on teaching
or with education.
Ms. Hull. Correct. And then did you have a second part?
Ms. Norton. What other things could you be doing with that
time, for example, to support students if you weren't reviewing
these challenges?
Ms. Hull. Sure. I would be able to spend time doing what I
was hired to do and that involves a variety of activities, but
most importantly, it keeps the students at the center. So,
often I'm working with students in small groups, in one-on-one
situations. I am also working with teachers and co-teaching
lessons. I also have a roster of my own and teaching classes to
students directly. All of that on top of maintaining a
collection and then sometimes having to support that
collection.
Ms. Norton. These book bans, along with related bills aimed
at censoring school discussions, are taking their tolls on
teachers as well. My own mother was a teacher. I understand how
much work that involves. Ms. Berg, I believe, you have spoken
before about facing increased complaints from parents. How long
does it take for you to address each complaint and what types
of issues are parents raising in these complaints?
Ms. Berg. Yes, an increased complaint recently and
depending on the issue or if there is an issue with a student,
it is phone calls home. All of the meetings that we have with
parents have to take place out of school hours, out of contract
hours before or after school, or oftentimes on my planning
block, which is where I usually try to grade or actually plan
the lessons I am going to teach. So, one complaint can be
anywhere from 3 to 4 hours, and that is out of contract time
for these meetings.
Ms. Norton. What types of issues are parents raising in
these complaints?
Ms. Berg. Again, like I said in my statement, it is a
really sad state of affairs that this divisiveness has really
kind of cut the communication between parents and teachers. A
lot of our parents in Loudoun County specifically just go
straight to the school board and don't actually come to the
teacher with their questions or looking for an alternative
text. A lot of it is just that they, you know, hear this
rhetoric in the news about CRT or LGBTQIA policies and they
don't want that discussed in class, but they never actually
come to us, the teacher, to discuss what we are doing with our
lessons in class regarding those issues.
Ms. Norton. Ms. Berg, I think the committee would be
interested in knowing how these challenges affect you
personally as a teacher? What could you tell us about that?
Ms. Berg. I love teaching. It is my just life's work, my
passion. Like I said, I wrote a curriculum, created a class. I
love the students I get to work with. And this past December, I
was putting together a resume and ready to quit my job because
of what is going on and the constant questioning of my
professionalism, my care for my students. Like Ms. Hull said,
they are always at the center of what we do. That is why we got
into this profession because we care about students, and it is
demoralizing. And we right now have a shortage of teachers in
this Nation, and it is only going to get worse, and that is
going to do damage to the education system as a whole. That is
what these book bans, these challenges, this rhetoric, that is
what it is doing. It is destroying education.
Ms. Norton. Thank you. I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Ms. Norton, for your excellent
questioning there. I think that a couple members are on their
way back, Ms. Pressley and Mr. Jordan. So, let me just ask a
few questions I had to sort of everybody and we could just go
down the panel there.
I think it is easy for us to recognize when something's
actual censorship, you know, in violation of the Supreme
Court's decision in Board Of Education v. Pico, when schools
are saying we don't like Catcher in the Rye, and we don't like
Native Son, and they offended some pressure group and we are
going to remove them, or in the higher ed context, we are not
going to hire someone who teaches critical race theory or we
are not going to hire someone who's a conservative or a liberal
or what have you. That is easy. But a number of you have talked
about the somewhat more ethereal question of the climate of
what the feelings are like, and that is much harder to put our
finger on that.
You know, I think one of our colleagues before said, you
know, even as, I think, a 40-year-old who was involved in
politics and a graduate student, he still felt he couldn't
really express his feelings about something and we know a lot
of LGBTQ people also feel, well, maybe nobody has said I can't
talk about my sexual orientation. Maybe they haven't passed
Don't Say Gay yet in my state, but I still feel stifled about
it.
How do we cultivate the values of tolerance and acceptance
such that we don't have the informal mechanisms of
marginalizing people? And maybe we can just start with Ms. Berg
and, you know, work our way down to Mr. Pidluzny.
