[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 37 (Thursday, February 29, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1058-S1059]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Freedom of Speech

  Ms. BUTLER. Mr. President, I rise today on the final day recognizing 
Black History Month to bring attention to this Chamber and to the 
American people watching the very harmful and anti-democratic practice 
of book banning happening or being attempted in States all over our 
country.
  The First Amendment in our Constitution is clear:

       Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of 
     religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or 
     abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the 
     right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the 
     Government for a redress of grievances.

  This amendment gives all Americans the right to speak, publish, and 
read what they wish, free from government censorship. But a nationwide 
campaign in States like Florida, Texas, Utah, North Dakota, and even 
California has been deployed to limit our children's learning and 
enforce restrictions on one of our most fundamental freedoms.
  Right now extremist politicians are working overtime to strip our 
Nation's bookshelves of essential literature that helps to tell the 
complete story of America, including the stories of great sacrifice, 
contribution, and pain of Black Americans. These include stories of 
struggle and triumph against hatred and bigotry. They recount efforts 
to reconcile the promise of American ideals with the reality of our 
most pervasive challenges. Authors who have long been recognized as 
chroniclers of our Nation's journey have been written off by lawmakers 
who seek to narrow the scope of what our children can learn about our 
history.
  Now, the organizers of these State-by-State battles would have you 
believe that they are upholding parents' choice, that imposing these 
book bans would somehow protect the innocence of our children. But I 
and so many others who have been watching this contend that the mass 
effort to shield young learners is an utter slap in the face to 
communities who too long had to fight to have their very stories told.
  Our Nation's most ethnically and racially diverse generation have 
seen themselves reflected in these pages, and for these extremist 
adults to deem these stories inappropriate is a direct attack on their 
experience and their very existence.
  Over the past 2 years, these blanket attacks on our books have become 
more organized and well funded. In 2022, more than 2,500 books were 
targeted. According to the American Library Association, the majority 
of those books were about Black or LGBTQ-plus people.
  As only the 12th Black Senator to serve in this Chamber and the first 
openly LGBTQ Black Senator to serve, I will not stand by silently as 
our stories get erased. That is why I will be joining the Freedom 
Readers and their efforts to ensure the freedom to learn by regularly 
taking to the Senate floor and inviting my colleagues to join me to 
read excerpts of books that tell the story of our Nation, its legacy, 
and the people who contribute to America's character of imperfection, 
of resilience, and of progress.


                          ``Sister Outsider''

  I will start today by offering excerpts from an essay in a book 
titled ``Sister Outsider,'' by Audre Lorde. Anyone who is remotely 
familiar with Lorde's exceptional body of work can contest to her 
genius as a writer, a poet, a philosopher, and a civil rights activist.
  Her book ``Sister Outsider'' is a collection of speeches and essays 
in which Ms. Lorde explores the questions surrounding race, identity, 
life, community, and meaning from her lens as a Black queer woman from 
Harlem, encouraging readers to do their own self-reflection and 
inviting them to draw new conclusions about the world around them, and 
to speak and take action.
  Ms. Lorde's work ``The Transformation of Silence into Language and 
Action'' first appeared in the Cancer Journal, where she shares her 
journey of having breast cancer, which ultimately led to a mastectomy. 
It reads, in part:

       In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, 
     and of what I wished and wanted of my life, however short it 
     may be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a 
     merciless light, and what I most regretted were my 
     silences. Of what had I ever been afraid of? To question 
     or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. 
     But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, 
     and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other 
     hand, is

[[Page S1059]]

     the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, 
     without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed 
     to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small 
     silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for 
     someone else's words. And I began to recognize a source of 
     power within myself that comes from the knowledge that 
     while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to 
     put fear into perspective gave me great strength.

  She writes:

       Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge--within 
     the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle 
     and otherwise, conscious or not--I am not only a casualty, I 
     am also a warrior.
       What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to 
     say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and 
     attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of 
     them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I 
     am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because 
     I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself--a 
     Black woman warrior poet doing work--who has come to ask you, 
     are you doing yours?

  Ms. Lorde continues:

       And it is never without fear--of visibility, of the harsh 
     light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. 
     But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, 
     except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I 
     were to have been born mute or had maintained an oath of 
     silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have 
     suffered, and I would still die. And where the words of women 
     are crying to be heard, we must, each of us, recognize our 
     responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and 
     share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. 
     That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that 
     have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our 
     own.
       We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the 
     same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. 
     For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own 
     needs for language and definition, and while we wait in 
     silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of 
     that silence will choke us.
       The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is 
     an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those 
     differences between us, for it is not difference which 
     immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences 
     to be broken.

  In closing, the writings of Ms. Lorde's in ``The Transformation of 
Silence into Language and Action'' are not only a beautiful 
articulation in examining the cost of being silent in the face of what 
could have been for her a terminal illness, she gives us an even better 
gift: She invites us to acknowledge our commonalities as well as our 
differences in order to give them voice and to deepen our understanding 
and expand the power of our words and turn those words into action.
  While Ms. Lorde first wrote and delivered this essay in 1977, I think 
we could all agree that it could easily have been written just 
yesterday.
  Shamefully enough, school administrators in Tennessee took steps to 
target this book and to issue educational gag orders with a goal to 
suppress hundreds of other stories from being told.
  Now more than ever, we must heed Ms. Lorde's call to speak into the 
silence, to raise our voices and reject the intimidation of those who 
would have the history of our Nation, the beauty of our differences, 
and the complexity of our humanity disappear from generations of 
learners to come.
  I invite all of my colleagues to join me as Freedom Readers, to 
challenge those who attempt to undermine our history, and uplift the 
diversity of our stories against the attacks to erase them.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.