TO GET A sense of America’s war on “woke”, look at its classrooms. In many schools, teachers, parents and legislators have become locked in battle over materials that, depending on whom you ask, push a smug liberal agenda or promote an inclusive, progressive outlook on race, gender and sexuality. The American Library Association documented nearly 1,300 demands to ban or restrict books last year. One school district, Sarasota County in Florida, spent over $60,000 in legal fees to fight a lawsuit and a challenge that aimed to censor woke books.
Are children’s books really more woke than in the past? A recent study analysed the content of over 1,000 of them to see how portrayals of race and gender have changed over the past century (see chart 1).