Ms. Berg. Yes, absolutely. Mr. Pidluzny and I were actually
having a great conversation, and I said the one thing that I
foster my class was it being a safe space, is the ability to
have these conversations regardless of your viewpoint. And I
asked students, you know, what do you want to discuss, and it
is always these major issues that are going on outside in our
world. And I say one rule, one rule only. If you want to talk
about this, you show respect. We are not here to all agree with
each other. We are here to listen and you have to listen as
much as you talk. And that is truly what is giving me hope for
the future because my teenagers can do it. I hope we can, you
know, talk and listen and just respect one another because you
want them to have this access to the conversation to, again,
hopefully change our future.
Mr. Raskin. And you clearly model those values of respect
and tolerance, so, thank you for that. Yes, Mr. Pidluzny.
Mr. Pidluzny. So, I think every constituency has something
to do. Administrators need to tear down their bias response
teams and they need to fix the policies, but they should also
model a tolerance of other viewpoints. So presidents and
[inaudible] should go to talks on every side of the aisle,
and they should make sure that we are inviting speakers to
campus to discuss topics on every side of the aisle.
Faculty need to hire faculty they disagree with, right? The
biggest problem we see with faculty search committees is that
they are duplicating themselves. And so political science and
philosophy and literature, they become basically viewpoint
monocultures, and we need to help students understand the
importance of free and open discourse and of civil discourse.
And so I think we need to incorporate training modules into
first year seminars. Faculty need to remind students that, you
know, that this is a place for free and open debate and that
they shouldn't be using social media to shame people who are
expressing disparate viewpoints.
Mr. Raskin. Yes, I appreciate that. Ms. Freeman.
Ms. Freeman. Thank you. I think Ms. Berg said a lot of what
I was going to say, but I think we do better when we listen to
each other's stories. And these stories are in the books that
we read in the classroom, in the school libraries. And with me,
you heard when I talked about the LGBTQ books, particularly for
my family and learning about the people that we need to work
with, whether it be in the school, in the community, even when
you get out into the real world. So, I just think it is
important that we do better when we know about each other, all
of us, and it is within our books that we learn about each
other listening to each other. Thank you.
Mr. Raskin. Great. And, Ms. Hull before I come to Mr.
Jordan for his questioning.
Ms. Hull. Sure, I will echo everyone's thoughts. And then
what I'm hearing is that we need to build tolerance and we need
to build empathy. And how we do that is by starting through
literature and we allow our youngest learners to be comfortable
when they are uncomfortable, and being able to feel like they
can ask questions and express different viewpoints in ways that
have been modeled through even age appropriate children's
stories all the way up through novels at the high school level.
Mr. Raskin. Very good. Well, thank you all for your
thoughtful answers to that question.
And I am going to yield to Mr. Jordan for his five minutes.
Mr. Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Pidluzny, did I
get that close? I apologize.
Mr. Pidluzny. That is it.
Mr. Jordan. All right. I will call you ``Dr.'' from now on.
I think I will just stick with that. Right now, where is the
biggest concerns about free speech actually happening?
Mr. Pidluzny. I think the two biggest problems are a lack
of viewpoint diversity. As John Stuart Mill explains, it is not
enough to have free speech or free expression rights. You need
to be being presented with ideas that challenge you to think
outside of your comfort zone or outside of the box.
Mr. Jordan. I guess I'm asking, was that more so on college
campuses or in----
Mr. Pidluzny. Well, I think the situation on college
campuses is much worse.
Mr. Jordan. Yes, much worse. We got what, we got safe
spaces and, you know, where you can go and you can't be
triggered or whatever, and people can't say that you got free
speech zones.
Mr. Pidluzny. Yes. Ms. Berg and I were actually just
talking about the fact that a lot of the things you put trigger
warnings on in college or a lot of the things that students are
trying to remove from their curriculum, like depictions of rape
and classical literature, those are the things that they are
talking about in middle school and in high school.
Mr. Jordan. Well, so, I guess, and when it comes to, you
know, elementary or even primary education, that is about what
is appropriate for kids. That is a different debate than
college campuses, adults' free speech. Is that right?
Mr. Pidluzny. Absolutely, right. So I think it is perfectly
reasonable for K-12 to ask, are these resources well-tailored
to our educational objectives? And so you can never remove a
book to restrict access to political ideas or social
perspectives. However, and this is from Justice Blackmun
writing in Pico. First Amendment principles would allow a
school board to refuse to make a book available to students
because it contains offensive language or because it is
psychologically or intellectually inappropriate for the age
group or even perhaps because the ideas it advances are
manifestly inimical to the public welfare.
