Advocates of literacy like to repeat some form of Joan Didion’s famous adage, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And they’re right. The only problem is that lately, they seem to be talking about all the wrong stories.

“The stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that we hear and read and absorb along the way in life, these are essential elements that make up who we are,” actor LeVar Burton recently intoned in a podcast with failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. “That’s what’s so confusing to me about this whole issue of banning books … is that it just doesn’t make sense, and so I’m trying to look at the underlying cause, and what I keep coming back to is that this is a power play. It’s an effort to exercise control.”