Culture
Book Banning Counter Attack
What to do to push back against the ignorance of book banning
Conservative moms in red states are on a toot to get books they deem to be 1) pornographic, 2) anti-white, and 3) un-American banned from schools and libraries. The ostensible reason is to protect their children from the inconvenient and uncomfortable opinions of others who don’t think like them.
It’s going to backfire, as it should. It’s not going to create pristine, patriotic, egalitarian minds in the kids they believe they’re protecting. It will create kids who are curious about why their fusty, puritanical moms don’t want them to read certain things. Curiosity will win out.
The history of book burning and book banning never works out the way the arsons and the censors think it will. Those titles always provoke interest in the same way that a back-in-the-day teenager always managed to get into the theater showing the R rated movies. With the internet, R is tame, of course. We’re now pushing out X, XX, and XXX movies.
Have you seen Euphoria on Netflix? The teenagers depicted in that highly popular series are totally familiar with drugs and alcohol (rampant addiction at 16), sex (of all persuasions), contempt for adult supervision (of which there’s little anyway), consumer excess (especially with clothes), and general nastiness to one another. But they are also deeply reflective and introspective when they occasionally sober up or when they inevitably find their lives going to shit. It’s a fascinating series, with extraordinary acting and gripping cinematography, but it paints a picture of kids so entwined with society as it is that they could not be harmed by anything in a book their moms would want to ban.
Euphoria, of course, is fiction. How much it depicts the real or average high school environment I can’t conjecture. But if teenagers do actually watch it, I doubt it harms them, I doubt it because kids can recognize excess and hyperbole and they can reject it.
Of course there’s the pre-teen years: elementary school, when kids are taught to be social with their peers and to understand authority. It’s also when reading is actively taught. The socialization processes kids undergo in elementary school shape them into the kinds of kids they will be in middle school (hormone kicking in time). If they have not been suitably socialized to their peer group, middle school can be a time when they distinguish others not like them on whatever dimension they choose to. That could be race, of course, because racial prejudice almost has cultural approval in some places. But it’s also a time when they grow their awareness of sexual preference, gender identity, faith, disability, cultural and linguistic background, bookishness and “nerdiness”, introversion, and probably other things.
It’s a time when aggressive kids who haven’t been socialized to accept differences can attach negative worth to those who differ from them. They turn into bullies and start harming the “others” around them, subtly by ignoring or not-seeing them or aggressively through humiliation or physical harming. It’s the time when the picked-on “others” start being fearful about school, unsafe, maybe depressed, maybe withdrawn, and maybe suicidal when it gets too much for them.
I don’t know if the book banning moms are actively trying to incentivize bullying in their own kids in the interest of turning them into grab-’em-by-the-balls, take-no-prisoners, A-listers of the future. Or are they’re just ignorant of how sociopaths are created? Do they have some mistaken idea that protecting their kids from the knowledge of how other people have suffered throughout history and still today will somehow automatically turn them into good, decent human beings?
It doesn’t work that way and the politicians who think it does are absolutely wrong and worse than the bullies. They’re standing in the way of healing and they’re doing it for the base reason that the cultural bullies, including the booking-banning moms, vote for them. Bullies beget bullies. It’s been that way for all our history.
So what can be done to counteract this bad messaging? I’ve got a few ideas.
First, publicize the lists of banned books with brief explanations of why they were banned. Avoid the fuzzy terms the book burners use, like “it’s pornographic, or it’s unpatriotic, or it’s racist, or it’s disturbing.” Use instead a one or two sentence description of what the book is about:
- “It’s a story of a Black woman who escaped slavery who tried to kill her children to prevent them from going into slavery” (Beloved by Toni Morrison),
- “It’s the story of a teenage boy who falls for a girl who he finds out later is transexual” (Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher),
- “It’s the story of a young biracial boy, abandoned by his mother, and sent to live with a family where he’s sexually molested by an older man” (America by E.R. Frank),
- “It’s the story of a young Latina who wants to recite her poetry against her mother’s wishes,” (The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo),
- “It’s the story of an Indian boy who leaves his all-Indian reservation high school to go to an all-white school (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie).
Post these titles and descriptions in libraries and on social media, where parents and kids are likely to see and read them. Note that each book has been banned somewhere.
If feasible send the annotated lists to PTA’s or other parent groups to let parents know which books have been banned in the schools and, also if possible, help procure any they would like to have for their families.
Encourage community libraries where books have not been banned to issue library cards to families who want to expose their kids to materials the thought-police have banned. Issue those cards even to people outside the community the library serves directly.
Acquaint teenagers with Libby (libbyapp.com) so they can access books with their library cards and read them on their computer or on ebook readers, like Kindle. Help libraries to acquire the ebooks.
For those who use Goodread and Amazon, submit positive reviews of books that have been reviewed by book banners, specifically countering the negative reviews of the book banners. Encourage teens to do so too.
Support efforts from organizations opposing book banning to eliminate banning laws and widen access to banned books.
If you participate in a book club, consider reading a banned book and discussing its merits in the usual way your club does. Specifically address the banning.
If you’re a teacher or counselor in a school or system that bans books and it doesn’t jeopardize your job, let your students know which books on the list you have enjoyed. Keep it at that and stay clear of recommending the book. If your school requires it, inform the parents so it doesn’t appear that you’re circumventing the ban.
Confront the book banners individually if and when they come at you. Don’t concede that a book you have mentioned is what they claim it to be. Stress the value that the author intended it to have. Don’t try to defend books you haven’t read yourself. Say “I haven’t read that book, so I can’t comment on it.”
Fight fire with fire too. If you’re an aggrieved parent whose kids have been harmed by “other” bullying or cultural violence, point out books for censure that promote white supremacy, gun violence, holocaust denial, immigrant bashing, Indian “savagery” and so on. The book banners might back down when their own favorite books are held up to the same light they use to censure what they don’t like.
Most importantly, don’t with your silence signal that you approve of book banning. Say it loud, book banning is not good for my kids and it’s not good for the health of my community. What needs to be silenced are the politicians pushing for it. They don’t have your kids’ long term interests at heart. They’re not wise enough, precisely because they don’t read the books they ban.
