Wrapping up Banned Books Week

While preparing this series on this year's Banned Books Week, which ends today, I happened to be searching some old posts here for an unrelated reason, and coincidentally came upon this one from 2004, which I had forgotten about. In it, I quote Mark Shea from his now-defunct Blogger blog:

I assert that no book is banned if it's not illegal to print it or possess it. For every book on their "banned" list, I could order up a dozen copies and freely read them on the steps of the police station. . . .

This affected outrage at this straw-man threat to liberty leads people to believe that they are living with a boot on their collective neck. And since most—;if not all—;of the banned books are children's books "banned" at the behest of parents, the kids get the idea that parents are oppressive.

Seventeen years later, I still generally agree with this. In fact, it's worth elaborating on.

It's not about censorship

"Banned Books Week" isn't really about banning books. The idea of "censorship" implies a certain level of power to suppress books. None of the books that the American Library Association highlights are really suppressed. Instead, Banned Books Week is really about challenged books: usually when a library patron or parent questions whether a work is appropriate for the the library or age-appropriate for a school curriculum or library. A parent has no authority to ban a book. She has only whatever persuasive ability she can use convince librarians or school trustees to remove it.

I could find no statistics on the ratio of book challenges to successful book challenges, but I can't imagine they're anything but a small minority. And even if they're successful, their effectiveness is limited, generally to a single school board or library system. Meanwhile, that same book is available from other libraries, bookstores, Amazon, maybe even easily downloaded from the Internet. In grade 10, I read Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, a perpetual candidate for book challenges (even in 2020, it appears on the ALA's list of top 10 challenged books). Suppose it had been removed from my English curriculum. No matter. My 15-year-old self could have still borrowed the public library's copy, or the one on my parents' bookshelf, sat down on the lawn in full view of the school office, and read Of Mice and Men with impunity.

"Censorship" is a straw man. Maybe they could pull Of Mice and Men from the school library or stop teaching it in literature classes. They couldn't stop me from reading it on my own. In fact, that would be nigh unconstitutional.

It's about who does the challenging

Deciding what gets included or omitted happens all the time. Resources such as classroom time, money, and shelf space are finite. You can't teach everything, or offer it for loan. Part of the job of schools, libraries, booksellers, etc. is to curate the materials they can offer. They need to balance a wide range of interests: notability, community standards, viewpoint diversity, profitability, age-appropriateness, and so forth.

Consider this scenario. The head librarian of a public library system (let's call her "Lisa") hears that Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to cease publication of some of Dr. Seuss's older books because of racially insensitive illustrations. She finds And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street in the children's section and starts reading it. Seeing an illustration of a Chinese man in a coolie hat and pigtail, eating with chopsticks, she realizes, "My goodness, they're right." Lisa has the book removed from the stacks. If she is asked, she says the library needs to look out for books containing outdated racial attitudes, and provide more culturally relevant material to contemporary children.

Around the same time, a parent (we'll call him "George") learns that his high-school-aged son will be reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in his English class the next school year. George recognizes the novel's greatness and its importance to American literature; however, he believes that the novel's ubiquitous racial slurs (Lee uses the N-word an awful lot) and frank discussion of rape make are unsuitable for his son's grade. At the next school board meeting, George presents his concerns, and asks if there is a more appropriate novel, touching on the same themes, that could be substituted. In doing so, he accidentally becomes a story on the local news and touches off a heated controversy in the community. In the end, George's challenge is unsuccessful and his son is required to read To Kill a Mockingbird that fall.

As September comes to a close, Lisa is planning a display for Banned Books Week in the library lobby. She remembers the kerfluffle over To Kill a Mockingbird, and puts a copy on display, along with a few other frequently challenged books

Lisa and George each challenged a book. And they each did so for the same reason: insensitive racial subject matter deemed inappropriate for their targeted age group. George is perceived as a censorious Philistine, and To Kill a Mockingbird goes into a display case celebrating "the freedom to read." Lisa and her staff are perceived as defenders of intellectual freedom, while And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street goes into a dumpster.

The real issue is not that materials are challenged for inclusion. It's who does the challenging.

I don't begrudge librarians, teachers, booksellers, etc. their curating role. That's their responsibility. But it's not only their responsibility. Parents, for example, need to keep an eye on the media (not just books) that their children are ingesting, and the librarians and teachers who are employed to serve them need to be receptive to their concerns. Instead, every September, we get the implied hostility of Banned Books Week, where the curators pat their own backs while manning the barricades against the monstrous regiment of oppressive Mrs. Grundies who think English teachers can do better than The Catcher in the Rye. We're just one angry letter from a concerned citizen away from Fahrenheit 451. Meanwhile, the curators can stack the shelves and curricula with whatever they please.

I'm as anti-censorship as they come, and I've said so many times. If you want me to read something, just call it "dangerous" or "problematic," then call for it to be removed, and you'll at least make me wonder what you're so eager to hide. All hail reverse psychology. But we need to be honest about what "Banned Books Week" really is. It's not an anti-censorship campaign; it's a week of self-congratulation by the self-appointed gatekeepers of intellectual freedom.

Postscript

In that same 2004 blog post, I included a list of books that had been challenged somewhere, and highlighted the ones I had read. At the time, it totalled 17. In the 17 years since (coincidentally), not counting the last two Harry Potter volumes that were yet to be published, I've managed to read a whopping one more on the list: that being Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes. As it turns out, banned books apparently aren't really that interesting.