Latest news with #bookbanning
Washington Post
12-07-2025
- General
- Washington Post
Book bans don't work. As a kid, I proved it.
When I was 6 years old, my father took me to a small branch library in my hometown of Lorain, Ohio. I'd never been to any library before, nor, I think, had my father been in one since he dropped out of school at age 16. He was distinctly ill at ease and throughout our visit stood in a corner looking idly at the pictures in an illustrated edition of what I later learned was 'Moby-Dick.' Meanwhile, clutching my newly issued children's library card, I had picked out several titles that intrigued my young self when the elderly overseer of this bookish kingdom noticed my selections. 'Oh, no, young man,' she said, or something close to that. 'These books are much too difficult for you.' She wouldn't let me check them out, and I was instead forced to take home, as more age appropriate, two or three titles about the mischievous monkey Curious George. While these were amusing enough, they weren't what I'd wanted. Two weeks later I returned the picture books and never entered that branch library again. So began my lifelong antipathy to book banning and every sort of literary censorship. A second pivotal moment, with a happier outcome, occurred in the sixth grade when I was eager to read Agatha Christie mysteries — and couldn't. To check her books out from the library, you needed an adult borrower's card, which you would be issued only at the start of the seventh grade. My mother possessed such a card, never used but duly assigned to 'Mrs. Michael Dirda.' This designation would prove essential since my scheme to circumvent the system turned on the fact that my father and I shared the same first name. On a beautiful Saturday afternoon I peddled my red Roadmaster bike to the city's newly built main library, selected three whodunits featuring Hercule Poirot and at the check-out desk flashed my mother's card with my thumb firmly covering the telltale word 'Mrs.' The librarian glanced at the Christies, paused over the typed signature my thumb was partly concealing, took a long look at me, then smiled and stamped the three mysteries. After that, I was done with children's books. These ancient memories spring to mind because I've been reading Ira Wells's cogent and incisive 'On Book Banning.' A critic and associate professor at the University of Toronto's Victoria College, Wells sees the recent highly politicized attempts to control libraries, especially school libraries, as assaults on knowledge and freedom of expression. To underscore the seriousness of this issue, he reports on the outrageous excesses of both the right and the left, each claiming to protect children and young people from 'harm.' In his opening chapter, Wells writes that in 2022 a librarian at the elementary school his children attend told a group of parents of her wish to throw out all the 'old' books — and by 'old' she meant published before 2008. She contended that they promulgated objectionable stereotypes, reinforced multiple prejudices, and failed to include racially and ethnically diverse characters or to address pressing contemporary issues about sexual identity. Some Canadian libraries actually did strip their shelves of these 'old' books, one of them consigning half its entire holdings to landfill. In direct contrast, continues Wells, conservative activists in Florida (and elsewhere, too) regularly challenge any book that promotes diversity, equity and sexual inclusiveness. Such works are accused of instilling white guilt or grooming children to accept and even adopt LBGTQ+ identities. Note that the targeted titles are associated with the most insulted and injured people in our society. Is it happenstance, writes Wells of earlier attempts at book banning, that in 1930s America, '90 percent of those charged with obscenity were Jewish?' Whether ultra progressive or ultra conservative, these opposing camps both want to cleanse our libraries of books they don't approve of. Yet along with being shrilly ideological, utterly wrongheaded and heartlessly cruel, they are behind the times. Today's young people hardly read any books at all other than those required by their school classes. Instead they spend on average four hours a day interacting with their smartphones. If community activists were truly concerned about children's welfare, says Wells, they'd be focusing their zeal on curbing cellphone use and access to social media. What's more, neither the extreme left nor the extreme right appreciates reading as an aesthetic experience or as a way of growing intellectually. For both, books are merely a form of propaganda and indoctrination. Real reading doesn't work this way. 