Stupid Reasons Stupid People Try to Ban Books

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Roxxsmom

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You say it looks more like censorship...are you acknowledging it isn't quite censorship? I think you'll agree that libraries have the right to decide which books to put on their shelves, and which books to take from their shelves; is it necessarily wrong for them to consider outside input when making those decisions?

I think I see where you're coming from in talking about classics and currently popular books, but if you carry through that line of thought you'll arrive at a double standard. Let's say two books get removed from the shelves, one popular and one obscure. I don't want to say only the popular book has been censored.

I'll certainly agree with you that school boards and other governing bodies that control libraries have made all sorts of bad decisions. Some of those decisions amply deserve a public campaign against them. But not every bad decision counts as banning or censorship.

Obviously, a public library can't carry every book that has ever been published, and most often the absence of a book from their collection will not be due to politics. And teachers (and increasingly, school boards) do get to decide what the curriculum will be in their district. I think most people aren't going to assign Ulysses to a bunch of grade schoolers. And there are plenty of reasons to discuss whether even high schoolers will benefit from reading this particular classic as opposed to a dozen or more others.

I don't think anyone is calling this censorship.

But there's a big difference between saying, "Kids this age would probably appreciate or learn more from a different classic from that period and culture" and saying "don't you dare teach it because it's obscene." It's a ban, imo, when the exclusion is politically motivated rather than pedagogically or economically motivated.

When a group says that a book should not be read or made available to other people because said book offends the group's sensibilities, that's challenging. When their challenge is heeded, that's banning.

In the US, bans tend to be local or restricted to age-specific contexts (like schools). Whether or not this is a concern depends, I suppose, on whether or not you want to read that book and you can't afford to buy it online, and whether or not there's an underlying principle you find offensive (when a particular group gets to decide what's offensive or age-appropriate for everyone else in their community).

I guess I don't understand what this argument is about. Are people saying National Banned Books Week is a hoax because no books are ever banned in the US anymore? Or are they saying it's actually very rare for books to be truly banned (as opposed to unavailable for some other reason), so it's not really something to worry about?
 
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Samsonet

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FWIW, I'm saying that if the point is to demonstrate how serious book-banning is, they need to spotlight more serious books. A kid who's grown up thinking that the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland are the usual kind of banned books is in for a shock when they realize some countries do ban books and people have been arrested for reading them.
 

RedWombat

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*muse* I, myself, though all in favor of Banned Books week, would like to see more...nuance? Something...to it.

There is a HUGE difference between "One school in New Hampshire over a century ago removed this from the school library" and "You could not buy this, you could not own this, and the author and his publisher were charged with obscenity," or "People called for this author's head. Literally, not metaphorically."

Both are important! Both matter! But one of these things is not like the other, in terms of degree.

I mean, if somebody informed me "A concerned parent asked that your book be removed from this single grade-school library because it has chickens discussing evolution," and I then went on Twitter proclaiming myself the new Salman Rushdie, I would expect to get slapped down so hard that my ancestors would feel it.
 

Kevin Nelson

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But there's a big difference between saying, "Kids this age would probably appreciate or learn more from a different classic from that period and culture" and saying "don't you dare teach it because it's obscene." It's a ban, imo, when the exclusion is politically motivated rather than pedagogically or economically motivated.

To me, there's a serious problem with looking at people's motives in order to say whether a real ban has been imposed. How can you look inside people's minds and know for sure what their motives are? They might make all the right sounds about "kids would learn more from a different classic," but deep down they might be thinking "that book's obscene!"

If the question is whether their motives count as political, that only makes matters worse. "Politically motivated" is something of a dirty phrase, but is it really clear that political motivations are so bad? If you want kids to have a good education, can that not be a political goal? If you want them to learn tolerance and open-mindedness, can that not be a political goal?

People find it very easy to attribute bad motives to groups they dislike, and good motives to groups they like. So making motive the key can all too easily turn into "it's book-banning when they do it, but it's perfectly all right when we do it."

And what if some truly, seriously, appallingly offensive book is at issue? I'm sure you can think of examples--I'm not talking about The Wizard of Oz here. Then should people just politely say "a different classic would be better"? Are there any books whatsoever that people could rightly campaign to get removed from public schools as inappropriate?


