When they come for the librarians …
As Americans, we’re banning a lot of books these days, perhaps 1,650 in the past year, censoring others, and coming after librarians and teachers. In North Carolina, too, at least six attempts have occurred statewide and here in the mountains, one in Waynesville and another in Macon County.
Frankly, the arguments for banning books are as old as the printing press and as flimsy as electronic tweets. Yet whether in Macon County, or McMinn County, Tennessee, most are not only unsuccessful but counterproductive. It’s called the “Streisand effect” after the singer/actress Barbara Streisand, and, in the case of McMinn County, the novel “Maus,” about a Holocaust family, shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list after attempts by the local school board to suppress it.
It’s far too convenient to blame banning books on right-wing extremists when, historically, the left has also attempted to censor the likes of “Huckleberry Finn” for “racist content.” At the root of all these arguments is the dystopian belief that books should represent some sort of ideal world, either a radically inclusive, impossibly egalitarian progressive one or a pre-civil rights “Father Knows Best” era where we all lived in a professionally happy Mayberry-like world layered over by sacred texts like the Bible and Constitution, one that never existed except on TV. Both ignore conflicting, controversial points of view and exclude many Americans, mostly minorities.
Implicit in both worlds is the belief that there is an All-American attitude children should embrace even as adults don’t, an understood if seldom-followed Winnie-the-Pooh list of things you shouldn’t oughta do along with a set of societal or moral commandments you should, things like pledging allegiance to symbols of American patriotism, going to church, not making fun or bullying others, cursing, eating junk food, ingesting drugs, watching pornography, or thinking of but certainly not discussing or having recreational sex, all standards parents inconsistently follow but forever proclaim.
So do books really influence behaviors, especially in the young? Especially if you read about “the others,” those of a different religion like Islam, of a race that isn’t yours, or sexual preferences you find abhorrent? Can reading about gays or Muslims “groom” you to become one? What if it makes you more understanding and tolerant of “the others?” Wouldn’t that be the ultimate “grooming?”
Research strongly and empirically suggests that, while behaviors such as teen drinking, smoking and sexual activity are influenced by many factors, books are not on the list. What is? Parental behavior, the home environment, social media platforms, mass media advertising and, not surprisingly, peer influence. Yet those who attack teachers, school boards and librarians are right to fear the power of reading a book. Why? Whether fictional or otherwise, reading itself ultimately makes us more open and accepting. Thus, the ideology, the “agenda” behind libricide — the killing of or censoring books — is that of killing reading itself.
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We live in a time when we wring our hands, fuss and fret about the declining state of America when it isn’t, about what our children read and are being taught outside the home but not inside, about the dissolution of the family and morality in general, the languishing state of Christianity, and about what kind of future awaits us all. It’s as if we’ve all become the character Btfsplk from the comic strip, “Li’l Abner,” seriously well-intentioned but our own worst enemy, going about our lives with a dark, even nuclear cloud perpetually hovering over us. Our lives become a growing list of grievances.
Who to blame for our misery? Anybody but ourselves. In our perpetual, acrimonious culture wars that never improve our material worlds, why not librarians? Recently the heroes of the COVID lockdown for distributing books and curriculum materials to homebound students at their own risk, they now have become society’s villains, accused of embracing a mysterious American Library Association “agenda” of reading works with “bad words” and “inappropriate behavior” like Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Henry IV.”
That same lockdown convinced parents that, with all their “rights,” they really didn’t want much to do with the often tedious familial work of passing on their knowledge, values, behaviors or spiritual or moral assets to their children. Or monitor and limit their access to social media. Perhaps Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” had the answer all along, namely “We have met the enemy and it is us!”
Yet the Proud Boys and Moms for Liberty know how to deal with pesky librarians. Like Virginia State Rep. Tom Andrews of Virginia Beach, “out” them by publishing their identities, addresses, family members and phone numbers, then harass and intimidate them publicly and privately. You can also check out offensive books and burn them, bring criminal charges against librarians for distributing “pornographic materials,” sue them in court for obscenity and lock them up, the default solution for those whom we find disagreeable. Yet when they come for the librarians, we’re finished.
