One day, when I was maybe 14, my friend Jacob invited me to play Dungeons & Dragons in his basement. My parents were skeptical. They had heard things, scandalous things, about the game. Didn’t people murder each other because of it? Wasn’t it linked to satanism? To witchcraft? The occult?
After a few days they relented, but this wasn’t exactly an isolated incident. I remember well enough — because we talked about it on the school bus — the controversy surrounding the band Judas Priest, who had scared all of our parents by allegedly including subliminal messages in their songs. Around the same time, members of the hip-hop group 2 Live Crew were charged with obscenity after a live performance of their album “As Nasty as They Wanna Be.” On the way home, we passed around a friend’s Walkman, partaking of the forbidden fruit — a raunchy song called “Me So Horny.”
Most of us turned out OK, but moral panics like these are rarely innocuous. They often redound on marginalized bodies, as 2 Live Crew member Luther Campbell noted in a November 1990 column published in the Los Angeles Times. Why were people so worried about the group’s lyrics? Shouldn’t they be focusing on hunger and homelessness and education instead? Our priorities, Campbell argued, are backward.
The other moral panics of my youth were more harmful.
The panic around the AIDS epidemic, for example, through its dehumanization of gay men, led to a horrific loss of life. The conjured lawlessness and violence of “inner” cities (recently reprised by U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz) led to, among other things, the 1994 federal crime bill, which scholars now agree was largely responsible for unprecedented levels of mass incarceration and the shattered communities that were the result.
It would be one thing if these fears were justified, but as 2 Live Crew’s Campbell noted elsewhere, they are often weaponized for political gain. That is their primary purpose. And for that reason, it doesn’t matter who they hurt as long as the politicians who invoke them ascend to or remain in power.
In our current historical moment, as record numbers of young people are identifying as members of the LGBTQ community, school boards are pulling materials from their libraries and classrooms that speak to students’ lived experiences. It’s an extension of the manufactured crisis over critical race theory. There, too, the strategy was to divide the electorate by creating a panic over what was being taught in schools — never mind the fact that it wasn’t.
“We know,” Campbell wrote in 1990, “that today they’re trying to censor rap and tomorrow it could be classical music or theater or …” He must have known his rhetorical flourish was far-fetched. For imagine if, at the same school board meetings, someone proposed pulling all the material that pertained to straight white men — a category to which I belong. Such a man might be forgiven for feeling himself invalidated — canceled, in the parlance of the right.
No one is proposing to censor books about straight white people precisely because straight white people are the ones whose power a moral panic seeks to maintain. The perceived danger presented by transgender kids, say, or the notion that a nation founded on slavery and genocide might not have escaped those roots, is that power will have to be shared. That’s why some are working hard to quash the voices of others. They hear those voices, asserting their own humanity, as a threat.
Even when the rhetoric of the censors isn’t violent — and it often is, even if in veiled form — the costs of erasure are profound. I will not rehash here the statistics about the well-documented susceptibility to self-harm and physical violence that accompanies queer life in our culture, but only because I wish to emphasize the inverse: the right to safety, family (chosen and not), fulfillment and the joy that should be part of every human life.
“We’re just asking questions,” some say. “Can’t we have a debate?” they wonder.
“Everything is in the language that we use,” the Native American poet Layli Long Soldier writes, and in this regard the word “debate” is instructive. Another person’s identity isn’t something you debate. It’s something you do your best to embrace.
The human project, the late Toni Morrison once wrote, “is to remain human and to block the dehumanization of others.” As I look back at recent election cycles in which manufactured moral panics have played a dominant role, and as I look around Lancaster County and see censorship efforts in full swing, I worry that future elections will feature more of the same craven power plays. I worry that as voters we have not yet become sufficiently inoculated against these cynical strategies in which people — children, even — are used as political pawns in fake panics.
We need, more than ever, to resist the dehumanization of our fellow citizens, especially our Black and queer and transgender friends, family and neighbors. Because if we don’t, the cost to human life will be high.
Erik S. Anderson is associate professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College. His most recent book is “Bird” (Bloomsbury).
