Amid increasingly divisive culture wars, schools are confronted with unprecedented pressures to ban books that discuss or address topics related to race, gender, and sexuality. Celebrated titles exploring these themes, like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, have been banned in over a hundred school districts across the nation. Depriving young, underrepresented readers of these books, and similar titles, robs them of an opportunity to see themselves represented through these literary works; and for some, it severs a critical lifeline for self-affirmation. Targeted book bans create a hostile environment in which students who reveal their sexual orientation and gender identity, or simply exist in their own skin, risk stigma and exposing themselves to discrimination. Further, the bans limit students’ learning opportunities and deprive them of quality education; studies show that banning diverse or inclusive books is associated with poor academic performance, deficient critical thinking and social awareness skills, and decreased reading engagement.
This Note explores the prospect of challenging book bans as a civil rights violation. Specifically, it addresses whether racially or sexually motivated book bans create a hostile learning environment in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. This Note advocates for an extension of the hostile environment theory and ultimately concludes that because book bans target statutorily protected characteristics, they can pose a legally sufficient limitation on students’ learning so as to violate federal anti-discrimination laws.