At some point, our librarians, teachers and school boards deserve not our anger and harassment but our respect and gratitude. We should give them the freedom to obtain and use materials they deem important to the free play of ideas and the fundamental liberty to read. If we can’t trust our teachers and librarians, our system fundamentally is broken. Moreover, attempts to cancel the culture of “the others,” to manufacture and invent a new, sanitized history and to write new books and ban others often speaks to the bankruptcy of our own.
(Milton Ready lives in Western North Carolina and is the author of “The Tar Heel State: A New History of North Carolina” (2020). This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
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13 comments
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Brilliant, truth-based guest editorial. Thank you. Apparently the negative commenters below missed one of your major points: In all the research on what influences children and teens to do things their parents and families disapproved of, books were and are never an influence.So as the editorial writer Milton Ready urges us, let's stop attacking librarians, even endangering their lives. Such scapegoating shows the moral and cultural void in the souls of the attackers.
As for "Quartermaster's" comment below: Define pornography. If you use the Supreme Court's definition, it is literature or visual art with no redeeming social or moral value. When I taught public school from 1982-1987, we did teach "classics" and some YA (young adult) novels, but Quartermaster would ban those books too if he'd ever read them.
Everybody's "comedy of manners" darling is Pride and Prejudice by that rad lesbian Bolshie Jane Austen--I'm kidding-- (born 1775-died 1817, daughter of a Church of England minister who encouraged her to write novels, which she read aloud to the family). Austen's Mansfield Park has a charming major character Mary Crawford, who sees nothing morally wrong in her brother's running away with a married woman, whose husband then divorces her, and whose father and mother disown her. Shakespeare's tragedies? "Something wicked this way comes": there is mass murder of all the children in a family (Macbeth). Four young people, two women, two men, run away into a forest and live without chaperones; there's bad magic, too (A Midsummer Night's Dream). The bad guy is the father of one of the young women. Tsk, tsk. Othello? A Black man from Africa marries a white woman and is goaded by false accusations of adultery into murdering her. Hamlet? Incest and suicide. So I guess we shouldn't teach the "classics," either.
As someone who has always read lots of books, I can testify that books never influenced me to do anything I shouldn't have done. Just the opposite: great literature shows us the unhappy results of doing what harms our minds and bodies by giving us characters who inflict self-harm by getting drawn into situtations by peers or powerful adults, or who are victimized by the powerful and unprincipled (Dickens' Oliver Twist, Lydia Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example).
At least some young adult fiction, such as Dear Martin, which one parent only got banned from a Haywood County high school class, also teaches how to live and how not to live (had that parent actually read the novel instead of a few pages, he might have realized that). The main character adopts peaceful, positive, non-violent behavior after police wrongly accuse him of a crime. He gets a scholarship to a top university. He becomes a model citizen. You got a problem with that?
No, "Quartermaster," what changed me for the worst (if trauma counts) over three and a half years in (a segregated white) high school in Selma, Alabama, was not books. It was learning that white "Christian" ministers were beating peaceful, unarmed marchers over the head and otherwise helping Sheriff Jim Clark brutalize and arrest them on Bloody Sunday. It was hearing jokes made about President Kennedy after he was assassinated. It was hearing peers tell racist and sexist jokes. It was seeing teenage girls bear the punishment for getting pregnant while boyfriends weren't even scolded. I felt surrounded by racists and sexists; I instinctively knew that I could not speak out without having violence done to me, white Honor Society student though I was.Monday, 04/03/2023
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Brilliant, truth-based guest editorial. Thank you.
As for "Quartermaster's" comment below: Define pornography. If you use the Supreme Court's definition, it is literature or visual art with no redeeming social or moral value. When I taught public school from 1982-1987, we did teach "classics," but Quartermaster would ban those books too if he'd ever read them. Everybody's "comedy of manners" darling Pride and Prejudice by that rad Bolshie Jane Austen (1775-1817, daughter of a Church of England minister who encouraged her novels, which she read aloud to the family? Austen's Mansfield Park, with a charming major character Mary Crawford, who sees nothing morally wrong in her brother's running away with a married woman, whose husband then divorces her? Shakespeare's tragedies, where there is mass murder of all the children in a family (Macbeth)?
