Rose Else-Mitchell
President, Education Solutions at Scholastic
557 Broadway, New York City, New York 10012


Dear Ms. Else-Mitchell,

We, the undersigned, are a group of authors writing to protest your division’s soft-censorship of Love in the Library, a picture book by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Yas Imamura.

Published originally by Candlewick, the book is a love story set during a terrible time in American history: the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

Your division at Scholastic offered to license this book, something that understandably thrilled the author. Scholastic’s Education Solutions Division serves 90 percent of the public schools in the United States. There is no other comparable book distribution force. You are a functional monopoly.

You had a condition, though: that the word “racism” be removed from the author’s note. We understand that you intended this to be a concession to a “politically sensitive moment.”

This is not a “politically sensitive moment”; this is a time where racists have been emboldened and racism is on the rise. In 2021, anti-Asian American hate crimes increased 224 percent during what the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism called “the dawn of a decade of rising hate.”  

What’s more, racism is a factually accurate description. In the words of a 1982 U.S. government report on the matter, the incarceration of Japanese Americans was caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”  

Lest you think this was concluded in hindsight, here’s what Idaho’s Attorney General stated at the time: “We want to keep this a white man’s country. All Japanese [should] be put in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.”

This vile act of racism traumatized generations of human beings because of their ancestry. It wasn’t inconvenience, a misunderstanding, or the product of a different time. It was an exercise of the worst human impulses, which we are seeing all around us today, and which your decision enables.

Your request that Tokuda-Hall erase the key factual context from her book is reckless and harmful to readers. Your monopoly reach means that you have an obligation to ensure that the stories you present are the highest quality. As a former classroom teacher, surely you understand that factual accuracy in educational materials is paramount.

This is a time that calls for courage and truth, not pandering to the worst elements of American democracy. If this nation is to have a just and prosperous future, children need and deserve stories that are diverse, responsible, and—when based in history—true.
 
We ask that you publish Love in the Library as it was written, that you apologize to the author and illustrator publicly, and that you take public responsibility for the decision to censor a book. We also ask that you audit your past decisions so that essential titles that were rejected or overlooked may be brought to the forefront and made available to all of our readers who need them, as promised by Scholastic’s mission statement, "to encourage the intellectual and personal growth of all children." 

These are essential steps to restoring faith in your division.Carrie Tillotson
Skylaar Amann
Andrea Wang
Mel Cordan
Sandra Schwab
Lori Kilkelly, literary agent