Guest post by Maren
A crash course in banned books
More than anything else in the library field world, censorship and other intellectual freedom issues have the power to instantly send me off into a blind rage. Unfortunately, as an academic librarian I don’t get many opportunities to channel this energy into my actual work because it’s largely a public and school library issue. I do however keep track of the email lists and Twitter feeds of various organizations that publicize and fight censorship*, so that…I can send myself into a rage all over again, almost daily? I don’t know. No, actually, I think that anyone who’s ever loved a book–not just librarians–should be aware of the constant attacks on those or other books by people who are nominally adults but seem to have missed the First Amendment** part of Civics 101. I’ve also seen a lot of misconceptions online from well-meaning people on my side of this issue, so I humbly present a roundup of censorship concepts. I had planned to also include some particularly interesting or notorious recent book challenges, but the post is long and dense enough already so I may continue it as a series.*
What does “banned book” mean, exactly?
In the U.S., it simply means that some library or school district somewhere has removed the book from their collection or curriculum because it offended someone. It does not mean that the book has been removed from all libraries throughout the nation***. You may also have seen or heard the term “challenged book”–this means that someone lodged a formal complaint against it, but it’s either in the process of being reviewed before a decision is made on what to do with it, or it was already judged appropriate and returned to the collection. These challenges are what the American Library Association compiles in its annual list, often mislabeled “the banned books list.” This is inaccurate because not all of those books were ultimately removed from all of the libraries or schools where they were challenged. In fact, if the institution has a good policy in place to deal with challenges–and if they actually follow that policy in good faith, which sadly doesn’t always happen–the book will usually remain in circulation, albeit sometimes with restrictions.
Who decides what to do with challenged books?
That varies widely by institution. Ideally, the book is read and the challenge assessed by a committee composed of a wide range of stakeholders, possibly including librarians, parents, students, community members, teachers, administrators, and/or school or library board members. You might think that the one constant would be librarians, as we are probably the most familiar with First Amendment issues in libraries and with what our entire user base can handle, but unfortunately this is not always the case. In too many institutions, book challenges go to the school or library board only, or to a single administrator, or in smaller communities even to the city council. When a book does get banned, it’s often because the person(s) who assessed the challenge made their decision based only on their own personal reaction, with little to no knowledge of the many Supreme Court precedents that have affirmed free speech protections for library books and their readers. For instance, Island Trees School District v. Pico is one of many cases where the Court acknowledged that the freedom to read is implied by freedom of speech, since speech is pointless if no one can “hear” it. Another case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District†, had already established that public school students “are ‘persons’ under our Constitution” (something that overbearing adults seem to forget all too often), and that they do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Taken together, these two cases guarantee that schools cannot legitimately remove books from their libraries simply because they don’t like the ideas or a few of the words in them. Emphasis on “legitimately” because as I said it still happens when committees, boards, or administrators are not sufficiently acquainted with these precedents, and if no parents or students feel like suing the school over it the decision will probably stand.
Obviously, free speech protections in public libraries are even broader. While Pico specified that books could be removed from schools on the basis that they were “pervasively vulgar,” adult fiction and non-fiction in public libraries enjoy a constitutional protection that goes waaaay beyond what many people seem to believe. They usually discover this when they are shocked, shocked upon coming across a sex manual on their local library’s shelves (bonus shock points if it’s a gay sex manual, of course) and complain to the authorities thinking that once they realize it’s there††, where children could find it, they will certainly remove it forthwith. The challenge is usually stopped short when the library or the ACLU points out that the ultimate responsibility for policing what minors read falls to their parents or guardians, not librarians or the community.
As I write this at the tail end of National Library Week (April 11-17), ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has just released the list of the most frequently challenged books of 2009. I encourage you all to pick one and read it, or if there’s an old favorite on there, re-read it! And please, please speak up when books are challenged in your communities. Here’s the list:†††
1. “TTYL”; “TTFN”; “L8R, G8R” (series) by Lauren Myracle
2. “And Tango Makes Three” by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
3. “The Perks of Being A Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky
4. “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
5. “Twilight” (series) by Stephenie Meyer
6. “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
7. “My Sister’s Keeper” by Jodi Picoult
8. “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things” by Carolyn Mackler
9. “The Color Purple” Alice Walker
10. “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier
* * *
*Such as: Intellectual Freedom Action News listserv from ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom; Twitter feeds for OIF and the Freedom to Read Foundation; and Facebook fan pages for the National Coalition Against Censorship and Banned Books Week.
**I do apologize to non-U.S. readers for the U.S.-centric nature of this post.
***Yes, this would be one of the misconceptions that hurts my head. I’m not sure how people even think that would work, because barring a secret library cabal^, the directive would pretty much have to come from the federal government and–NO. That doesn’t happen here, or I daresay anywhere the readers of this blog live. That’s like North Korea-level repressive, man.
†You may have heard of this one; it’s the case where some students successfully defended their right to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War. It was the basis for Justice Stevens’ dissent in the more recent “Bong hits 4 Jesus” case.
††Like books just appear on library shelves by magic. Certainly no one read reviews and considered their worth to the whole community before purchasing them, oh no.
†††The reasons frequently given for the challenges are listed here.
^Of course we have one, but we sure don’t use it to ban books.
* YAAAAY! SERIES! YESSSSSSSS! –ed.
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