A Sense of Doubt blog post #2972 - The Problems With Book Banning - Censorship part two

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2972 - The Problems With Book Banning - Censorship part two

Second of three posts collecting censorship materials for my presentation.

Thanks for tuning in.

Ron DeSantis Book Censorship Empties School Libraries, Makes Little Kids Cry https://t.co/0gdj7wtNCT

— gmrstudios (@gmrstudios) February 1, 2023

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/a-florida-school-board-member-speaks-out-about-being-targeted-by-desantis/


On challenging books: My concern about book banning, which is a cornerstone of fascism, is that we already have a policy in place that if a parent is not happy with a book or a lesson plan, they merely have to speak to their teacher and the teacher will not allow the book to be checked out of the media center for that student. Or, if there’s a lesson plan, the teacher will substitute a different lesson for that student. So why is it that any parent feels that they have the right to speak on behalf of other parents’ rights for their child to read a book or have a lesson? That’s just pure politics and fascism. Plain and simple.



https://www.openculture.com/2023/01/the-brooklyn-public-library-gives-every-teenager-in-the-u-s-free-access-to-censored-books.html



https://www.wonkette.com/the-stupid-it-burns-books



also as writing sample for English 101?


https://reason.com/2022/07/03/who-controls-what-books-you-can-read/


ISSUE:

https://reason.com/issue/august-september-2022/



https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2022/09/banned-books-oklahoma-teacher-revoked-education-secretary/

https://www.openculture.com/2022/08/the-brooklyn-public-library-gives-every-teenager-in-the-u-s-free-access-to-books-getting-censored-by-american-schools.html


IMAGES VIA "Censorship Sucks"

https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-book-banning-libraries-lgbtq-hood-county#1392094

July 31, 2022

By Claire Moses

Good morning. Today, we explain the increasing politicization of the book-banning debate.

Books at a New Jersey high school library that were targeted for bans.Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

A growing trend

Book-banning attempts have grown in the U.S. over the past few years from relatively isolated battles to a broader effort aimed at works about sexual and racial identity. Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris cover the publishing industry. I spoke to them about what’s behind this trend.

Claire: How did book-banning efforts become so widespread?

Alexandra: We’ve seen this going from a school or community issue to a really polarizing political issue. Before, parents might hear about a book because their child brought a copy home; now, complaints on social media about inappropriate material go viral, and that leads to more complaints in schools and libraries across the country.

Elected officials are also turning book banning into another wedge issue in the culture wars. Last fall, a Republican representative in Texas put together a list of 850 books that he argued were inappropriate material in schools and included books about sexuality, racism and American history. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned on the issue by arguing that parents, not schools, should control what their children read. Democrats have also seized on the issue through congressional hearings about rising book bans.

And, sometimes, the disputes have spilled into something more menacing. The Proud Boys, the far-right group with a history of street fighting, showed up at a drag-queen-hosted story hour for families in a library in San Lorenzo, Calif.

Why do parents and conservatives want these bans?

Alexandra: For some parents, it’s about preventing kids from reading certain things. Others want to introduce certain topics — like L.G.B.T. rights or race — to their children themselves.

A lot of the people I’ve spoken to say they don’t consider the bans they want to be racist or bigoted. They say the books contain specific content that they feel isn’t appropriate for children, and they’ll sometimes point to explicit passages. But librarians we speak to say that the most challenged books around the country are basically all about Black or brown or L.G.B.T. characters.

In Texas, residents sued a library after a library official took books off the shelves based on a list from an elected official. They weren’t all children’s books; the list included Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi.

It’s hard to disentangle the banning surge from other conservative efforts to use the government to limit expression, including what critics call Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Those are all movements that have overlapped and spurred book-banning debates.

Elizabeth: Book banning is part of a wider political context right now, of extreme polarization, of heightened political tensions and the amplification of certain messages by the kinds of media — social or otherwise — that people consume.

Has any banning effort stood out to you?

Elizabeth: In Virginia Beach, a local politician sued Barnes & Noble over two books, “Gender Queer,” a memoir by Maia Kobabe, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” a fantasy novel. This lawmaker wants Barnes & Noble to stop selling these titles to minors. The suit probably won’t succeed. But it’s an escalation: The issue went from people thinking their children shouldn’t read certain books to trying to stop other people’s children from reading certain books.

I understand why some of the fights over school reading are so intense: By definition, teachers are making choices about which books children are — and are not — going to read, and parents may not always agree. The efforts to take books from libraries feels different, yes?

Elizabeth: When people are trying to push a book out of the library, they’re making a decision for everyone, that nobody has access to a particular book. But librarians are trained to present a range of viewpoints. For them, it’s a matter of professional ethics to make sure that the point of view of one person or one group isn’t dictating what everyone reads.

Elizabeth: Book banning can also be damaging to kids who identify with story lines in books that are banned in their communities. The question for the child becomes, “What’s wrong with me?”

How are librarians responding?

Alexandra: It’s heartbreaking for them. Librarians say they got into this field because of a love of reading and talking to people about books. Some have left their jobs; some have been fired for refusing to remove books. Others quit after being subject to a barrage of insults on social media.

