Beacon Books on Red Alert During Banned Books Week 2024!
September 26, 2024
And the category is . . . Challenged! Challenged as in a hair’s breadth away from being banned. For Banned Books Week, United Against Book Bans released the latest roundup of challenged books, and ten Beacon Press titles are on it! Tens across the board for each one strutting their red-alert stuff! Some are par for the rabid far-right course—Race and history and queers! Oh, my!—while others, indeed, will make you do a double take. In any event, this just means we and our authors will keep the decolonizing, teaching-truth energy going full speed. Can’t stop, won’t stop.
An African American and Latinx History of the United States
“If American exceptionalism is a harmful fable, then what do we replace it with? We can begin by continuing to learn more about ordinary people’s capacity to create democracy in action . . . Whether one looks at events such as the making of the Underground Railroad to Mexico in the 1820s or the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, it is an incontestable fact that the United States advances the most when its most oppressed people achieve power and control over their lives.”
—Paul Ortiz
At the Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick Up the Pieces
“Today, people I hardly know ask me about my birth name, my sex life, or my surgical history. Trans people commiserate about these things, because no matter how different we all are, the questions we get are often the same. And while now I accept that being a visible trans person means having to deal with spam, back in high school I had no idea why people suddenly felt they had an all-access pass to scrutinize my anatomy. Let’s get back to my penis.”
—Donald Collins, “Who Wears the Pants?”
Can We Talk About Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation
“We have to talk about the way that our socialization about race prevents us from fully recognizing that talent, and the way that the dynamics of race in our society have kept us from fully educating youth of color. If we don’t fully engage in dialogue about what we can do differently, and bring an understanding of the legacy of race and racism in our society into that conversation, we will not be successful in addressing this and other national challenges. We have a wealth of untapped and underutilized talent in communities of color across the country; we need this talent. Can we talk about race?”
—Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD
Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics
“Conceptualizing violence within the frame of hate makes it easy to mistake symptom for cause. Hatred is not the root cause of racism, misogyny, homophobia, violence against transgender people, violence against disabled people, or economic cruelty. Hate is a predictable consequence of deeply rooted, historically persistent forms of these maladies. They are foundational to institutionalizing hierarchies of power. Unnoticed and unexamined, they permeate mainstream culture.”
—Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People
“Like most people, Americans want to think well of themselves, their ancestors, their history, and what they and their leaders do. As advanced technology makes the experiences of Indigenous peoples around the world more readily available, it is necessary that Americans learn to think more completely and more critically about their own history, because it can help them be better citizens of the world. Part of that critical thinking involves recognition that “America” is a name given to two land masses by European colonizers. Indigenous peoples had, and have, words for the land in their own languages.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz with adapters Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese
Kindred: Young Adult Edition
with a foreword by Tomi Adeyemi
“I could feel the knife in my hand, still slippery with perspiration. A slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her. And Rufus was Rufus—erratic, alternately generous and vicious. I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover. He had understood that once. I twisted sharply, broke away from him. He caught me, trying not to hurt me. I was aware of him trying not to hurt me even as I raised the knife, even as I sank it into his side.”
—Octavia E. Butler
Out Law: What LGBT Youth Should Know About Their Legal Rights
“Today, there is greater acceptance of sexual-minority youth among young people and that growing acceptance provides you with a greater level of security in being open about who you are. Nevertheless, greater openness toward sexual difference among youth still runs up against an older, less accepting part of society—a part that still controls many positions of authority. In some cases, that authority is parents, teachers, and principals. In other cases, it is those who make and enforce laws at the local, state, and federal levels.”
—Lisa Keen
A Queer History of the United States for Young People
“The ‘future of queer history’ sounds contradictory, but it is not. Since before this country was founded, there have been people who refused to conform to gender and sexual norms living in and creating America. Often, because they lived outside certain cultural traditions, they led the way for new ways of seeing the world, new ways of seeing America. Sometimes they were persecuted for this; sometimes they were praised. Often, people in the mainstream realized only after the fact the vision and new values queer people brought to American culture. Those people did that in the past. That is American history. Now you, your friends, your classmates, your communities, and your colleagues are the ones who will make those changes, have those visions, and create a new future for America, a new America.”
—Michael Bronski with adapter Richie Chevat
“In spite of the many options for surgeries, the myth that surgery makes a trans person ‘fully’ male or female still circulates. It’s not uncommon to hear that a person is ‘more trans’ for desiring surgery, and that those who haven’t yet had or cannot afford these changes are ‘less’ trans. Even within trans communities, there are hierarchies set up between those who are ‘pre-op’ (pre-operative), ‘non-op,’ and ‘post-op’ (post-operative), often resulting in shame and low self-esteem in those who cannot afford or do not want the surgeries others consider important.”
—Laura Erickson-Schroth and Laura A. Jacobs
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.