By Chris Richards
Republished from the author’s substack.
At first I didn’t know what to make of Judd Legum’s piece on what he calls “Scholastic’s Bigot Button.” It raises some interesting ideas about whether or not a publisher should pander to conservative political biases by allowing them to hide liberal titles. It shows how not offending certain kinds of white people continues to be an important cultural priority. It informs readers of a right wing pressure campaign against Scholastic Corporation, spearheaded by a conservative Christian publisher of children’s books called “Brave Books.” What it doesn’t really engage with is who Scholastic Corporation is and why the company has so much power.
This is important because who Scholastic is, what they do, and the power they have is central to the right wing pressure campaign to which Scholastic is capitulating. At the moment, Scholastic is selling at $37.48 a share. As Judd Legum points out in his article, it is a publicly traded company with more than a billion dollars of market capitalization. What that means in plain English is that Scholastic’s division Arthur A. Levine Books is the original US publisher of JK Rowling and Philip Pullman. Levine himself left Scholastic in 2019 to establish his own company, but Scholastic still handles the back catalog. That means Harry Potter and “The Golden Compass” are controlled by Scholastic here in the US. In addition, Scholastic itself is the publisher of Suzanne Collins. That’s a lot of Young Adult literary culture in one place.
That’s just one of Scholastic’s four main business lines. Children’s and Young Adult publishing is big money as it is, but the media rights for those books is big money too. Which is why Scholastic Entertainment exists, to develop intellectual property from Clifford the Big Red Dog, to Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and the Golden Compass, to Goosebumps. There’s a lot of money in this area too, and a lot of power, but this isn’t why Kirk Cameron’s publisher is going after Scholastic.
You see, Scholastic pretty much controls school book fairs. It turns out that schools don’t just hold book fair themselves using decorations made by teachers and librarians. They pay someone to run the book fair for them. Usually that someone is Scholastic Book Fairs. So nearly every time a public school holds a book fair, Scholastic makes a buck. Scholastic also has book fair packages designed to appeal to different schools as different markets. Here is where Brave Books and their pressure campaign targeting Scholastic comes in.
According to its website, Brave Books was founded by Trent Talbot. Dr. Trent Talbot was a practicing ophthalmologist who was so disgusted by “the inappropriate content being pushed upon children”that he just needed to found a right wing Christian kids’ book and YA publishing company to give parents and schools “a wholesome alternative.” So he naturally decided that Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron were the people he should turn to for help. I think of “wholesome” and I immediately want Kevin Sorbo to teach my kids about masculinity, right?
Because being an obnoxious conservative bigot is a brand in today’s America, Brave Books opened its own book club and book fair divisions to compete with Scholastic and chose an openly confrontational marketing tactic. Brave decided to accuse Scholastic of advancing the LGBTQ+ agenda, because we all know that blatantly accusing your competition of wanting to groom parents’ kids is one way to stake out your own recognizable brand. It also makes it clear that you value the thoughts, feelings, and spending money of the Christian conservative market.
This is the basic background of the specific issue that Legum is writing about. I want to be clear about this background before touching on the specifics of his piece and the core problem left unaddressed by his piece. That core problem, imo, is more important than the immediate specifics of what Scholastic is doing under pressure from Brave. The problem is one of capitalism, and of how the fiduciary responsibilities of corporate officers are seen in the modern business culture.
The specifics of this news are simple. In the face of a marketing offensive from a competitor accusing Scholastic of marketing “inappropriate material” at book fairs, Scholastic has introduced an easy button that school employees planning a book fair can use to eliminate any “objectional content” from their school’s book fairs. Naturally the “objectional content” is all about racial inclusion, the lives of Black people like Ketanji Brown Jackson and John Lewis, and teaching kids that LGBTQ+ families are as valuable as traditional Christian families.
It’s important to keep this in the proper context and look at the material underpinnings of what is happening. This isn’t about Scholastic executives being afraid they will be censored by an out of control state governor like Ron DeSantis. This isn’t even about complaints being made by vigilante parents. This is about a corporate competitor of Scholastic choosing to compete by condemning the morality of Scholastic, as a company, in order to try to sell some schools Christian book fair packages. This is the business of capitalism as usual, with Brave Brooks choosing to brand themselves as the “choice for Christians who want their kids to be safe at the book fair.” It’s a marketing gimmick.
When Scholastic adds a button to their system to exclude liberal content to which conservatives might object, they aren’t knuckling under to any public censorship campaign. They aren’t bowing to the forces of a repressive state. No, it’s much simpler.
They are protecting their market share by giving conservative Christian school employees the easy and quick option to keep liberal material out of the book fair. They don’t want to lose market share because the school districts in Texas and Florida go with the conservative book fair option. So they are making sure their interface allows conservative Christian school employees to feel comfortable with their buying decisions.
There’s a conversation that we should be having about corporate control of our “public” education system that we’re not having.
