Danica Davidson
September 18, 2024 
Sasaki and Miyano volume 1, a BL manga rated Teen, was recently banned district-wide by Florida’s Brevard County Public School Board. This occurred after a mother who hadn’t read the book put in an official complaint, calling it pornography and suggesting it could lead to “compulsive masturbation.” During the board meeting, board member Megan Wright, who voted to ban Sasaki and Miyano, took offense to the gay couple, calling it “inappropriate,” and also complained that the book reads right to left (like the Japanese language), saying, “[W]e’ve been teaching our kids from day one, you start at the beginning and you read from left to right, bottom to top.” Now Brevard School Board member Jennifer Jenkins and review committee member Paul Roub, both of whom are against the ban, spoke to Otaku USA to share their sides of what happened.
First, Jenkins gave a little background. “I ran in 2020 [for school board] and when I won, I unseated the Republican incumbent. That woman went on to be one of the cofounders of Moms for Liberty [a political group that supports book bans]. We are legitimately the first county to start the book banning nonsense in the state of Florida. Florida started to create all the book ban laws, and Moms for Liberty would take advantage of that. Brevard County initially started a book review committee with members of the community, and they had specific criteria of who had to be a part of it: so, a parent, an educator in that grade level, a school psychologist, a media specialist. Fast forward to 2022 when the new board came on. They paused the book review committee and they removed all experts from the conversation, because they said they have a ‘conflict of interest.’ And so the only members that remained were five people that were appointed by each board member. There are five board members on my board, so each one gets to pick a random community member to be a part of it [as a reviewer]. They originally had a vote and they decided what [books] stayed and went, but then the board didn’t like that. So they [the reviewers] no longer had a vote, they had recommendations, and then it’d go to the board.”
She continued, “I have no idea how this book [Sasaki and Miyano] even got to the point of what it did, based on what was written on it. [The complaint] should have never been taken seriously.”
Roub, who keeps a website tracking book bans in Brevard County, explained, “A formal challenge now causes the book to be removed from shelves immediately. They challenge the book, it’s gone. It gets added to our schedule, we review it, the board votes on it. Now it’s gone for eight years. There’s no appeal process in this district. There is some sort of statutory thing where people can mount legal challenges, which a couple groups are definitely interested in doing.”
Roub further pointed out that in the paperwork, Cassandra Palmieri, who filed the complaint, could have made a request that her own child doesn’t read Sasaki and Miyano. Instead, she marked that no child in the district should have access to it through their school libraries.
“Jennifer has told me that no one who has ever submitted this form just opted their own child out,” Roub commented. “It’s never about their own kids.”
Roub says his kids read manga, and they think the challenge against Sasaki and Miyano was ridiculous. Roub has read the book, and he agrees. He compared the relationship between Sasaki and Miyano as being like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer, but no one would think to ban that book over their relationship. Roub and his son laugh-cried reading the complaint’s suggestions that Sasaki and Miyano could be replaced with Chainsaw Man and Sailor Moon (both titles that also have gay characters).
“There’s a narrative that we come up against repeatedly: ‘We’re protecting the children from porn,’” said Roub. “There’s no porn in the schools. There have been laws against that forever.”
Talking about Wright’s complaints that the book reads right to left, Roub said he thinks exposing kids to languages that read right to left could expand their horizons and be a lesson in itself. “Kids are sponges. They’ll learn all sorts of things really quickly. I don’t get the idea that this would somehow harm their reading progress. Oh, and to be clear, [Wright], unlike everyone else on the board, is not an educator. She is not a teacher. She rose to prominence yelling at the school board because she was anti-masking and anti-health measures [during COVID]. She coasted in on the Moms for Liberty train. So the non-teacher having opinions about a back-to-front book being problematic is just batshit to me.”
Also commenting on Wright’s complaints on how the book is read, Jenkins said, “To me that’s just a very bigoted mentality of, you know, ‘This isn’t American.’”
After the ban, Jenkins said many people reached out to her, especially parents of middle school students. Jenkins paraphrased what she said a number of the messages expressed: “My child struggled to find a place, or my child struggled to find something they were interested in reading.” She said the parents she heard from were especially upset about the board member who called Sasaki and Miyano “stupid”: “And so they [the parents] felt like that comment was calling their kids stupid or saying that their kids’ interests are stupid.”
Jenkins and Roub are not aware of other manga titles being challenged in Brevard District. At least, no challenges have come before the board involving manga. They both stated that a lot of the challenges they do see are against books with LGBTQ characters or authors. Jenkins also talked about books on African American history and Holocaust victim Anne Frank being attacked by people who wanted to see them banned in the district. Roub said violence usually isn’t an issue in these bans, but things involving sex are.
Jenkins said, “I had asked our lawyer, “Does this [the ban of Sasaki and Miyano] set us up for a legal challenge since they’re blatantly, just willy-nilly removing this book and it has nothing to do with House Bill 1069?’ And his response was, ‘Yeah.’ It just blew my mind that they [the school board members who voted for the ban] were just so bold and brazen, like, ‘I don’t care that we’re going to waste taxpayer money on lawsuits.’”
Jenkins encourages people to stand up to book bans. “I really believe that this is much bigger than just controlling what children are reading. I think it’s just a distraction, number one, but also just a catalyst to make it okay to discriminate.”
“[People] would be startled at how little thought went into taking a book away from potentially any student in the district,” Roub said. “This person, who had never read the book, and never will, filled out a form and [Sasaki and Miyano] was removed from the shelves. An uninformed challenge took that book away from other people’s kids, and I find that horrifying.”
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Danica Davidson is the author of the bestselling Manga Art for Beginners with artist Melanie Westin, plus its sequel, Manga Art for Everyone, and the first-of-its-kind manga chalk book Chalk Art Manga, both illustrated by professional Japanese mangaka Rena Saiya. Check out her other comics and books at www.danicadavidson.com.
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