Mr. Jordan. Yes, because moms and dads don't like that
either. That is a different animal. On a college campus, can a
safe space and a free speech zone be at the same location?
Mr. Pidluzny. Well, they have different objectives, so I
would say no. But the free speech zone is itself problematic
because it suggests that there is only one part of the campus.
Mr. Jordan. Exactly, because it seems to me, where is the
free speech zone supposed to be?
Mr. Pidluzny. Yes. Well, I mean, typically it is in the
quad somewhere, some states are actually forcing----
Mr. Jordan. It seems to me the First Amendment is the First
Amendment. A free speech zone should be just about everywhere.
Mr. Pidluzny. Well, absolutely.
Mr. Jordan. It should be everywhere.
Mr. Pidluzny. But for time, place, manner restrictions, or
insightful speech, absolutely.
Mr. Jordan. Sure. We understand that. I remember we had
some hearings a few years ago. We had Ben Shapiro and Adam
Carolla and other people come in and we had college professors
come in. Tell me about these bias response teams. I remember
that from a few years back.
Mr. Pidluzny. I think they are one of the most insidious
things that are happening on college campuses. There are
hundreds of them out there. Basically, they look different on
every campus. They often include police officers. They often
include student life administrators.
Basically what happens is you create some kind of portal,
and students are encouraged to anonymously make complaints
about things that are said or done, and this triggers some kind
of an investigation. Sometimes the bias response team can refer
for punishment or even enact punishment. But the design of the
process is that it would be reputation damaging and onerous, so
that any reasonable, objectively reasonable student would want
to avoid this. How do you avoid it? Well, you avoid it by
saying anything that anyone could take offense at.
Mr. Jordan. Yes.
Mr. Pidluzny. And that is the problem. And that is the
point.
Mr. Jordan. You don't want someone to report you to the
bias response team. It chills everyone's speech on campus.
Mr. Pidluzny. Well, you can't even watch Ben Shapiro on
your dorm, right?
Mr. Jordan. Yes, exactly. One of the things that I am
concerned about is this term ``misinformation.'' Misinformation
gets used, it seems to me, someone is, however someone defines
misinformation. If you engage in misinformation, then that
speech is not allowed to happen. And I am very concerned about
that because I actually think that one of the biggest
purveyors, maybe the biggest purveyor of misinformation is the
government. Government tells us things all the time that aren't
accurate, but somehow if a citizen says something that they are
going to get attacked by, I think, often by the left for
spreading misinformation.
Mr. Pidluzny. Yes. I mean, the very concept of
misinformation, the idea that we should be banning that
actually flies in the face of the idea of an intellectual
marketplace where if you have dialog between different ideas,
the ones that are true are going to rise to the top, and the
ones that are simply false will rise to the bottom. So, for
example, we didn't do a whole lot of scientific discussion of
masks and how effective masks were. All right. We just heard
our public health authorities tell us, well, they don't help,
and then that they do help, and that they don't help unless
they are N95. Well, and the problem with that is it reduces our
confidence in government and our public health officials and
that is a huge problem.
Mr. Jordan. Very much so.
Mr. Pidluzny. I wish they would have just said we are not
totally sure.
Mr. Jordan. That is not the only example. There are all
kinds of examples where the government told us one thing that
turned out to be just the opposite. And yet if you question
that, you were labeled as the one spreading misinformation and
your speech got attacked. So, we got to be very careful with
that phenomena as we move forward.
With that, I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Thank you, Mr. Jordan, for your thoughtful
questioning.
And now, Ms. Pressley, it is my honor to recognize you for
your five minutes of questioning.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you, Chairman Raskin, and thank you to
the first panel of students for sharing your stories and taking
action.
Across the country, scholars are calling out, rightfully
so, how banning books on race and LGBTQ issues from our schools
are impeding their education and their own personal development
and growth. Republican book bans target literary classics like
``The Bluest Eye'' and ``Beloved'' by Toni Morrison, the first
Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, because the
novels discuss racism and slavery, but their focus is not only
on works of fiction. In multiple states, Republicans have
sought to prohibit students from reading non-fiction and
historical recounts because the subject matter tells the truth
about racial injustice in America.
