Speaking in States Where My Book Is Banned

The first sign is usually the schedule.

Before the event, someone pulls me aside to explain that they had to be careful about how I was described. They avoided anything that might flag me as a "diversity speaker," because apparently that's the sort of thing that attracts unwanted attention. Then we all go about our day.

When I speak at schools in states where my memoir appears on restricted lists, nobody is waiting at the entrance to confiscate my notes. There isn't a protest line outside. Students still show up and ask thoughtful questions about identity, belonging, free speech, and what happens when those values come into conflict.

The conversations themselves are remarkably ordinary. The adjustments happen around the edges, shaping what happens in the community without actually being a part of the community itself.

A university recently invited me to speak during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The Asian American student organization that organized the event had been forced to disband after the state threatened university funding. So the talk ended up being sponsored by the Associated Student Government instead. Many of the students involved were exactly the same people. They just had different stationery. It was the exact same room, same audience, even the same folding chairs. Nothing changed except the label that they slapped on my talk/

This is what censorship often looks like in modern America: Not bonfires and blacklists so much as administrative paperwork.

The rules arrive as procedures and approval processes wrapped in language about community standards and inappropriate material. The terms themselves tend to be elastic: divisive concepts, harmful content, or simply, inappropriate. Ask ten people what those phrases mean and you'll get eleven answers.

Florida activist Chaz Stevens demonstrated the problem by filing requests to remove the Bible from school libraries using the same standards applied to other challenged books. Whether you find the tactic clever or obnoxious, it exposed something important: if a rule can plausibly apply to everything, somebody still has to decide when it applies to something.

Discretion is where the real argument lives.

That's part of what makes the Fifth Circuit's decision in Little v. Llano County so interesting. The court held that public library collection decisions constitute government speech, allowing officials in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi to remove books without the usual First Amendment scrutiny applied to viewpoint discrimination.

On one level, the logic makes intuitive sense: libraries choose what to acquire. But if every book in a public library becomes government speech, then the government suddenly develops some very eclectic opinions.

Justice Alito made a similar point in Matal v. Tam—my case—when he rejected an expansive theory of government speech. If trademark registration transformed private expression into government expression, he wrote, the government would be "babbling prodigiously and incoherently."

Aren’t libraries vulnerable to the same problem?

Authors write books. Editors edit them. Publishers publish them. Librarians decide what to buy. Readers decide what to take home. The government's role has traditionally been less that of author than host…and a host isn't presumed to endorse every conversation happening in the living room. If nothing else, this is the government "babbling prodigiously and incoherently” at scale.

Most administrators I meet think these rules are absurd. They say so quietly to me in private: their hands are tied, they explain.

I suspect the inconvenience is part of the design. You don't have to prohibit an event outright if you can make organizing it just exhausting enough. Rename the student group, relabel the speaker. Add another form, create enough friction that people decide the conversation isn't worth the trouble. This is what chilling speech can look like.

Those who are skeptical of expansive free speech protections often begin from a place I understand completely because nobody wants hateful speech amplified. But what skeptics haven't always experienced is how quickly the category of harmful speech expands once someone else is in charge of defining it. Eventually, somebody decides that your history is divisive, your identity is political, or your story inappropriate.

By then, the principle has already been traded away. All that's left is arguing over who gets to exercise the discretion.

That's the conversation I keep having on campuses across the country. And it's why I've never declined an invitation to speak in a state where my book is restricted. Those are precisely the places where the conversation matters most.

Democracy isn't tested by our willingness to tolerate the speech we already agree with. The real test is whether we preserve the freedom to encounter ideas we'd rather avoid, and trust one another enough to decide what to do with them afterward.

A chef doesn't want to cook in a place where everyone has already been fed. There are people hungry for another, deeper truth.
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Speaking in States Where My Book Is Banned is part of an ongoing series on civil liberties, free expression, and what First Amendment principles look like in practice. If these conversations connect to work you're doing at your institution, simontam.org/speaking is the place to start. For civic engagement and democracy programming, simontam.org/civic-engagement-democracy has more. And if you're an educator looking for classroom resources on these questions, simontam.org/for-educators has those too.