Banning books: Protecting kids or erasing humanity?
Kasey Meehan says it was her long-standing love of books that made her, in a sense, their political advocate.
“As simple as that sounds, I think that’s what brings a lot of people on the team to this role,” said Ms. Meehan, program director of the Freedom to Read initiative at PEN America. “For many of us, reading has been such a fundamental part of our own self-discovery and a kind of self-awareness building experience.”
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Amid the battle over what children can read in school, Banned Books Week highlights books as an essential tool for educators to teach empathy and create informed citizens. Parental rights organizations claim that children do better when parents also have a say in what they read.
It’s a particularly busy week for Ms. Meehan and her organization as they take part in Banned Books Week, highlighting what they see as the dangers of banning books in schools, especially at a time when such bans are underway in the United States increased. According to a recent report from PEN America, there has been a spike in book ban efforts during the 2022-2023 school year, including more than 3,300 cases in districts where more than 1,550 titles have been removed from school shelves.
For Ms. Meehan and others, the power of books is integral to their vision of a democratic society. “Book bans only pose a real threat to developing a deeper understanding and empathy for others in our highly pluralistic society – the ways in which we can see each other’s humanity,” she says.
Kasey Meehan says it was her long-standing love of books that made her, in a sense, their political advocate.
“As simple as that sounds, I think that’s what brings a lot of people in the team to this role,” says Ms Meehan, program director from the Freedom to Read initiative of PEN America, a nonprofit organization that advocates for freedom of expression at the intersection of human rights and literature. “For many of us, reading has been such a fundamental part of our own self-discovery and a kind of self-awareness building experience.”
In some ways, it is precisely this power of books and ideas that has often placed them at the center of politics, either to strengthen existing authority or to pose a threat. Given the emotional impact of literature and storytelling, it is perhaps not surprising that those who want to ban certain books understand its potential impact and power.
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Amid the battle over what children can read in school, Banned Books Week highlights books as an essential tool for educators to teach empathy and create informed citizens. Parental rights organizations claim that children do better when parents also have a say in what they read.
It is a particularly busy week for Ms. Meehan and her organization as they participate in the annual Banned Books Week, founded in 1982 and sponsored by a consortium from publishers and non-profit organizations. This year they are highlighting what they see as the dangers of banning books in schools, especially at a time when such bans have increased in the United States, especially in Republican-led states.
For Ms. Meehan and others, the power of books and ideas is integral to their vision of a democratic society. “Book bans only pose a real threat to developing a deeper understanding and empathy for others in our highly pluralistic society – the ways in which we can see each other’s humanity,” Ms Meehan said.
According to a recent report from PEN America, there has been a spike in book ban efforts during the 2022-2023 school year, including more than 3,300 cases in certain school districts where more than 1,550 titles have been removed from school shelves.
“Examining the scope of the past two years, books featuring diverse characters, primarily characters of color and LGBTQ+ characters, were overwhelmingly subject to book bans,” wrote Ms. Meehan as lead author of the PEN America report. The vast majority of these books are also considered young adult titles, she says.
The most banned books this school year are ‘Tricks’ by Ellen Hopkins, ‘The Bluest Eye’ by Toni Morrison and ‘Looking For Alaska’ by John Green. Other commonly banned books include “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson.
However, many Republicans reject the label of such efforts as “banned,” arguing that when it comes to public education, questions about the age-appropriateness of certain topics in school libraries are legitimate concerns. That’s especially true, they say, when it comes to issues of human sexuality. Such books remain available for sale. The point, many say, is that it is parents who should determine what their children can read when it comes to these topics.
“It is not biased to say that children do better when their families know what is happening in their lives,” testified Nicole Neily, president from the nonprofit Parents Defending Education, during a U.S. Senate hearing on book bans in September.
“But now that families are asking to simply know what their children have access to – or perhaps want to put guardrails on materials for children of certain ages – they are being pilloried in the public square,” Ms Neily said. “Such public flogging is not only intended to take a pound of flesh from the perpetrator, but to send a message to every other parent with similar reservations: speak your mind, and the crowd will come after you too come.”
The values underlying conservative efforts to emphasize parental rights and guardrails for access to books are part of religious conservatives’ understanding that they must raise their children in the traditional ways of their faith and understanding of a divine order revealed in the Bible. For most, sex, gender, and human sexuality are clearly defined, and deviation from these paths disrupts God’s intended order.
At the same time, a Republican “war on the woke” has fundamentally challenged the idea that books about racial and sexual identity promote empathy and peaceful pluralism. Many conservatives say such efforts are themselves both antidemocratic and rooted in a dangerous emphasis on racial and even religious differences.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman/AP
In an executive order prohibit “Indoctrination and Critical Race Theory in Schools,” Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas said this year that a focus on identity “revives segregationist values” and is “contrary to traditional American values of neutrality, equality and fairness.”
States like Florida, Texas, and Missouri have been the most active in imposing restrictions on books and concepts in schools, and in some cases in higher education. But the controversies have also spilled over funding for local public librariesas efforts to ban books with topics about race and sexuality extend beyond public education.
“The books that are banned are always those of marginalized voices, but it is so important that these voices are brought in and included as legitimate and true and just as important as the others,” says Dana Reisboard, professor of Education and Critical Literacy at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. “The need for diverse voices and the need to bring up and challenge non-traditional family structures is because they exist.
“So it not only removes the people who need to see themselves; it is also erasing for people who don’t want to be included and then wouldn’t understand them,” she continues. “Their own sense of self-worth and identity then grows disproportionately and becomes meaningful only because it exists in a vacuum.”
Parental rights non-profit organisation Moms For Liberty has spearheaded many of the efforts to remove certain books from schools, becoming a major conservative grassroots organization with close ties to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Last year, the state passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, which some critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Of all the books banned in U.S. public schools, 40% were in Florida last year, PEN America found.
The organization dismissed the books in PEN America’s report as “pushing porn to schoolchildren.” It has organized a competitive “Teach Kids To Read Week,” highlighting some of the dismal reading proficiency rates among American fourth graders. Moms for Liberty did not repeatedly ask the Monitor for comment.
Accusations of pushing porn also include conservative accusations that these books are part of a “to polish” attempt to sexualize schoolchildren or “recruit” them into LGBTQ+ “lifestyles.”
Such accusations have been made against members of the LGBTQ+ community since the gay rights movement began in the 1970s, says Donna Decker, a professor of English who teaches a class on banned books at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire. “It’s really scary, shouting or insinuating that someone is a predator. And what that does – the real core of this is it tries to erase people’s humanity. So don’t say ‘gay’; don’t say ‘trans.’ Withdraw medical treatment or access medical advice. It’s all part of the same distancing, an attempt to turn people into a dangerous ‘other’.”
Professor Decker says she and her students talk about the power of literature and storytelling and the reasons why governments have long tried to ban books. And she says that books help form human empathy and play an important role in understanding the world and becoming a citizen in such a diverse, democratic society.
“It’s common for some people’s stories to be deemed valuable and other people’s stories to be erased,” she says. “But there is an important social value in doing the opposite, and really understanding what our country is and what it was. The same could be said about understanding ourselves, and books help us do that.”