From The Washington Post:
If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it, but I’ve been irritated for a long time by Banned Books Week. Despite my unqualified support for the freedom to read, the annual celebration, which began Sunday, has always struck me as shrill and inaccurate. I know the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association and other fine sponsors are doing important, necessary work. I just wish Banned Books Week didn’t appear to exaggerate a problem that’s largely confined to our repressive past.
All week in bookstores and libraries around the country, you’ll see displays, banners and special events like the Drag Queen Story Hour at the Brooklyn Public Library on Wednesday. Central to these celebrations is the annual list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books. This year, like most years, that list includes: Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and other fantastic, award-winning novels that only the most ignorant and backward people would object to.
. . . .
Which is part of the problem. Are we winning any converts with this annual orgy of self-righteousness? The rhetoric of Banned Books Week is pitched at such a fervent level that crucial distinctions are burned away by the fire of our moral certainty, which is an ill that wide reading should cure not exacerbate.
And what books are actually, effectively “banned” in the United States nowadays? The titles on the Top 10 Most Challenged list, in fact, sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year. How many authors would kill to be “challenged” like that?
James LaRue, from the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association, is ready for these quibbles even before I call him. He’s heard them before, but he answers my questions with the patience and clarity of a good librarian — which he once was.
“Who are we kidding?” I ask him. “Books aren’t ‘banned’ in this country anymore. The Supreme Court has made that impossible.”
But LaRue nudges me away from the legal meaning of the term “banned” to consider the lived experience of a vulnerable, lonely reader:
“There are so many places like in rural communities where you say, ‘Well, the book isn’t banned. It’s still been published. It’s still available on Amazon. It’s still in a bookstore.’ But let’s say you’re a young gay kid, and you go to your library, and David Levithan’s ‘Two Boys Kissing’ has been removed, and so you don’t know that it’s there. You don’t have a credit card to get it from Amazon. You can’t hop in a car if you’re 14 years old and drive to a bookstore. So the ban is not a trivial thing. It’s a deliberate suppression of a viewpoint that has real consequences for people.”
. . . .
But what about the way Banned Books Week implicitly stigmatizes anyone who objects to a librarian’s or a teacher’s judgment? The vast majority of people who “challenge” titles are simply parents concerned about the age-appropriateness of books their children are being exposed to. Doesn’t Banned Books Week carelessly lump together the interested mother with the book-burning Nazi?
“If I say, ‘I don’t want my child to read this,’ you have the right to do that,” LaRue acknowledges. “But when you try to remove it from the library, you’re saying that other people’s children don’t have the right to read it.” That, he suggests, is the hallmark of an intolerant society.
Link to the rest at The Washington Post
PG suggests there are certain groups of people who enjoy the frisson that accompanies protests that stick it to the man without actually risking anything and protecting “vulnerable, lonely readers” without actually knowing any.
The biggest threat to libraries in “rural communities” is the lack of money to acquire books and keep the lights on. There’s also the inconvenient truth that a great many people who read are reading on the internet. Spending a dollar to improve internet access might bring more benefits to vulnerable, lonely readers than spending a dollar on a physical library.
I respectfully disagree with making this a binary argument.
Yes, lack of funds — especially outside of major urban areas — is probably a more-prevalent danger to the diversity and maintenance of library collections.
No, book-banning efforts are not “largely confined to our repressive past.” Unless, that is, the “repressive past” in question is less than a decade ago in a Big Ten college town that is not itself a major metropolitan area, Three times in four years.
These frequently work together to disguise each other in practice. On the one hand, there’s inordinate pressure applied to acquisition budgets for public libraries because the librarians acquired “inappropriate material not representative of community values” (to quote a town council member in 2009 from one of the surrounding communities to that Big Ten town). That is, if the librarians do acquire “inappropriate” materials, those who object will just reduce the acquisition budget. On the other hand, librarians in non-ethnically/culturally-diverse subareas, even in major metropolitan areas like the Bay Area (specifically, some of the smaller communities in San Mateo country), have been bullied into not even considering “controversial” books for acquisition because they understand that budgeting cycle all too well.
