A few months ago I found a paperback copy of George Orwell’s “1984” on a city bus. I opened it and found myself reading a familiar passage about the protagonist Winston Smith’s cubicle and the slot in the wall nicknamed the “memory hole.”
“When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying near, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the corresponding slot and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the basement.”
We are living a version of this. The Trump administration is systematically banning books, scrubbing scientific data, defunding education and waging war on facts, truth and democratic life — all in the name of patriotism and American greatness. Red states like Tennessee have become the laboratories for this Orwellian assault.
Under the totalitarian Age-Appropriate Materials Act — a Tennessee law passed in 2022 that, along with an addendum passed two years later, has permitted the removal of hundreds of books from libraries throughout the state — the Knox County school district recently ordered the removal of Alex Haley’s novel “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” from its libraries.
“Roots,” which was published in 1976 and won a special Pulitzer, follows Kunta Kinte, a 17-year-old boy captured in Gambia and sold into chattel slavery in North America, and continues with six generations of his descendants down to the author himself. Adapted a year later into a landmark miniseries that remains one of the most-watched television broadcasts in American history, “Roots” shows the survival and triumph of Black Americans over a barbaric system, and the power of memory.
As of May 2026, Knox County Schools has banned 124 books, including “Roots.” Other books banned include Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel,” Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five.” The bans follow a chilling and staggering pattern across the state of Tennessee — which banned at least 1,600 books between July 2024 and June 2025 alone, trailing only Texas and Florida — and the nation. According to a 2025 PEN America report, 23,000 book bans have been enacted across 45 states and 451 public school districts since 2021.
The banning of “Roots” feels especially insidious because the novel and TV series helped reshape how Americans understand the central role of White on Black chattel slavery and its aftermath in our country’s history and present.
The banning of “Roots” feels especially insidious because the novel and TV series helped reshape how Americans understand the central role of White on Black chattel slavery and its aftermath in our country’s history and present. It was even more of an indignity because Haley lived in and around Knoxville, Tennessee, for long periods of his life. A statue of him stands in Morningside Park; at the time of its unveiling in 1988, it was the largest public statue of an African-American in the country.
Carly Harrington, spokesperson for Knox County Schools, told the Guardian: “As a district, we recognize the immense cultural and historical significance of Alex Haley’s Roots to our nation, to Tennessee, and particularly to the county seat of Knoxville. The decision made to remove ‘Roots’ from school libraries is in no way a commentary on the literary or cultural value of the novel, but the result of adherence to state law.”
But this is bureaucratic nonsense and double-speak.
In reality, the Trump administration and the MAGA movement are engaged in a White racial authoritarian political and cultural project — a coordinated effort to reposition White Christian men at the center of all the history that has ever mattered in this country. Books chronicling and emphasizing the experiences of Black and Brown people, the LGBTQ community, women and other marginalized communities are antithetical to that project and must, by definition, be disappeared.
What remains is a hallucination of the past and present, and of reality itself, a condition sociologist Joe Feagin describes as “the white racial frame.”
“Roots” was banned at the same time that the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court — and red states in the former Jim Crow South moved, almost instantaneously, to dismantle Black people’s voting power. These are not parallel or coincidental developments. They are examples of white backlash to the Civil Rights Movement and the Long Black Freedom Struggle, and the very idea of multiracial democracy.
Harrington specified that “Roots” was removed because content in the novel’s 84th chapter, which includes a depiction of the sexual assault of an enslaved person by a white plantation owner, was not “age appropriate” under the 2022 law, which requires Tennessee schools to keep a public list of library materials and have a policy for reviewing them for “appropriateness” based on feedback from parents, guardians, school employees or students. The Age-Appropriate Materials Act also prohibits titles that contain sexual content, sexual abuse, nudity or “excessive violence.” Under Tennessee law, “Roots” and other banned books can still be taught, but they are not part of the circulating collection at public school libraries.
The ban of “Roots” was an attempt to whitewash American history. Slavery is inherently violent, a state of tyranny. Historians have documented how chattel slavery in the Americas and across the Black Atlantic killed many millions of Black people. Rape was a systematic weapon against the enslaved. To ban books like “Roots,” which offers a realistic depiction of Black people’s lived experience, for “excessive violence” or depictions of sexual abuse is to rule that the basic truth of chattel slavery and cannot be told under Tennessee law. The episode belongs to a much longer lineage of banned books about race and the color line in the South and other parts of the country.
Under the Jim and Jane Crow regime, hundreds of books were banned, or otherwise censored or prohibited, because they were judged to be subversive, a threat to civil order, anti-American or morally corrupting if they challenged segregation and white supremacy by showing Black and white people as equals.
Under the American institution of White on Black chattel slavery, it was illegal for Black enslaved people to learn to read or to own books, and while it was technically legal for them to do so under Jim Crow laws, Southern states systematically denied Black Americans a proper education due to legalized segregation and funding inequities.
Today’s book bans in Tennessee, Virginia, Florida and much of red state America rest on the premise that white children and white adults must be protected from any discomfort that discussions of racism and the color line — or of gender, sexuality and other potentially “divisive” topics — may cause them. The absurdity is that white privilege and fragility are deemed to be more important than Black and brown people’s actual pain, which can shorten lives through a repetitive stress injury called “racial battle fatigue.” But importantly, this assumption is also insulting to white Americans. It treats them as too intellectually and emotionally fragile to survive even the most basic confrontation with their own country’s history along the color line.
After weeks of national and international attention — and pressure from school board members and the local community — “Roots” was restored to school libraries in Knox County on Tuesday. In a memo, superintendent Jon Rysewyk explained that legal experts he consulted could not come to a consensus on whether the Tennessee law actually required the removal of Haley’s novel in the first place. The legal uncertainty was a deciding factor in reversing the ban. “Removing any book from circulation is, and should be, an immense decision,” he wrote. “Our intent will always be to err on the side of access, which is the decision I have made with regard to “Roots.’”
Returning “Roots” to school library shelves in Knox County does not erase the harm that was done to free speech and democracy by such an exercise in authoritarian power.
This victory should be celebrated, and the people who fought for it deserve real credit. But returning “Roots” to school library shelves in Knox County does not erase the harm that was done to free speech and democracy by such an exercise in authoritarian power.
Book bans are designed to chill free speech, freedom of thought, and the exercise of civil rights and liberties more broadly. They are a form of authoritarian emotional and behavioral training to create a public that self-censors. Once that rule is internalized, it spreads and becomes the new norm. This is authoritarianism as a self-perpetuating system — one that no single court ruling or superintendent’s memo can fully dismantle.
In a 2008 speech at the PEN Literary Gala, the late Nobel Prize-winning Black novelist Toni Morrison anticipated this new-old order in Donald Trump’s America. “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard — that thought is a nightmare,” she said. “As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”
Morrison understood why authoritarians fear writers. “Writers,” she said, “disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on a population, a coma despots call ‘peace’.”
Book bans are a form of intellectual violence. They manufacture a present stripped of context or history that serves the would-be authoritarian. By making injustice into a kind of orphan, oppression is made to seem like the natural order of things. A people who lack the ability to name what was done to them cannot fully organize to undo it.
As the Age of Trump grinds on, and red states like Tennessee perfect their role as proving grounds of autocracy, Toni Morrison’s invisible ink is everywhere.