First Lady Jill Biden, ‘book bans’ and the classroom culture wars

Then Biden touched on another matter — one related to both of her jobs.

“As someone mentioned to me in the photo line, we cannot ban books,” she said, to a murmur of approval. “We cannot ban books. I’m a teacher. We cannot do that.”

The first lady has been an educator for more than three decades: first, as a high school English teacher in Wilmington and later as a community college instructor at Delaware Technical Community College. When her husband assumed the vice presidency in 2009, she began teaching writing courses at Northern Virginia Community College, a role she’s maintained during the Biden administration. Her tenure as first lady has coincided with a rise in attempts to remove or restrict certain books based on their content in schools across the country, often when the texts deal with topics such as LGBTQ+ people or racism. Although “book banning” is an imprecise term — the people who raise objections to the content are generally different from the ones empowered to take action, and some texts have returned to the shelves after removal — the specter of political censorship from the right has put liberals on high alert.

The person at the first lady’s fundraiser wasn’t the only one nudging America’s highest-profile educator to talk about it.

“The thing I’m sure Dr. Biden cares a lot about, too, is these book bans — it’s making me anxious,” Eva Longoria, the actor and director, said when warming up the donor crowd at the Hay-Adams. “They’re erasing our history — whether it’s women’s history, or Chicano history, Black history — that’s very dangerous for our country.”

Biden’s remark at that event — “we cannot ban books” — echoed comments she made in interviews with the “Today” show in 2022 (“This is America, we don’t ban books”) and, earlier this year, with the Associated Press (“I don’t believe in banning books. I think the teachers and the parents can work together and decide what the kids should be taught.”).

At the same time, the East Wing seems keen to walk a fine line with respect to her involvement in culture warfare. The debate over what books belong in schools and libraries, and how subjects like race, gender and sexuality are discussed by educators, is part of a theater of political combat that gets messier the closer one gets to the front. Biden’s speeches seldom get into the nitty-gritty of the content being challenged or how the backlash from conservative activists is putting the profession under duress. Rarely does Biden bring up the topic unless prompted to address it — for example, by journalists, or by someone on the photo line. Instead, she has touted the administration’s policies and feel-good “Teacher of the Year” programming or a “personal curated board” on Pinterest with “snackable advice” for teachers.

“The culture wars are loaded, and that’s what a first lady wants to avoid,” said Elizabeth J. Natalle, an associate professor emeritus of communication at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who has published several books about first ladies.

In a statement to The Washington Post, Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, said the administration “won’t hesitate to call out” the “MAGA Republicans” for “their extreme and irresponsible actions,” but declined to provide specific details on how the campaign views the first lady’s role as it relates to attempts to curtail access to certain books. A spokeswoman for Jill Biden, Vanessa Valdivia, would not discuss the first lady’s approach to Republican rhetoric on the record, noting instead her role as “an effective messenger for the administration’s education policies” and “her work promoting quality education for everyone, including championing universal access to preschool, teacher recruitment and retention, opportunities for career-connected learning, and more affordable options for post-high school education, including community colleges.”

The first lady has been vocal about her affection for books in general, including texts that relate to matters of race and gender. In a 2021 interview with Kelly Clarkson, Biden mentioned that she’d recently finished Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” which argues that American society is structured around a racial hierarchy comparable to those in India and Nazi Germany. Later that year, Biden told Good Housekeeping that her favorite books to teach to students have included “To Kill A Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee bildungsroman that follows the trial of a Black man in the South over allegations of rape, and “The Scarlet Letter,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which centers on the public humiliation of a woman in a Puritan society with strict gender roles. In the same interview she said she’d recently taught “Born a Crime,” a memoir by former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah that explores racism and South African apartheid. (The Wilkerson, Lee and Noah books have been in the crosshairs of activists in recent years. Hawthorne’s had been a frequent target of censorship over its sexual content from the 1990s through the 2010s.)

“She’s in school, she’s in community college,” said Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a fellow Democrat who recently signed a law that requires that libraries adopt policies prohibiting book bans to remain eligible for state funding. “She understands that access to information, that your freedom to choose what it is that you want to study, making sure that you’re reading about maybe things that you don’t agree with — that that’s part of what education is.”

“This could be one of her pet issues — in terms of no book banning — so that we could get more traction and move on this, because we are not moving anywhere on this,” said Jeanine Downie, a Montclair, N.J., dermatologist and committed Biden voter who appeared on a recent Fox News voter panel. In Downie’s opinion, liberals “have not done anything significant to combat this.” The Biden camp “should lean in harder” in its rhetoric against book challenges, she said.

The Democratic base is fired up about book challenges, according to Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic pollster who served as one of two lead Biden campaign pollsters in 2020. “The polling has been extremely consistent from Day 1,” said Lake, who has tested the issue among likely 2024 registered voters. “And what it’s shown is that people are adamantly against book banning.” Biden herself is “perceived to be much less partisan” than other political figures, Lake added, and “people love that she’s a teacher.” Taking on the issue, the pollster said, “would fit very much with the way she talks,” though she hadn’t surveyed voters on the first lady and book challenges specifically.

Biden has used her profile to advocate for higher teacher pay, universal preschool and tuition-free community college. Her White House portfolio on education focuses on what she calls the “the three R’s of teaching”: “recruit, respect, and retain.” President Biden has alluded to his wife’s influence on his education agenda for decades with quips like, “I sleep with an NEA member every night,” a reference to the first lady’s membership in the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union.

Lately, however, some of the most heated topics in education politics have had to do with the content of classroom teaching, rather than cost, access and wages.

Republican-led states, empowered by the “parents’ rights” movement that took hold during the pandemic over masking and remote learning policies, have passed laws limiting how race and gender are taught in public schools. By October 2022, 25 states had passed more than 60 laws policing classroom content, according to a Washington Post analysis last year. State boards of education, interpreting those laws, have implemented curriculum standards that prescribe which materials can be used and how lessons should be framed. The Florida State Board of Education, for example, approved new rules on the teaching of Black history — including guidance suggesting slavery was beneficial to the enslaved because it taught them new skills.

In June, the White House announced it would appoint an “anti-book ban coordinator” to train school districts on how book challenges that target specific communities may violate federal law. Vice President Harris, meanwhile, has been leading the administration’s prosecution of the case against what it calls “MAGA extremism.” Harris traveled to Florida last month to chastise the state’s new education guidelines that suggest that enslaved people learned “skills” that could be “applied to their personal benefit.”

Sheila Nix, Harris’s campaign chief of staff and a former chief of staff to Jill Biden when she was second lady, told The Post that “all the principals” have a role to play in “calling out extremism.” She said: “I don’t think you can say the first lady is going to do only the policy and the vice president is only going to do the fighter role.”

Nix acknowledged that a nonpolitical goal like retaining teachers in the profession might suffer if teachers feel…