Too, one should not forget that the focus of a lot of these efforts is school libraries,
In short, the sentiments in the article and in PG’s response to it are in my experience overly simplistic.
Do we need Mother’s Day? Father’s Day? Black History Month? Fourth of July? 9/11?
Any of the many things somebody somewhere thinks we should be reminded of.
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRnTovm26I4 is the reason I had to throw BHM into the mix. 😉 )
The books aren’t free.
There’s money at stake.
Whose ox is getting gored?
Whose feelings are getting hurt being reminded others may not have a problem with what upsets them?
(Maybe this was the start of the trigger people! 😉 )
Leaving aside “moral perversions like homosexuality”–which is an individual point of view not shared universally throughout our society.
There are legitimate reasons to restrict access of certain materials to children. Take an example: the holocaust. Very few people in our society would disagree that the holocaust happened and that it was a vile crime against humanity. This consensus is as universal as anything could be. I hope HS kids read all about the holocaust. But I don’t think an eight year old should be exposed to the horrors of it.
So some books SHOULD be challenged at elementery school libraries, fewer at middle school libraries, and none at high school and public libraries. This isn’t the same as banning books.
I read Anne Frank when I was eight. My mother gave it to me. Very glad she did.
Fair enough.
But, would it have been okay to give it to a kid of six? My oldest child was reading before kindergarten–I wouldn’t have started him on the holocaust at that age. How about giving a work that GRAPHICALLY described the death camps to a child of eight? Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Or the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields? Or the predations of any serial killer? Should eight year olds be reading about the Zodiac Killer? Son of Sam? John Wayne Gacy? Hannibal Lecter?
Children are innocent. The loss of innocence is a painful, but necessary process, that ideally should be carefully guided by parents. (I note that it was your mother who judged you were mature enough to take on ANNE FRANK.)
Adult citizens should have access to everything. But a thoughtful discussion on what and when kids should be exposed to mature material is NOT the same as banning books.
Most public libraries today supply their clients with both paper and digital books. In our library system, both paper and digital circulation has been increasing for the last few years.
Most public libraries take extending digital access seriously. In our system’s case, we supply free access to the network at all of our branches. At some branches, this is a convenience, but not a vital service, but in other branches, many people would not have digital access without our services.
I remember having a “child” library card. It limited what I could check out. If I remember correctly, at age twelve I could get an “adult” card, with a signed form from a parent or guardian. Never did, because the local library never had anything for what I was reading (even back in the late 1960s, PG’s noted problem with funding was widespread).
“If I say, ‘I don’t want my child to read this,’ you have the right to do that,” LaRue acknowledges. “But when you try to remove it from the library, you’re saying that other people’s children don’t have the right to read it.” That, he suggests, is the hallmark of an intolerant society.’
No, it’s the hallmark of a society that doesn’t want to support morral perversions like homosexuality,.
Young people are impressionable, and so it’s important that parents and other adults make sure that they read books which are appropriate for them, which nurture their imaginations and help them become good people, not stories filled with violence and LGBTQ nonsense.
Teach children whatever you like. Defining homosexuality as a moral perversion is certainly your prerogative, but many other members of the public disagree with you. Libraries are neutral– beliefs are up to our patrons, not us.
If it’s a public library, the content of the library collection is up to the taxpayers, and any taxpayer has a right to campaign for or against any part of that content.
One side wins, and one loses. But the absence of any book from a given library collection is hardly a ban.
I agree with your thoughts. What about the libraries that ban Little House on the Prairie or To Kill a Mockingbird or other authors that they deem unacceptable? They need to be held accountable!
My right to read a given book imposes no obligation on anyone to provide it.
PG is succinctly correct in that last paragraph!