'Where literature opens conversations,' writes Wells, 'censorship closes them. Where literature provokes questions, censorship insists upon answers. Where literature unsettles us with ambiguity, the realization that the 'meaning' of a text is never final, censorship seeks to comfort us with moral absolutes.' While some books do provide mirrors in which we can see ourselves, most function as portals, entryways to new knowledge and new experiences; others provide welcome escapes from the life around us. When I turned to books as a child and an adolescent, I didn't want my identity affirmed; I wanted to transcend it. In general, it strikes me as misguided that school curriculums now focus so resolutely on works by living authors. This is done in the name of relevance, but aren't contemporary writers and books the ones that young people will investigate on their own, given a well-stocked and well-funded school library? Classrooms could then focus on the time-tested works that energize our creative imaginations. For instance, elementary school reading might emphasize the world's folktales, fairy tales and mythologies, those foundation stones of so much of our literature, art and music. The school library would then provide present-day works of more immediate interest and concern to the students, thus bolstering 'the reading habit.' There should be biographies of sports heroes, Stephen King bestsellers, graphic novels and manga, histories of hip-hop — and books addressing teen angst and sexual confusion. These last must be available for any kid who needs them or simply wants to learn what all the fuss is about. After all, the key societal benefit of wide reading is the development of empathy for others. In the end, banning books never works for long. Censorship crusades are always reprehensible and hurtful from the get-go, but wait a generation and they come to seem either squalid or quaint. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded in 1873 by Anthony Comstock, author of 'Morals, Not Art or Literature,' a title that says it all. In 1920, this organization took the writer James Branch Cabell to court over his 1919 novel 'Jurgen.' To understand why the book — now a minor classic — was prosecuted as 'obscene, lewd, lascivious and indecent,' I found a copy and read it. Set in the medieval realm of Poictesme, 'Jurgen' is a philosophical fantasy in which its middle-aged pawnbroker hero travels into the past, regains his youth in 'the garden between dawn and sunrise,' enjoys multiple amorous adventures (with, among others, Guinevere before she marries King Arthur), is sent to hell then to heaven, and ultimately returns a wiser man to his loving but shrewish wife. Cabell himself was then entering his 40s, with a string of admired and little-read novels behind him, but the media spotlight resulting from the intended suppression of 'Jurgen' — successfully defended by John Quinn, the celebrated collector of James Joyce and other modernists — quickly made him world-famous. Scott Fitzgerald, no less, would beg Cabell to contribute a blurb to 'The Beautiful and Damned.' To my delight, 'Jurgen' surprised me with the beauty of its fastidious and subtly ironic style, even as I was mildly put off by the plethora of sexual double-entendres (lances, clefts) and moved by its pervasive wistfulness about first love and paths not taken. In many ways, it is a great novel of midlife crisis, while also being very funny. The fearsome troll-king Thragnar, who kidnaps Guinevere, leaves a note near his throne that reads: 'Absent upon important affairs. Will be back in an hour.' The Devil confesses that his wife simply doesn't understand him. The stressed-out Creator of the universe, who is Black, works behind a door labeled 'Office of the Manager — Keep Out.' There's even a tour de force sentence consisting of multiple mixed metaphors: 'Indeed, it is a sad thing, Sylvia, to be murdered by the hand which, so to speak, is sworn to keep an eye on your welfare, and which rightfully should serve you on its knees.' Alas, by the late 1930s, Cabell's star began to fade, though 'Jurgen' continues to be admired to this day; in 1976, there was even a lavish Limited Editions Club edition. If you've read Robert A. Heinlein's novel 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' you have, probably unknowingly, experienced a strongly Cabellian blend of fantasy, irony, sex and philosophical inquiry. Overall, as Edward de Grazia made clear in his 1992 study, 'Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius,' the books attacked by one generation frequently emerge as classics in the next. (De Grazia's striking title, by the way, derives from a remark by Jane Heap — co-editor of the Little Review — in her defense of the 'Nausicaa' chapter of Joyce's 'Ulysses' against charges of obscenity.) Besides 'Jurgen' and 'Ulysses,' one can point to D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer,' Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl,' Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' and many other once-verboten titles now part of the literary canon. Today, John Cleland's 'Fanny Hill' is a Penguin Classic. When, at age 16, I nervously bought the novel at Rusine's Cigar Store, it came from behind the counter, sealed in cellophane. At heart, book censorship, like Comstockery and Prohibition, ultimately aims to make human beings into little saints. Ain't never gonna happen. As H.L. Mencken wrote long ago, 'What ails American literature, fundamentally, is what ails the whole of American culture, politely so called: a delusion of moral duty.' Among the best responses to such Puritan zealotry is to be utterly, shamelessly promiscuous: Read whatever catches your fancy. Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic and a regular contributor to Book World.