In the US, bans tend to be local or restricted to age-specific contexts (like schools). Whether or not this is a concern depends, I suppose, on whether or not you want to read that book and you can't afford to buy it online, and whether or not there's an underlying principle you find offensive (when a particular group gets to decide what's offensive or age-appropriate for everyone else in their community).

It can certainly be a concern. My point is that it's a quite different kind of concern than actual book-banning is. It can also be a concern if a library just isn't interested in getting the sort of books you like, or if a library is facing a budget crunch and can't afford them. I think you've already agreed that those sorts of things don't count as banning.


I guess I don't understand what this argument is about. Are people saying National Banned Books Week is a hoax because no books are ever banned in the US anymore? Or are they saying it's actually very rare for books to be truly banned (as opposed to unavailable for some other reason), so it's not really something to worry about?

I'm not saying it's a hoax. I'm saying it mixes up different issues and muddies both of them. Genuine book-banning is still something to worry about, even in the U.S. It would be nice if the ALA and its co-sponsors engaged more seriously with that issue--whenever I see one of their "banned books" lists, I keep looking for titles like Fifty Shades of Ten-Year-Olds and You Too Can Cook like Walter White. Those titles never show up.

As much as anything else, what rubs me the wrong way is that the event's sponsors act as if they're making a very strong stand; but then they consistently choose the easiest possible cases to highlight. This may sound harsh, but to me their behavior carries a distinct whiff of cowardice.
 

Hapax Legomenon

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So what, you want your banned book list to include The Anarchist Cookbook and such?

I guess the main thing is that these days book banning is something that happens mostly at school libraries. If public library resources are limited, school library resources are much more so. Most material that's considered "harmful to children" that gets published in normal books all the time doesn't even get into the library. Most of the trouble arises when a book that is written for children/young adults or classic literature gets into "harmful" material.

The reason why you don't see titles like Fifty Shades of Ten-Year-Olds and You too Can Cook Like Walter White is because publishers would not touch those books with that kind of content with a ten-foot pole so a library never even gets the chance to ban them. Yes ebook publishing makes it easy for all sorts of things to get published but 1) Amazon and the like has content policies so they would take your book down if it had something like pedophilia in it and 2) library books are trade/academically published so they wouldn't end up in a library to ban anyway.

So maybe a more accurate look of banned books of today would be books that were pulled from Amazon and such rather than from a library?
 

jaksen

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In the link I provided in this thread, the author gave very specific reasons for wanting various books banned:

Sexual explicitness, offensive language, unsuitability of the books for a specific age group, graphic language, homosexuality, implied sex, anti-religious themes, overall objectionable content.

And, of course, poor writing. (They said: 'Lousy, substandard, second rate writing.')

Really, there are people who feel obligated to censor books - for the good of us all. The very last paragraph in the article states that teachers and librarians cannot be trusted to give them (children) good, wholesome books to read.

So the reasons these 'book censorers' or 'book banners' give for their actions are not vague at all. Well, not to them, they aren't.
 
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Hapax Legomenon

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That or a list that isn't written from a purely american perspective.

What is the purpose of banned books week? When I go to bannedbooksweek.org, it definitely looks like it's an American thing rather than an international thing. By focusing on non-US cases for a US event it looks like "haha look at these other countries banning these books, good thing that doesn't happen here" when the impression I get from the site is that the week's purpose is to stay vigilant against censorship in the US.
 

nighttimer

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Is it ever okay to remove a racist or sexist book from a school library?

Certainly it should be okay to remove a book due to inappropriate, objectionable or simply outdated content. Take The Ten Little Nigger Boys or The Story of Little Black Sambo and if that's too overt in the racial messaging, try The Story of Doctor Dolittle where a Black character bleaches himself White and gives off "a burning brown smell."

I would have no objection to removing such a book from a library where children could access them. The artistic merit of a literary work is debatable, but it isn't censorship to conclude not all books are for ages, even ones that are supposedly written for children.
 

calieber

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"Appropriate for children" seems somewhat vague to me ("appropriate for children to read unsupervised, without someone making a point of opening a dialogue on the content" less so, but if it's assigned reading, that's not a problem). And public libraries are different than school libraries in that regard.

