@CoreyRobin I teach a class at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on Banned Books. I’ve been teaching it every few years for 25 years. Here is what I have learned.
2/23 Book banning in the United States happens the most frequently in five places: classrooms, schools, school districts, school boards, and public libraries. Challenges to books are almost always brought by public school parents.
3/23 On the one hand, stated challenges to books in these five places are almost always devoid of “isms” of any kind. It’s rarely said, “let’s ban this book because the author is black,” or, “let’s ban this book because the author is gay.”
4/23 As @CoreyRobin noted, stated objections to a specific book are almost always for reasons of prudery---if there’s an “ism” it’s puritanism. Here's a graph from the early oughts: ala.org/advocacy/bbook…
5/23 On the other hand, if we look at when book banning happens, and where it happens, as well as the organizations behind book banning (which are often in the shadows), a different picture emerges.
6/23 Book banning often happens in waves. For example, when Ronald Reagan became President in 1980, the early years of his administration were marked by a surge in the number of challenges brought to books.
7/23 The surge was so remarkable that the activist librarian Judith Krug, in partnership with book publishers, suggested the idea of a “Banned Books” week to the American Library Association, and the first such week was held in 1982. It’s been celebrated by the ALA ever since.
8/23 There was a similar surge at the start of the Trump presidency. More recently, because GOP politicians have been inflaming panic over “critical race theory,” we’re experiencing another wave of book challenges.
9/23 Where are these challenges clustered? Book challenges can happen virtually anywhere in the United States, but books written by authors of color, for example, are more frequently banned below the Mason-Dixon line.
10/23 If you look at this map, you’ll see that Florida is a hot spot for 21st century book banning. You’ll also notice that there are considerably fewer book challenges in the Western United States. npr.org/sections/allte…
11/23 Religious and political organizations are often lurking in the shadows when it comes to book banning. In the mid-1970s, for example, a conservative political group called Parents of New York United (PONY-U) compiled a list of 33 books that should be removed from schools.
12/23 After school board members from Island Trees Union Free School District attended a PONY-U conference, they removed some of the books on that list from their districts’ libraries. Students found out, and revolted.
13/23 With publicity from Kurt Vonnegut and legal help from the ACLU, students sued their school district, and won, in the famous case Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v Pico (1982). oif.ala.org/oif/pico-case-…
14/23 @CoreyRobin argues that the school board members who banned Maus from the Tennessee school district curriculum did not use anti-Semitic arguments in their discourse. And he’s absolutely right. They did not.
15/23 On the other hand, we don’t know anything about the people who brought Maus to this Tennessee school board’s attention. We don’t know if these individuals are anti-Semitic, or if they are connected to larger anti-Semitic political organizations or movements.
16/23 At the same time, we do know this: the vast majority of books that are banned and challenged in the United States are written by women, people of color, ethnic minorities, and authors who identify as members of the LGBTQA+ community.
17/23 Furthermore, many of these books are written, like Maus, to expose and redress wrongs done to marginalized and oppressed peoples. bookriot.com/statistics-of-…
18/23 Significantly, the Maus case also reminds us that graphic novels are especially targeted by censors. So frequently, in fact, that there is an organization founded to defend graphic novels and comics, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, cbldf.org/f-a-q/.
19/23 Much of what I’ve shared today I learned from @ejmknox, a brilliant library science professor and one of the most prolific scholars on the subject of banned books. I’ve also learned from my students, some of whose work is compiled here. bannedbooks.library.cmu.edu
20/23 As Knox argues in her article, “Silencing Stories: Challenges to Diverse Books,” the discourse of censorship, “combines symbolic power and language to effect change in the world. When people bring challenges against diverse books,
21/23 (Knox cont) the arguments are similar to those against non-diverse books, but they have a different valence. This is because the arguments made against the books often target elements that are constitutive to life as a member of a non- majority group.”
22/23 It doesn’t matter that the Tennessee school board failed to invoke anti-Semitism in their decision to ban Maus. Maus is considered by many to be the greatest graphic novel ever written, as well as one of the most effective texts for explaining the Holocaust to children.
23/23 Anyone who bans Maus is harming the project of Holocaust education, and social justice more generally.
Correct link here. npr.org/sections/allte…
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