Globe and Mail
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Globe and Mail
Ira Wells, who literally wrote the book on book bans, shares his thoughts on the politics of censorship
Typically, the library is a place to access a breadth of resources and ideas, to sit in the present and behold the past. Well, not for public school students of Peel Region, just north of Toronto. In 2023, working within a framework of anti-racism and inclusion, librarian educators removed thousands of books from the shelves, including most titles first published more than 15 years ago. Meanwhile, in Florida, ultra-conservative Christian parents' rights organizations such as Moms For Liberty have been taking over school board meetings to demand the expulsion of 'harmful' literature, by which they mean books like the award-winning YA novel The Hate You Give, inspired by the Black Lives Matter Movement, or Tango Makes Three, a picture book based on the true story of two male penguins who pair-bonded in New York's Central Park Zoo. Alberta to ban books deemed sexually explicit from school libraries As Ira Wells, a professor at the University of Toronto and the author of On Book Banning, points out, the effects of censorship are the same regardless of the particular politics of the censor. Neither kids in Peel Region nor Florida can find Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye on the shelves, to give but one example. Wells recently spoke with the Globe about the past, present, and future of book banning. Early in On Book Banning, you introduce a bipartisan value that you call the 'Censorship Consensus.' What does that mean? In many parts of the U.S., but in Florida in particular, parents were and are essentially pushing to get LGBTQ books off the shelves. And they are framing this as a matter of harm, of the books harming their kids. Their solution is book-banning. Progressive educators in the Peel District School board here in Ontario conducted these equity-based processes that involved reviewing library books for various harmful qualities, such as racism, obviously, but also eurocentrism, heteronormativity, and cisgender normativity. And their solution, at least in the Peel region, was to ban such books. Opinion: When we remove books from schools or libraries, we prune the landscapes of children's imaginations We have these two polar opposite groups, the Canadian progressives and the religious fundamentalists in Florida, but they're both banning books. They're both framing the library as a field of contagion where we need to save the children from the harm that they will experience through books. That symmetry struck me as notable. Reading books is not the popular pastime it once was. So why is the removal of physical books from library spaces such a ground zero for censorship? I think it has something to do with restoring a semblance of control to people who are feeling threatened for different reasons. In Florida, I think that parents are anxious about the fact that they cannot control what their children are accessing on TikTok. And so, despite the fact that their children are, statistically, certainly not spending nearly as much time reading as they are on their cell phones, it gives them a semblance of control. In the book, I say that it's a version of symbolic violence. It's a way of signaling to members of their own community what they would remove from the society itself. You invoke Enlightenment thinkers, particularly John Stuart Mill, and European predecessors like John Milton to argue against book banning. Do you feel that the European humanists are particularly relevant today, where our society is so pluralistic and with the prevalence of social media? That you should allow or encourage someone to engage in speech that you may find personally offensive or disagreeable is a counterintuitive idea. It doesn't come to us very easily. It's not a given that children would want to hear opposing views. We have to be educated into that. So I think it's worth returning to some of the original points where this idea came from. Milton's innovation is essentially that we recognize ethical categories not only by what they are, but what they're not. And it has some application here, in the sense that, if you were to purge the library of everything that you disagreed with, then you would be left with what Milton calls an 'excremental whiteness,' or enforced purity, a false virtue. When students can't make a 'wrong' choice, in what sense are they being virtuous at all when you're just forcing them to have these views? Ultimately we want to encourage others to express their views so that we can figure out what we ourselves actually think. What we think must be thought through in opposition to the best arguments on the other side. The