The organization Take Back the Classroom says that “pornographic books have infiltrated classrooms and libraries for the purpose of grooming our children under the guise of education. It’s time to take back control.” 

On Take Back the Classroom’s website, people over the age of 18 are able to search up locally challenged books by navigating to their state, then district, then school to find individual lists. Pioneer High School has 96 challenged books.

Yet Pioneer has not removed a single book, and they do not plan to. Pioneer media specialist Janine Bauer says that “Ann Arbor has a very defined book challenge process, so I am not scared.” Parents can file complaints about specific books, or have their child’s library account marked as one unable to check out certain books. In this way, Ann Arbor Public Schools have protected media specialists and ensured that mass bans are unnecessary.

But why are they being challenged? The chief reason cited is that they are “sexually explicit”, marked with a bright orange tag. However, many of these titles also cover diverse characters and minority groups, with no tags acknowledging this pattern. Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which follows the story of a queer, Chinese immigrant girl during the Red Scare has won the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Elizabeth Acevedo’s Poet X is an LA Times Award winner for covering Latin American immigrants and their stories. The Pioneer shelves reflect a proud desire for inclusion by carrying these books. Bauer says, “You need books to speak to everybody.”

Similarly, in his classroom, Pioneer AP English Literature and Composition teacher as well as 9th grade English teacher Shawn Ashley says he has chosen books for “diversity of time…and people in the book.” He also chooses diversity of content through writing style “so you see the story is presented and unfolded a little bit in a new way that you’re not accustomed to, necessarily.”

The chief pitfall of challenging books, Ashley identifies, is that we will become accustomed to thinking the same, and this can become dangerous. “It’s like, I think this, and this is right, and everybody else should think this too. Well, it’s a great world if everybody acted like that, it’s like the end of Crime and Punishment, where everybody thinks the same way Raskolnikov does. It’s going to be nothing but murder and mania rolling around.”