On Book Bans

Over on The Weekly Sift, Doug Muder posted this about book banning:

My Facebook friend Jennifer Sheridan...wrote:

I think I have figured out something important about the Book Banners.

When I was a kid in school, I was a book nerd, and my friends were book nerds, and we all knew which books had “dirty parts.” We would read them, probably giggle a bit, and then get on with our lives. No one ever made a big deal about it, it was nothing.

And I realize looking back, that if you weren’t a book nerd in school, you probably don’t know there have ALWAYS been library books that had dirty parts.

If you are a grown person now, and are hearing “filthy” passages from some books that are popular today, you might find it shocking that books with those kinds of passages can be found in public school libraries.

But because you didn’t read as a kid, you think this is all something new. It isn’t new; you’ve just shown you never cared about books.

I’ll just add that I went to a religious elementary school, so I knew where all the dirty parts of the Bible were.

As one of the book nerds back in the day, I knew where those parts were, too. In high school, I remember looking up a book in the public library that was about books that had been banned specifically so I could read the parts that had caused them to be banned! (The choice parts of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre learned me a few things, I have to say.)

Related, you may have seen this image shared on social media in the past week:

This set of books and its claim about "most banned books" irritates me because it's not true in several ways. 

The word "ban" should be reserved, in my opinion, for books that are removed from circulation in some way (with the worst form of that being burned!). None of these books are removed from circulation in public libraries, and few if any are frequently removed from school libraries in recent decades. (Really, The Scarlet Letter is one of the most banned?) 

As is pretty well known, Huck Finn and Mockingbird are sometimes challenged as part of required readings because of their use of the N word: this is not the same thing as being banned. Lord of the Flies also is removed from curriculum as not as relevant as newer books. This Snopes article has some detail on each book's banning (or challenging).

The books that are most-challenged currently are these, according to the American Library Association (reported on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website). They're not old classics; the oldest book is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Many of the books include LBTQ topics and BIPOC characters. They sometimes deal with sexual abuse and drug addiction.

Jennifer's analysis is probably true for some of today's book-banners, but I think many of them realize that books they don't like have always been in schools and libraries. The difference between the decades of her/my childhood and now is that the outright banners feel empowered to try to control everyone else's reality instead of realizing they are a distant minority who should stay in the obscure corner where they belong.