Having been taken from an integrated new high school in Kentucky (where there was some harrassment of Black students I heard about only at the 40th reunion) and set down with my family in Selma, Alabama, in Dec. 1963, I can testify that books never influenced me to do anything I shouldn't have done. Just the opposite: great novels show us the unhappy results of doing what harms our minds and bodies by giving us characters who inflict harm by getting drawn into self-destructive situtations or who are victimized by the powerful and unprinciples (Dickens' Oliver Twist, Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, for example).
What changed me for the worst (if trauma counts) over my three and a half years in high school in Selma was not books. It was learning of "Christian" ministers beating peaceful, unarmed marchers over the head and otherwise helping Sheriff Jim Clark brutalize and arrest them on Bloody Sunday. I felt surrounded by racists and instinctively knew that I could not speak out without having the same done to me, white though I was.Monday, 04/03/2023
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Brilliant, truth-based guest editorial. Thank you.
Having been taken from an integrated new high school in Kentucky (where there was some harrassment of Black students I heard about only at the 40th reunion) and set down with my family in Selma, Alabama, in Dec. 1963, I can testify that books never influenced me to do anything I shouldn't have done. Just the opposite: great novels show us the unhappy results of doing what harms our minds and bodies by giving us characters who inflict harm by getting drawn into self-destructive situtations or who are victimized by the powerful and unprinciples (Dickens' Oliver Twist, Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, for example).
What changed me for the worst (if trauma counts) over my three and a half years in high school in Selma was not books. It was learning of "Christian" ministers beating peaceful, unarmed marchers over the head and otherwise helping Sheriff Jim Clark brutalize and arrest them on Bloody Sunday. I felt surrounded by racists and instinctively knew that I could not speak out without having the same done to me, white though I was.Monday, 04/03/2023
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This is a tragic time in our country, when intelligence, thought, and reason are being replaced with hate. When a nation tears down its institutions, replaces love with hate, and joy with misery, there is the end of society. And for this movement to pretend it cares about the books their children read, and are so worried about a man in a dress, it allows its children to be mowed down in their schools. It's not the guns? So where's healthcare? Until we evolve past hate, our society will continue to decline.
Monday, 04/03/2023
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You seem to think that placing pornography in libraries is just peachy. The left is doing all it can to tear down the culture and substitute a degraded schemozzle of filth, immorality and insanity. Say what you will, but you are part of the problem.
By the by, how many in your audience even remember L'il Abner or Pogo?Saturday, 04/01/2023
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Stop supporting groomers and Drag Queen Story Hour
Wednesday, 03/29/2023
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Thank you for this. Librarians are among the most helpful people in the community. Our job is to provide resources and information to ANYONE and EVERYONE in a welcoming and nonjudgemental space. That includes marginalized folks: the bullied kid who seeks refuge at lunch or after school, the child who struggles with reading, the kid that doesn’t “fit in” who faces confusion or a crossroads and seeks like-minded characters in books. I have dealt with book challenges, and have respectfully invited parents to meet with me to discuss good choices for their child. It is their right to monitor their child’s choices, but they should not, and cannot, be allowed to impose their perspective on all children. How dystopian that the movement is called “parent’s rights” while restricting the rights or others. Worry when they come after librarians.
Monday, 03/27/2023
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Lets try it again... Vladimir Lenin said "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."
Sunday, 03/26/2023
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Sorry but good people who try to raise their children honorably and to become good citizens don’t accept having their children subjected to drag Queen story hour
Saturday, 03/25/2023
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Excellent piece! Fear of knowledge and empath for others seems to be driving the current round of book bans.
Friday, 03/24/2023
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Excellent commentary. Thank you.
Friday, 03/24/2023
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Well said. Thank you!
Thursday, 03/23/2023
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Brilliant, eloquent, thorough editorial. Thank you!
Thursday, 03/23/2023