Ms. Bridges, you know this all too well. Your book, ``This
Is Your Time'', is on the list of books that Texas Republicans
want removed from public schools. And the so-called Moms for
Liberty group has launched a campaign in more than 30 states to
have one of your children's books, ``Ruby Bridges Goes to
School'', banned because it makes students feel uncomfortable.
Ms. Bridges, what do you say to the parents who do not want
their children to hear your story or seek to exclude the truth
of racism that you and your family experienced firsthand?
Ms. Bridges. Well, as I said earlier, I believe that
history is sacred, and none of us have the right to change or
alter history in any way. Well, I have been taught that we need
to know our history to know where we are going. Just thinking
about everything that I have heard this morning, it seems to me
that we have so many of these books of choice, that the reason
why is that our young people cannot find their stories and
contribution, sacrifices to this country in the books that we
do not have a choice in. And that is in our textbooks.
So it would seem to me that these books of choice is even
more crucial that we have them so that our young people in
schools have a place to go to find their stories and their
contributions to this country. I mean, at some point in time we
may be calling on these young people to serve and defend this
country. And as my father felt back during the Korean War, I
would think that this country would want to lift them up. Let
those citizens know that we are indeed proud of them because we
celebrate their stories, their contributions. So, I think that
these books are proven to be even more crucial.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you.
Ms. Bridges. And shouldn't be banned.
Ms. Pressley. Thank you, Ms. Bridges. And to your point
about called on to be the future defenders, you know, in
communities throughout the country, Black students of all ages
continue to face white supremacist violence just for trying to
access quality education. I mean, recent threats on our HBCUs
are a stark example of this in fact. So how do you think the
removal of books like yours will affect this young generation
of students who might not be aware of the struggle to fight
segregation in America? How does it affect their sense of
purpose, their agency?
Ms. Bridges. Well, I have to, you know, refer back to the
thousands and thousands of kids who write me letters and saying
how my story has actually helped them to stand up to be brave.
So I would have to refer to that. Yes, as I mentioned earlier,
the truth is hard to look at, but I do honestly believe that in
the long run the truth will set us free.
Ms. Pressley. And thank you so much, Ms. Bridges. These
book bans are really no more than a malicious political
campaign of erasure, erasure of civil rights history, erasure
of LGBTQ equality, erasure of all the hard-fought progress made
that allows our babies the chance to learn, and accepting and
nurturing classrooms. But, of course, this is not just about
knowledge. I could argue that books save lives. I know it saved
my own when I was a child and real-time experiencing child
abuse and I picked up Maya Angelou's ``I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings'' from my school library. And it was the first time,
in the midst of all the shame and the fear that I was
experiencing, that I knew that I was not alone in the world.
So, yes, books expand minds and empower our young people and
the place that they take in this world, but I think they save
lives.
Ms. Bridges. Absolutely.
Ms. Pressley. With that, I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Ms. Pressley, thank you for your wonderful
questioning. And that is we have come to the end of our
representative questioners.
Ms. Mace, did you have any final thoughts you wanted to
conclude with?
Ms. Mace. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank our
witnesses once again for their time today and adhering our
witnesses this afternoon and this morning.
I think the idea of censorship is a far more important
issue than the issue of state superintendents of education,
state boards of education, local county boards of education and
parents doing what is legally and rightfully theirs to
determine is how their kids are educated in their communities.
So, when you look at this issue and you look at some of the
censorship that is happening on college campuses, as we heard
today from Dr. Pidluzny, it is very difficult to say your name,
but thank you for being here today. But that kind of
censorship, censorship on social media, that is far more
dangerous than what we are hearing, I think, from our witnesses
today. And I have experienced it myself, you know, part of the
American experiment is being able to have a debate of ideas, to
have this exchange of ideas, and not get attacked for. But we
are seeing conservatives and some on the far left and far right
being attacked every single day in this country. And the
censorship and this erasure is not being applied equally.
I know the Kremlin is tweeting on Twitter right now. You
know, we are banning conservatives from Twitter, and yet the
Kremlin can still tweet today. And, you know, if you are going
to have a standard, apply it equally across all users on social
media. And complaining that parents go to school boards to have
their voices heard is wrong. Accusing schools as in saying that
there is no safe place to go read in the classroom or the
library, that should be the safest place to read. And so this
is, I think, not an accurate representation of what is truly
going on.
