There’s a whole lot of book banning going on across the US at the moment and it should scare anyone concerned about the education of children. Maus, a Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel that tells a powerful story of the Holocaust, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, has been banned by a Tennessee school district because of curse words and a female mouse’s nudity. To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the best books of the 20th century, was dropped from a required reading list in a school in Seattle because of racism concerns. Also on the target list of mainly parent activism is Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and the brilliant account of slavery in Hannah Jones’s The 1619 Project. Any book that talks of sex, sexuality, racism and gays — the usual suspects — draws the ire of the Right.

To be sure, much of this madness is driven by America’s highly toxic partisan politics, always there, but inflamed by former president Donald Trump. Neo-Nazis have come out of the closet and the conservative right has found a wedge issue in cultural stock such as books. At the heart of this racist reawakening are the inevitable demographic shifts in the country, described as the browning of America. With that comes a felt loss of white privilege and place, a sense of racial entitlement lost. At the head of this movement is the Christian evangelical right, emboldened since the election of the first black president that Trump latched onto with his birther conspiracy — Barack Obama was not born in the US, a nonsense that brought the former president national attention and a growing following on his way to the White House. Obama was not even Christian, another lie that got feet. White evangelicals found their voice in the b(l)acklash led by Trump, and books are the latest target. Which got me thinking, by the standard of these Christians, the Bible should be on the chopping block...