censor's urge is usually couched in language of protecting society, especially, children, from language or ideas that constitute 'harm.' Did your research, and the many interviews you conducted for the book, ever lead you to figure out what precisely constitutes harm, when it comes to books? The religious fundamentalists have one idea of harm— 'LGBTQ indoctrination,' and what they call critical race theory, which is a caricature and a bogeyman of what critical race theory actually is. Basically, anything that they find upsetting constitutes harm. On the other hand, the Ontario progressive educators will explicitly tell you that classics are harmful because they're Eurocentric, they're colonialist, they privilege heteronormativity and so on. My argument is that conceiving of literature in this way, as primarily a site of contagion that needs to be censored, in fact becomes the source of harm. They are harming students by depriving them of information and stories that might have given their life value. It harms by severing our children from history, presenting a very sanitized version of the world. It teaches students that when you confront an upsetting view, the answer is to silence and censor. And it encourages students to think of themselves as fragile receptacles of harmful material. It's demeaning to students; it takes a very dim view of what they're capable of. Let me affirm that I am very much in favour of diverse libraries and feel that every student should see themselves reflected on the shelves. The way to do that is to build, is to add. Culling the libraries and removing scores of 'old' books is really misguided. And it's also incredibly paternalistic. There's a racist heritage to the notion that classics — Socrates, Shakespeare, and so on — belong only to the white, upper-class men who can sit around and engage with with that stuff. W.E.B. Du Bois called that out over 100 years ago. I think there's a long history of that racism that is inadvertently replicated when educators claim that students are only interested in reading texts that reflect their own exact social identities back to them. Children read for all kinds of reasons – all kinds of imaginative reasons. What's one thing parents can do to protect and nurture their children's intellectual freedom? Listen to your children and be attentive to what excites them and what engages them. And nurture that. Don't try and force your children into a politically motivated way of engaging with literature. We are not going to save the world through forcing our children to read certain kinds of books; books are more than just levers of social engineering.
CBS News
10-06-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
St. Francis school district scraps book banning policy, will return titles to shelves
A lawsuit stemming from a book banning policy in the St. Francis school district has been settled, and the books will return to shelves. In March, Education Minnesota-St. Francis and the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota filed lawsuits after the district adopted a policy that removed librarians and teachers from the book approval process and replaced them with a website called "Book Looks." The website, which shut down in late March, was affiliated with Moms for Liberty, a group at the forefront of the conservative movement targeting books that reference race and sexuality. The website ranked the books from zero to five, with zero being "for everyone" and five being "aberrant content." If a book with a rating of three or above was challenged, the policy dictated that it would be removed from shelves, the ACLU said in its lawsuit. More than 30 books were removed from libraries and classrooms, including "The Bluest Eye," "Slaughterhouse-Five," "The Kite Runner," "Brave New World," "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Night." The school board accepted the settlement during its regular meeting on Monday. The education union agreed to drop the lawsuit and did not seek any financial damages. A new book policy in St. Francis will include input from teachers, librarians and student representatives. A review committee can only remove a book with a supermajority vote, and the school board can only overrule the review committee after publishing a report and acting in a public meeting. The new policy must also stay in place for at least three years. "We achieved this settlement because parents, students, our community and even Minnesota authors stood with educators to defend the freedom to read in public schools," said Education Minnesota-St. Francis President Ryan Fiereck. "The students' stories and commitment to fixing this terrible policy were particularly inspiring." WCCO has reached out to the St. Francis Area School Board for comment.
