One morning in February 2022, about a year into the nationwide backlash against school lessons on racism, gender, and sexuality, my phone was buzzing with missed calls from numbers I didn’t recognize. NBC News had just published an article I’d written about the new wave of attempted book bans that was hitting school districts across the nation. I knew the piece would be a conversation starter, but the people trying to reach me that morning, I would soon learn, weren’t interested in dialogue.
One of the callers followed up with a text identifying herself as a concerned mother and asking me to call. She said she wanted to discuss my article, which opened with the story of a queer 17-year-old student in Katy, Texas. The girl, unnamed in the piece, had told me that, because her parents opposed homosexuality, her school library was the one place where she felt free to read books that reflected her experiences as an L.G.B.T.Q. teen. Now she felt that was under attack.