A librarian in Texas quit after 18 years because she was harassed online. She moved out of state and took a job in tech.

What’s next?

Elizabeth: The movement is not going away as long as the midterms are ahead of us. And the school year will start just as election season is really heating up, so both could add fuel to this fire.

Alexandra Alter joined the Times in 2014 and Elizabeth Harris in 2005. Elizabeth’s first byline for The Times was on a first-person piece about camping in Central Park. Alexandra’s first byline ever was in 2002 for The Nepali Times, about traditional clay pottery in a village near Kathmandu.

For more

Librarians are at the center of the culture war. How “Gender Queer” became the most banned book in the U.S.

We hope this special double issue of Reason showcasing banned books will serve as both a cautionary tale and a fun summer reading list.   The American Library Association (ALA) keeps lists of what it calls "challenged books"—books that a person or group has tried to remove from or restrict access to in schools or libraries. A "banned book" is one where that removal is successful.   By the ALA's reckoning, challenges and bans are way up, setting a 20-year record. The organization recorded 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021, targeting more than 1,500 different titles. The list is far from exhaustive, assembled as it is from media reports and from folks who contact the organization directly. This produces an odd chicken-and-egg problem, where the more politically agitated people are about book bannings, the more incidents they will report as book bannings, and the more there will appear to be.   The books that make the ALA annual top 10 list vary from year to year, but they comprise a consistent mix: classics that deal with mature themes—Beloved and the Bible—books that contain slurs or other now-contentious words or depictions of race—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird— books that touch on sex or gender from what is intended to be an age-appropriate perspective—I Am Jazz and anything by Raina Telgemeier—books that smack of the occult—the Harry Potter series and Bridge to Terabithia—and books that are very clearly by and for adults—Fifty Shades of Grey.   "Banned books" is a vague category, like "cancel culture" or "obscenity." At the terrifying top of the hierarchy are true book bans, enforced by the state—the kind that inspire the government-sponsored conflagrations, especially those designed to suppress political dissent or erase inconvenient histories. Book burnings have long been popular with those who would seize and hold power, from the Catholic Church (Leviathan) to Josef Stalin (The Master and Margarita). Kings, fascists, and communists alike have warmed their hands over literary bonfires. But rarely in 2022 America do book bans take the incendiary form of our Ray Bradbury–fueled (Fahrenheit 451) fever dreams.   Yet controversy over book bans has flared up nonetheless, with local and state elections won or lost over which books will be stocked in libraries or taught in schools (The Dangerous Lesson of Book Bans in Public School Libraries)—a newly invigorated front in a long-running culture war.   The removal of books from public libraries or public school libraries is a step below those, though it is also government censorship of a kind, since the books are removed by public employees, often at the behest of politicians. So too with curriculum battles: These fall far short of a state-ordered book burning, but they are too often driven by the same censorial impulse and smallness of mind. They are less troubling than outright bans, since they tend to be localized, applied primarily to children, and publicized in ways that make it possible for parents to hedge against them. But that does not mean they are unobjectionable.   Nearly all of the books mentioned in this issue are, in fact, available to motivated American readers.   But there are more ways for governments to control what people can read than immediately identifiable book bans. Adults may still struggle to get access to books for all kinds of reasons related to government, from intellectual property fights (Why Ryan Reynolds Can Use Winnie-the-Pooh To Sell You a Phone Plan) to local zoning (Little Libraries, Free at Last?) to incarceration (Blood in the Water).   There are also private entities that practice a form of book banning. While this form is the least worrying from a legal point of view—companies and individuals should have the right to do business with whomever they like—it is still troubling from a cultural perspective, and it seems to be on the rise. It includes self-censorship by authors (Rise of the Sensitivity Reader) and publishers (The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future) as well as gatekeeping by booksellers (When Harry Became Sally).   All of these less blatant barriers are explored in the issue you just received, along with their more traditional counterparts. It's worth noting that the one book we were unable to obtain in our research for this issue is a memoir that remains unpublished due to a gag order by the Securities and Exchange Commission ([REDACTED]), a final reminder not to be too distracted by the blowtorch while other books are being quietly snuffed out. A mere whiff of the censor's smoke can send hordes of curious novelty seekers off to acquire copies. Not all will stand the literary test of time, but the Bible and Ook and Gluk both have their place. Perhaps that place is poolside? You can read all of this month's stories with your Reason Digital subscription online, or download the August/September 2022 issue as a PDF to read wherever you want. You can also take a stroll through the full 50 years of Reason archives, a perk exclusively available to you as a digital subscriber. Thanks for your subscription! Katherine Mangu-Ward, Editor in Chief, Reason

The Dangerous Lesson of Book Bans in Public School Libraries

An obscure Supreme Court case provides a roadmap through the curricular culture war.

by David French

Rise of the Sensitivity Reader Overzealous gatekeeping on race and gender is killing books before they're published—or even written. by Kat Rosenfield

You Can't Stop Pirate Libraries

Where there's demand for books, the internet will supply them. by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2304.08 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2836 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.