CTV News
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Sarah Jessica Parker details her fears of book-banning, likens libraries to ‘sanctuaries of possibility'
Sarah Jessica Parker attends the premiere of "And Just Like That..." Season 3 at the Crane Club on May 21, in New York. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP via CNN Newsource) Sarah Jessica Parker might play a writer passionate about relationships (and shoes) on TV, but in real life she's an avid reader who holds books near and dear to her heart. The actress and publishing imprint owner – whose series 'And Just Like That…' debuts its third season on Thursday – spoke to CNN this week about her love of reading, and why she fears the ramifications of book bans and library funding being cut. 'Book banning doesn't really accomplish much, except it just hurts people,' Parker told CNN's Isa Soares. 'Specific to libraries, I will simply say that many people in this country, including me, were raised in libraries, and they're not just buildings with shelves, they are sanctuaries of possibility.' The 'Sex and the City' star went on the describe how libraries are vital and free connections for many people to utilities such as Wi-Fi, heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer. 'The opportunity to apply for jobs, to learn languages, to reach information, they are the gateway to compassion and empathy and curiosity, but they are also beacons in neighborhoods,' she said. 'The idea of taking that away, (of) cutting funding and making libraries – almost making it impossible for them to stay open and serve their communities, but to take books away to suggest that someone else's opinion… just fundamentally it's counter, it's anathema to who we are as Americans,' Parker added. Describing the importance of being able to learn, through books, about 'something that is unfamiliar,' and of 'learning about each other,' she said that 'it seems an impossibility that I would live in a country where I can't share a diverse or counter-opinion. I'm excited about meeting people who think differently than me, and it's a way, it's how we often arrive at the best decisions.' As for her HBO Max series 'And Just Like That…,' Parker mentioned that production on the New York-set show was 'a really long season' for the cast the third time around, 'but enormously gratifying.' 'For me and I think for the other actors on the show, this season is really big,' she shared. 'Everybody has big, exciting, rich stories. It's robust in love and complications and moments of friendship that are necessary and frustrating, people disappointing one another, people falling short, people stepping up, people being a source of comfort. Enormous curiosity about sexual politics and men, and it's all there and it was hugely fun to do.' 'And Just Like That…' is now streaming on HBO Max, which like CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
CNN
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Sarah Jessica Parker details her fears of book-banning, likens libraries to ‘sanctuaries of possibility'
Sarah Jessica Parker might play a writer passionate about relationships (and shoes) on TV, but in real life she's an avid reader who holds books near and dear to her heart. The actress and publishing imprint owner – whose series 'And Just Like That…' debuts its third season on Thursday – spoke to CNN this week about her love of reading, and why she fears the ramifications of book bans and library funding being cut. 'Book banning doesn't really accomplish much, except it just hurts people,' Parker told CNN's Isa Soares. 'Specific to libraries, I will simply say that many people in this country, including me, were raised in libraries, and they're not just buildings with shelves, they are sanctuaries of possibility.' The 'Sex and the City' star went on the describe how libraries are vital and free connections for many people to utilities such as Wi-Fi, heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer. 'The opportunity to apply for jobs, to learn languages, to reach information, they are the gateway to compassion and empathy and curiosity, but they are also beacons in neighborhoods,' she said. 'The idea of taking that away, (of) cutting funding and making libraries – almost making it impossible for them to stay open and serve their communities, but to take books away to suggest that someone else's opinion… just fundamentally it's counter, it's anathema to who we are as Americans,' Parker added. Describing the importance of being able to learn, through books, about 'something that is unfamiliar,' and of 'learning about each other,' she said that 'it seems an impossibility that I would live in a country where I can't share a diverse or counter-opinion. I'm excited about meeting people who think differently than me, and it's a way, it's how we often arrive at the best decisions.' As for her HBO Max series 'And Just Like That…,' Parker mentioned that production on the New York-set show was 'a really long season' for the cast the third time around, 'but enormously gratifying.' 'For me and I think for the other actors on the show, this season is really big,' she shared. 'Everybody has big, exciting, rich stories. It's robust in love and complications and moments of friendship that are necessary and frustrating, people disappointing one another, people falling short, people stepping up, people being a source of comfort. Enormous curiosity about sexual politics and men, and it's all there and it was hugely fun to do.' 'And Just Like That…' is now streaming on HBO Max, which like CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