But at the same time, we want to have folks, like Ruby
Bridges, having her voices heard. There are so many Black
voices, so many LGBTQ voices, too, that have the right to be
heard at the same time. But the questioning of speech and
looking at that from that perspective, even Bernie Sanders,
because we have got, I read a story earlier today from Daniel
Marans on Huffington Post, who is sitting in the room today,
quoted Bernie Sanders not too long ago, that people have a
right to give their two cents worth, give a speech without fear
of violence, intimidation, et cetera. And yet today we have
that going on.
We had the end of a 2020 election where mainstream media
wouldn't talk about the business that Hunter Biden was doing,
even talk about the emails that were on his laptop. And when
talk about some of the, I would say allegedly shady work that
he was doing and whether or not his father was a part of that
and doing that at the tail end of an election. And so we see
that every day.
There was some citation earlier about kids not feeling safe
because of their LGBTQ status. Mental health, mental issues are
up. Depression and anxiety has been up by 25 percent over the
last years because of COVID-19. That is a statistic from the
World Health Organization. I have seen it in my own family with
my own children who have suffered because they were not in
school. They were in virtual school. And I have seen some
children that haven't been able to get it back. I have seen
increase in drug use from kids who don't even have the ability
to drive right now. And so when we are having these
conversations about anxiety and depression of our students, I
hope that we can have a broader discussion of how keeping our
kids out of schools has actually harmed them over the last two
years.
And I just want to last say it again, Mr. Raskin. Even
though we sometimes disagree, we always agree to disagree, and
I love the debate that we have in the Civil Rights Subcommittee
on Oversight. And I want to thank you all for your time and
being here today.
Thank you, and I yield back.
Mr. Raskin. Well, thank you so much for that excellent
conclusion and for making sure you would be here with us today
to participate in this. And I have got a few closing thoughts
of my own.
First, I want to thank our extraordinary witnesses
beginning with the students who were with us on the first
panel. But I want to thank Samantha Hull, who is a librarian
from the great Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, Mindy Freeman,
who is appearing from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And we thank
you so much for being with us along with your daughter. And Dr.
Jonathan Pidluzny, who is with the American Council of Trustees
and Alumni, and Jessica Berg, who is teacher in neighboring
Loudoun County, Virginia.
I also was very moved by the testimony and the seriousness
with which all of you have approached a really important topic,
and I just had a few cleanup thoughts I wanted to advance
before we close. One is on the question of the fine old lost
art of American heckling. I got heckled yesterday by our
colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene on the floor of the House, and
totally fine with me. I think they were about to gavel her down
or tell her she had to be removed. You know, she was yelling at
me, but she left some oxygen and space for me to respond, and I
did. And that kind of heckling, you know, if you go back and
read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, there is a great compendium
of the Lincoln-Douglas debates by a historian named Harold
Holzer. But he includes the heckling that took place and people
would yell things out, and then Lincoln and Douglas would
respond to them, and sometimes it would launch a whole new, you
know, discussion between the two of them. That kind of heckling
is fine for me. The kind that I think we saw in one of the
tapes where people are actually trying to shut people up and
shut down the event, that strikes me as not within the spirit
of the First Amendment, much less something like we saw on
January 6, which was the ultimate act of censorship.
The ultimate expression of cancel culture was what took
place on January 6, where 900 people entered this building
unlawfully, evading the metal detectors, evading the officers,
actually wounding and injuring 160 of our officers, smashing
them in the face with baseball bats, and American flags, and
Confederate battle flags, and so on. That, to me, was the
essence of cancel culture. They were trying to cancel out our
whole democracy. On that day they were trying to cancel out the
whole Constitution, so I was not happy to see the relatively
trivial violence before on the video. I don't think anybody
was, you know, wounded or given post-traumatic stress syndrome
or killed in that kind of violence, but I wasn't happy to see
it. And I am not happy to see a form of heckling which is
really just shutting down other people's ability to speak.
