A Few Thoughts on the End of Banned Books Week

I’ve been getting some questions about book bans in America.

First…let me reassure my friends outside the United States that in 99.9% of cases (I made up that figure, for argument’s sake, but IMO it’s a decent estimate) books are not being taken off shelves everywhere and not allowed to be sold or loaned. (I’ll talk about that other 0.1% later.)

In the United States, book bans and challenges were originally aimed at school curriculum and school libraries. The American Library Association began tracking those challenges in 2001. In the early days, if concerned parents didn’t want their children to read work that they deemed inappropriate, they raised an objection. And that’s totally valid—you get to decide for your own child (at least until they figure out how to sneak a copy from … somewhere … and read it with a flashlight under the blankets). I’m absolutely sure that if my fourth-grade teacher required us to read the Bible, my parents would have raced up to that school and gone all Brooklyn on her. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Unfortunately, I was caught in fourth grade with a copy of “The Secret of Santa Vittorio” in my desk—a little racy then but tame by today’s standards—and my mother had to call Mrs. Prusak and say she’d given me permission to read it.

Anyway. That was then, and this is now. In recent years, book challenges have become a political football—no, an entire football league. Organizations like Moms for Liberty compile lists in the tens and hundreds of books they consider offensive and raise objections to them wholesale, regardless of whether that book is even in a particular school library or curriculum, regardless of whether they have children in that school district or even in that state.

I highly doubt that a middle school library is going to have “Fifty Shades of Grey” on their shelves. But I didn’t say that common sense is being applied here. It’s all vibes and culture wars and what people see in their right-wing bubbles.

Or cases like “Gender Queer,” in which a senator I won’t name read aloud one short passage that could raise some eyebrows but is completely in context if someone took the time and effort to read the whole book. (It’s a really poignant and authentic book, too; a graphic novel about the writer’s adolescent experience with gender labels and identity.) For a while, it seemed like that line was all Fox News talked about—without considering that for some kids, this could be completely appropriate, inspirational, and might even be life-saving reading.

Now let’s get to that 0.1%. Invariably, when I talk about Banned Books Week, someone will rebut me along the lines of “You’re reading the books, so how can they be banned?” While the “puny spirits” (an absolutely wonderful description by LeVar Burton of those who would ban a book for everyone) are trying to push into public libraries, these books are available in most public libraries or from retail outlets. Whether kids in rural areas or whose families don’t have the means to buy or borrow a book is a whole other discussion.

The second rebuttal I get are those extremely few but very public cases where the rights-owner might say, “You know, that particular bit of the story might be considered offensive now, so I’m going to update it and republish, or just commit that title to the dustbin of history.” Yeah, they have the right to do that, as the rights-owner. This does not mean a book is being banned. It means that the estate of Dr. Seuss decided to unpublish or modify a work where they have the rights to do so. You don’t see those old jingoistic and racist Bugs Bunny cartoons anymore, do you?

However I likely would have an objection if a publisher, without consent of the author or the author’s estate, decided they didn’t like that particular word in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and took it out completely. Because this would not be the author’s intent. It would remove the historical context from the work. Add a foreword if you want to explain why that word is there, if you must. But let the work stand. Because I think we all need to understand our history, and if we try to pretend it doesn’t exist, it will cause our children more harm than good.

What do you think?

Some resources on the subject:

“Assembly Required,” a podcast with Stacey Abrams produced by Crooked Media, the episode with Le Var Burton talking about books, reading, and book bans.

Book ban data: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data

How to report censorship: https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/report