The reason why you don't see titles like Fifty Shades of Ten-Year-Olds and You too Can Cook Like Walter White is because publishers would not touch those books with that kind of content with a ten-foot pole

Not since Loompanics Unlimited shuttered, at any rate.
 

Roxxsmom

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To me, there's a serious problem with looking at people's motives in order to say whether a real ban has been imposed. How can you look inside people's minds and know for sure what their motives are?

Because a lot of the time, they tell you what their motives are. If they're sending outraged letters to the public library, or the local school board because "Billy's Got Two Dads" is filth that promotes unnatural families, then it's pretty clear they've got a political agenda.

It gets harder to know whether political censorship or banning has happened when there haven't been any pitchfork wielding mobs or angry letters, and the very small and underfunded school library simply has no books with LGBT characters in them at all, or books that explain sex to kids, or books about Martin Luther King (or whomever) for less deliberate reasons. Then it's easy to wonder if it simply didn't occur to someone to spend their limited funds on any such books, though of course, prejudice can still play a role here, even if it's less conscious. Or if they decide to avoid buying anything they think might be controversial simply to avoid hassles.

I agree with others that there's a scale of banning and challenging books. There's a big difference between an author having to go into hiding because he or she is getting serious death threats, like Rushdie, and someone whose work was deliberately excluded from a few small town libraries because of the local morality brigade.

Maybe a color system should be implemented? Red for government bannage with calls for imprisonment or death at one end, and some other color to indicate widespread criticism/challenges without any threats at the other end.

Though in this age of the internet, it's becoming increasingly common for writers who speak out about "controversial" issues like feminism, QUILTBAG rights, representation of People of Color in their fiction or blogs to get trolls who send death (and if the person in question is female, rape) threats. Most are probably not serious, but it can be hard to know who is who.

Still, when it's a government official, political pundit, or prominent religious leader calling for your death, that's putting you in some serious danger.
 
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Kevin Nelson

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Because a lot of the time, they tell you what their motives are. If they're sending outraged letters to the public library, or the local school board because "Billy's Got Two Dads" is filth that promotes unnatural families, then it's pretty clear they've got a political agenda.

Sometimes they'll tell you their motives. Sometimes they won't. More importantly, it's hard to say which motives truly count as political. In practice, people only tend to describe agendas as "political" when they disagree with those agendas. If you want to fight racism, is that a political agenda? If you want to promote tolerance of gay and lesbian parents, is that a political agenda?


Maybe a color system should be implemented? Red for government bannage with calls for imprisonment or death at one end, and some other color to indicate widespread criticism/challenges without any threats at the other end.

Criticism per se shouldn't be on the spectrum at all. That's something every author should be prepared to receive.


Though in this age of the internet, it's becoming increasingly common for writers who speak out about "controversial" issues like feminism, QUILTBAG rights, representation of People of Color in their fiction or blogs to get trolls who send death (and if the person in question is female, rape) threats. Most are probably not serious, but it can be hard to know who is who.

Still, when it's a government official, political pundit, or prominent religious leader calling for your death, that's putting you in some serious danger.

Threats of violence are serious crimes and should be treated as such.

Maybe my main disagreement with you is that I think there are several problems that differ in nature as well as severity. Problem X and Problem Y can be equally severe, yet quite different from each other. And if you mix up the two of them, then you make it harder to solve either one.

So there's not just a single scale of severity. There are several scales. If libraries make excessively narrow book selections, that's one problem. If people make threats against authors or librarians, that's another problem. If the government imposes penalties on selling or possessing certain books, that's yet another problem. All of those problems can be more or less severe. They can occur simultaneously, and they can be connected--but being connected doesn't make them the same.
 

Hapax Legomenon

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Not since Loompanics Unlimited shuttered, at any rate.

You would think that since self-publishing has become super simple there would be a lot more, but not really. Self-publishing venues have rules and the US has recently successfully convicted in obscenity cases against writing so it'll likely remain so.
 

Roxxsmom

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Sometimes they'll tell you their motives. Sometimes they won't. More importantly, it's hard to say which motives truly count as political. In practice, people only tend to describe agendas as "political" when they disagree with those agendas. If you want to fight racism, is that a political agenda? If you want to promote tolerance of gay and lesbian parents, is that a political agenda?

Yes to both, if you're employing the political process in order to do so. Petitioning the local authorities to exclude certain titles from your school curriculum or local library is a political process.

