Legislating Trauma: Book Bans, Educational Gag Orders, and Microaggressions

ABSTRACT As the number of book bans continues to increase nationally, there has been a growing body of research examining the impacts of book bans and their function as an extension of other educational gag orders. The literature is profusely and unapologetically clear that book bans have a myriad of impacts—they decrease engagement, critical thinking and literacies, and student and teacher morale, as well as lead to a lower sense of self. In this conceptual paper, I build on this body of scholarship particularly in terms of considering the impact of book bans on safety, belonging, and especially well‐being. Specifically, I ground this paper in Critical Race Theory and trauma‐informed studies to show that reading bans constitute a microaggression and can cause trauma for minoritized students. Therefore, we must understand reading bans not only as a censoring of literacy but also as a censoring of certain people's right to exist and to be well. In other words, book bans are not simply an attack on texts but an attack on marginalized people's lives—one that is being legislated at local, state, and federal levels.