The second thing I want to say, and we were about to get
through the hearing so well on a bipartisan commitment, the
First Amendment, but I did want to respond to my friend, Jim
Jordan. I don't know if he's still out there somewhere. I'm
sorry that he left the room. But, you know, it is very easy to
feel that your group is somehow being unfairly targeted and
made a victim. And I have spoken before to the distinguished
gentleman from Ohio about this. He seems to believe that
conservatives are somehow uniquely the victims of what he calls
cancel culture.
We have already heard from some people today--students,
teacher, librarian, mom--about the actual attempts to strip
books from people's libraries. And we heard from the great Ruby
Bridges about the extraordinary and shocking effort to censor
her books and remove them from public libraries in an attempt
to silence the critical experience, the formative experience
for our lives of the Civil Rights Movement affecting everybody,
not just the African-American community, not just the Latino
community, the Asian-American community, but the people in the
white community, people all across the board. This is the
American story.
And so, I guess what I would like to say is I think that we
are going to advance the First Amendment values that all of us
hold dear, if we can step a little bit beyond our own sense of
grievance and indignation, that somehow we are the first people
ever to feel the sting of being marginalized. I know that
conservatives feel marginalized. I think Oberlin is sometimes
mentioned as a school, just like conservatives feel, liberals
feel marginalized sometimes at George Mason University, or
conservatives can feel marginalized at Wesley perhaps, and
liberals can feel marginalized at the University of Chicago.
OK. So, let's try to maintain a sense of balance about that,
and we can talk about how to improve the climate for everybody.
I think it is within the spirit of First Amendment values that
we want to give everybody the right to speak, and to
participate, and to try to respect them as much as possible, as
Ms. Berg said.
And finally is to the point raised by my friend, Ms. Mace.
And I think a couple of the other members raised this too. We
do have a kind of a tension or a balance in our public schools
and, by the way, our public universities too, between
individual freedom and democracy. There is no doubt that we
have democratic mechanisms like school boards, and state
legislatures, and county education superintendents who are
involved in the preparation of curriculum. That is a function
of democracy. And at the same time, under our First Amendment,
the Supreme Court has said and certainly the people feel, our
students or teachers don't shed their First Amendment rights at
the schoolhouse gate. And so we have to try to reconcile those
two values.
All I would say about the current attempt to demonize and
vilify people on school boards, teachers, librarians, is they
are the democratic culture, along with our PTAs and our
parents. They are the people that have been put in by the
voters all across America. They are doing a hell of a job, I
think. And so just because someone decides that they want to go
on a book banning rampage or expedition doesn't mean suddenly
that everybody who has been elected to the school boards or
everybody who is in an office or everybody who is the head of
the PTA, is somehow the enemy of the people. I don't accept
that. I think that the teachers, the librarians, the PTA
people, the school officials are doing their very best to
reconcile all of these values in a democratic society. And the
First Amendment is there to protect all of us.
And the Supreme Court, I think, has been real clear about
viewpoint discrimination, whether at the higher education
level. Check out Board of Directors v. University of Virginia,
I think it is called, and the Rosenberger case, where, no, you
can't discriminate against religious student groups that want
to get money to publish their newspaper. They have got an equal
right to the Republicans, and the Democrats, and the liberals,
and the conservatives. Just because you are religious group
that is publishing a newspaper doesn't mean you can be
discriminated against. But the Supreme Court has also been
equally clear in the K through 12 context. While curriculum
materials have to be age appropriate, you can't take books out
of the library because somebody else doesn't like it.
And I will just end with that image I started with. The
First Amendment, freedom of speech, it is like an apple, and
everybody just wants to take one bite out of the apple and if
we let everybody take one bite of the apple, there is nothing
left to it. So, we have got to defend not just the speech we
love and the speech we agree with, but also the speech that
might force us to learn something new or the speech that we
think we really detest and we despise, that is what the First
Amendment is about.
I want to thank the great Ruby Bridges for gracing us
today. It means so much to us to have you with us. And Ms.
Hull, Ms. Freeman, Mr. Pidluzny--forgive me--and Ms. Berg, all
the students, everybody participating, thank you for this
important investment in American freedom.
And the meeting is now adjourned.
Witnesses will have five days to get us any changes to
their testimony, and members will have five days within which
to submit additional written questions for the witnesses to the
chair and we will send them to you. If people have further
questions, and please respond to them as quickly as you can.
Mr. Raskin. And with that, the meeting is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:50 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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