Criticism
per se shouldn't be on the spectrum at all. That's something every author should be prepared to receive.

And should welcome it, in fact. There's a different between being criticized, even being controversial, though, and people trying to make it so a segment of the population can't access your work.

I might, for instance, say, I think a certain SF writer is homophobic, and I didn't appreciate his attempts to block marriage equality in my state, so I won't buy his books. I may even encourage my friends and family members to follow suit, if I'm that kind of person (I'm not). But I'm certainly not going to go to the local library and demand that they pull this author's books from their shelves.

The first is criticism and the exercise of my free speech. The second is challenging. And if the library complies by adopting a policy that they won't include any books by people who are involved in homophobic politics in their collection, it's a form of censorship, though it's obviously going to be much more localized and small scale than a higher-level government agency imposing the same ban or forbidding the publication of such authors at all.

So there's not just a single scale of severity. There are several scales. If libraries make excessively narrow book selections, that's one problem. If people make threats against authors or librarians, that's another problem. If the government imposes penalties on selling or possessing certain books, that's yet another problem. All of those problems can be more or less severe. They can occur simultaneously, and they can be connected--but being connected doesn't make them the same.
It simply sounds like you don't really agree with the concept of national banned book week, or perhaps, you feel it's portrayed too broadly?
 
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Kevin Nelson

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Yes to both, if you're employing the political process in order to do so. Petitioning the local authorities to exclude certain titles from your school curriculum or local library is a political process.

This threatens to go off on a tangent, but I notice that earlier you were talking about motivation, while now you are talking about process. Those are two quite different things.


And should welcome it, in fact. There's a different between being criticized, even being controversial, though, and people trying to make it so a segment of the population can't access your work.
The above may be a key point. I think that when people challenge library books they find offensive, they're mainly trying to prevent support or encouragement of those books. That's different from trying to make access impossible. They could consistently take the attitude "Well, if you really want to read that book, you can still buy it yourself."

Of course, there are people so poor that buying books is a burden for them. But, unfortunately, they will already find most books difficult or impossible to access. I think you've agreed that underfunding of libraries, while sometimes a serious problem, is different from book-banning. And that sort of underfunding cuts off access to a lot more books than challenges to individual titles do.

In any case, most of the challenges are specifically directed at school libraries. It looks to me like most of the people making the challenges can accept the presence of the books they dislike in libraries geared more towards adults. The upshot may be to make access more difficult for children, but it won't be impossible.


I might, for instance, say, I think a certain SF writer is homophobic, and I didn't appreciate his attempts to block marriage equality in my state, so I won't buy his books. I may even encourage my friends and family members to follow suit, if I'm that kind of person (I'm not). But I'm certainly not going to go to the local library and demand that they pull this author's books from their shelves.
So...let's say that instead of making a demand, someone encourages the library to buy different books in place of the offensive ones. Would that make a difference? Is it ever acceptable to voice an opinion like "I think Book X would be better than Book Y for the collection" within earshot of a librarian? If so, how do you draw the line? If the line is supposed to be drawn in terms of "political motivation," I've said why I don't think that will work.


The first is criticism and the exercise of my free speech. The second is challenging. And if the library complies by adopting a policy that they won't include any books by people who are involved in homophobic politics in their collection, it's a form of censorship, though it's obviously going to be much more localized and small scale than a higher-level government agency imposing the same ban or forbidding the publication of such authors at all.
If some small town passed an ordinance forbidding the sale of certain books, that would be actual censorship of a localized and small-scale sort. If a library adopts a policy of not purchasing certain sorts of books, I think that's qualitatively different from actual censorship.

Suppose some organization decides to establish a library devoted entirely to nonfiction. Surely you wouldn't say such a library is censoring works of fiction by declining to buy them? Do libraries not have the right to adopt whatever purchasing policies they choose?


It simply sounds like you don't really agree with the concept of national banned book week, or perhaps, you feel it's portrayed too broadly?
I think it's promoted in a way that mixes up distinct issues and dodges hard questions. I would welcome a version of Banned Books Week with a clearer focus.
 
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Kevin Nelson

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the US has recently successfully convicted in obscenity cases against writing so it'll likely remain so.

And those are the sort of cases I'd like to see publicized by something calling itself "Banned Books Week."
 
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