California Sen. Laphonza Butler reads Audre Lorde in protest of GOP book banning

U.S. Sen. Laphonza Butler of California, the first Black lesbian in the chamber, kicked off a series of readings from banned books Thursday on the Senate floor with an excerpt from the work of another Black lesbian — Audre Lorde’sSister Outsider.

Butler began by invoking the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and its guarantee of freedom of speech and the press without government interference. “This amendment gives all Americans the right to speak, publish, and read what they wish, free from government censorship,” she said.

“But a nationwide campaign in states like Florida, Utah, North Dakota, and even California has been deployed to limit our children’a learning and enforce restrictions on one of our most fundamental freedoms,” she continued. “Right now extremist politicians are working overtime to strip our nation’s bookshelves of essential literature that helps to tell the complete story of America, including the stories of great sacrifice, contribution, and pain of Black Americans.”

Supporters of book bans claim they’re protecting parents’ rights and children’s innocence, she said, but what they’re doing is really “an utter slap in the face” to those who’ve had to fight to have their stories told. This is also “a direct attack” on the experience and existence of the most ethnically diverse generation in history, she said.

In 2022, more than 2,500 books were targeted nationwide, the majority of them about Black or LGBTQ+ people, Butler noted. “I will not stand by silently as our stories get erased,” she said. That’s why she’ll be taking to the Senate floor regularly to read excerpts from books “that tell the story of our nation, its legacy, and the people who contribute to America’s character of imperfection, of resilience, and of progress,” she explained. She invited her colleagues to do so as well.

Lorde, she said, is a “genius as a writer, a poet, a philosopher, and civil rights activist.” Sister Outsider, a collection of speeches and essays, “explores the questions surrounding race, identity, life, community, and meaning from her lens as a Black queer woman from Harlem” and invites readers “to draw new conclusions about the world around them,” Butler said. The essay she read from deals with Lorde’s experience of breast cancer.

Senator Laphonza Butler kicked off her banned book-reading serieswww.youtube.com

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality and what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it may be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences,” the excerpt began. “Of what had I ever been afraid of? To question or to speak as I believed … could have meant pain or death, but we all hurt in so many different ways all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence.”

After she read the excerpt, Butler said, “The writings of Ms. Lorde and the transformation of silence into action are not only a beautiful articulation examining the cost of being silent; she gives us aa better gift. She invites us to acknowledge our commonalities as well as our differences in order to give them voice and to deepen our understanding and expand the power of our words.” While written in 1977, this essay could have been written yesterday, she said.

But educators in Tennessee are targeting Sister Outsider and hundreds of other books, Butler noted. “Now more than ever … we must heed Ms. Lorde’s call to speak into the silence, to raise our voices and reject the intimidation of those who would have the history of our nation, the beauty of our differences, and the complexity of our humanity disappear from generations of learners to come,” she concluded.