The Bore of Banned Books
Banned Books in the United States are Boring
It is Banned Book Week in the US. The week is meant to spread awareness about books that have been challenged or outright banned.
It kind of grinds my gears.
The author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, had a fatwa or religious hit, placed on his head by the Ayatollah of Iran after he published the book. The Shia government thought his book, which was critical of Islam, was too heretical to just let go. This fatwa led to his having to go into hiding in Britain. The Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was found stabbed to death in his Tsukuba office.
The author of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had to write the book in hiding at friends' houses, as he had already been imprisoned for making anti-Soviet remarks during World War II. The KGB interrogated one of the people who typed the manuscript and destroyed copies as they found them. The typist in question, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, was later found hanging in a stairwell.
In some countries, authors are exiled, hunted, imprisoned and killed for writing books critical of religion or government. Their books are burned, and the people who own copies face serious charges.
Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer was taken off of school library shelves in Florida.
Get a Fucking Grip.
These are not at all similar.
I find the conversation around “banned” books in the United States deeply aggravating. It’s so decadent and first-world to equate a book’s removal from school libraries over questions of how age-appropriate the book is to book burnings in Nazi Germany.
News flash: That’s been happening forever.
From kindergarten all the way to second grade, our school librarian suggested we pick books from a certain section, as the books in another section were too advanced for us. Were we censored? Were we being denied critical information? Was my school literally Nazi Germany?
No, it wasn’t.
If you think that any and all books should be allowed in school libraries, I promise I can think of two or three titles that would bother you if little Timmy brought them home.
The books aren’t really banned. You can still get a copy of All Boy’s Aren’t Blue, Gender Queer, The Hate U Give, or any other book some lunatic wanted off of school shelves in Florida. We know the authors, we know the titles, and book stores celebrate these books and sell them openly on prominent shelves.
They aren’t really banned.
I’m willing to bet money that a child can bring a private copy of a book that was taken off the library shelves to school and be okay. They’ll probably come home with the book too, because, again, it isn’t really banned.
Maia Kobabe lives in California and doesn’t fear exile, imprisonment, or execution over Gender Queer. Ron DeSantis can’t pull an Ayatollah and put a hit on Kobabe.
If a cop searches your home or car and finds a copy of Harry Potter or Catcher in the Rye, guess what? You’ll be okay. You’ll face no prison time for owning one of these books.
America is actually pretty unique among western-style democracies. Australia happily uses its ban hammer to ban violent video games. Germany (understandably) has banned Nazi iconography. If you check the Wikipedia article for books banned in the US, many of them were banned from being mailed, not ownership. Many book bans were overturned by Kingsley Pictures Corp. v. Regents and the Roth decision. The First Amendment and lawyers make it exceptionally difficult to actually ban a book in the states.
The only piece of media I know of that’s banned (the illegal to own kind of banned) in the United States is the video game The Guy Game, and that’s because it actually includes child pornography.
I’m sorry that your life is so boring and unedgy that you resort to reading young adult books that some evangelicals threw a fit over. There are books that are censored or have been banned in the United States.
Operation Dark Heart is censored by the Department of Defense for releasing classified information. Coming Through the Rye (if you can even find a copy) was taken out of print for violating copyright and being an unauthorized sequel. The Federal Mafia was called fraudulent by a Nevada court. Nixon tried to suppress The Pentagon Papers.
You could dive into some titles I mentioned earlier, like The Satanic Verses or The Gulag Archipelago. You could read books critical of regimes, religions, or ideas.
My point is that if you are so concerned about books being taken off school shelves, then parent your children. Buy them the books. Why rely on a school library when you have Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and public libraries? You live in the United States of America, with the First Amendment and decentralized power. Use it.
I agree that the language of “banning” is overwrought. The private space is replete with all manners of content for almost any taste.
There is a difficult question here with regards to schools. Libraries are public spaces, in the school context. A child can linger and wander through the stacks and find something intriguing or affirming, and this can be valuable, especially for gender diverse or gay children.
Not all children will avail of the library, but not all children need it either
Pruning the selection of options is always a choice, and always a political one. Deliberately pruning out the gay or gender diverse content probably won’t “stop” children from being that way, but it might alienate them further.
So who is harmed by the presence of these books? I’m not sure. But of course, there is also the issue of space. You can’t have everything in the library. So this comes back to choices.
I’m not sure.