Amanda Darrow, director of youth, family and education programs at the Utah Pride Center, with books that have been the subject of complaints from parents in Salt Lake City in 2021.
Amanda Darrow, director of youth, family and education programs at the Utah Pride Center, with books that have been the subject of complaints from parents in Salt Lake City in 2021.
Those of us living in New Mexico are somewhat sheltered from the campaigns to ban books that have run rampant across America in recent months. Some might remember in 2001 when a pastor in Alamogordo led a burning of the Harry Potter series books, which he dubbed “a masterpiece in Satanic deception.” But more than 20 years later, that event pales in comparison to the 566 book bans in place in Florida, as reported by The Guardian.
In the 2021-22 school year, more than 1,600 books were banned across 32 states and 138 school districts, according to CBS News. Organizations are fighting for the restriction of certain media kept in school and public libraries, specifically books that represent the experiences of people in LGBTQ+ communities or the experiences of people of color — or even books simply written by members of these communities.
This isn’t a new trend, however. Book censorship has been a constant presence in America, dating to the 1637 banning of Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, according to the Harvard Gutman Library. As a teen who grew up without (unreasonable) restrictions on what I could read, it haunts me how popular book banning has become. It’s terrifying to think there is a strong movement to control what we are allowed to read.
There are two main fronts when it comes to book banning. The first is the media that children have access to in their school libraries, and the second is the content kept in public libraries. Both fronts threaten people’s freedom to think for themselves and form their own opinions through the exposure to multiple perspectives.
Considering most would agree there are certain topics inappropriate for kids to be exposed to under a certain age, book banning in schools still poses a threat. Groups such as the conservative parental rights nonprofit Moms for Liberty exploit age as an excuse to bar young students from learning about perspectives the groups disagree with or dislike, such as those of the LGBTQ+ community or the past and present oppression of people of color in the U.S.
This front is the hardest to fight against because there is no way to draw a clear line when considering which books should or should not be kept in a school library; it’s really dependent on the opinion of each individual. On top of that, elementary students themselves don’t have the power or know-how to fight to keep media on their shelves, and it is doubtful anyone would take them seriously if they did.
Even so, these students could still grow up and find these banned books on the shelves of their local public libraries, right? It’s only temporary censorship. It’s only temporary censorship until these public libraries are also targeted for the books they hold, such as the Victoria Public Library in Texas, which was threatened with eviction and funding cuts if it did not remove a collection of LGBTQ+-representative books, according to a Time magazine article published in the fall.
With all the warnings from dystopian novels such as Fahrenheit 451 or 1984, this is the more terrifying aspect of book banning. It targets the community as a whole — people who should have the freedom to decide for themselves whether to read a book. This banning in public libraries really puts into perspective the actual goal of censorship: control. Control over how an individual interprets the world. Control over a person’s ability to think for themself. Book banning is an attempt to solidify hand-picked beliefs as truth.
We need to speak out against book restriction and banning. We need to read and buy books that have been targeted across the country, new and old; from The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by JD Salinger to Gender Queer (2019) by Maia Kobabe. Reading and buying these books not only support the authors, but strengthen their voices and undermine the bans that seek to silence them. Another way to fight book banning and its effect is by supporting and donating to organizations that actively work to empower writers and maintain free access to media.
Let’s fight book banning, and support organizations like PEN America, Lambda Literary and Freedom to Read Foundation that are working to uplift the rights of readers and writers.
Cora Thompson is a sophomore at The MASTERS Program. Contact them at cgthompsonsf@gmail.com.
