Book bans are about control that’s already lost. But people keep trying anyway.
In 1974, the Kanawha County, W.Va. school district was rocked with bombings, boycotts ... and banned books.
A new curriculum had been introduced with “multicultural” textbooks that among other things, explored the contributions of minority Americans. A school board member named Alice Moore started questioning the morality of the books and parental control over curriculum, eventually bringing together an ardent coalition of parents, miners, evangelicals and even the KKK. When school started that September, 9,000 out of 45,000 students stayed home.
After a few months, the controversy died down, students returned to school along with the new textbooks. But as historian Carol Mason later wrote: Kanawha “was pivotal in shaping a variety of discourses, tactics, and alliances that brought right-wing politics into the mainstream after the 1960s.”
Book bans arrive with social disruption, and they were practically guaranteed in the wake of COVID, Trump and our political divides. Close to home, we’ve seen parents in Floyd County demand the retraction of a children’s book on Ruby Bridges, the girl who integrated New Orleans schools and in Tennessee, a local school board recently banned “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. More recently, a group of people in Bullitt County are trying to get LGBTQ books pulled from the county library system.
Banning books is a fascinating cultural and political phenomenon that appears cyclically during periods of change or uncertainty. But part of the fascination is the fact that it’s nearly always literally counterproductive — they bring more attention and sales to banned book, make them more attractive to the children you’re trying to protect, and in the end do nothing to stop the free flow of ideas. Like water, information flows through our clenched fists. Plus these days, it’s odd that anyone would try to ban books and not smart phones when one hour of social media can provide enough depravity to last a lifetime.
“It’s like trying to shut the barn door after all the animals are out,” said University of Kentucky political science professor Stephen Voss. Book bans are “a challenge to changes already baked into the culture ... these backlashes arise when the forces have already lost — it’s their frustration that the writing is already on the wall. The real reason is that they’ve already lost and there’s a real frustration about it.”
That’s not to say they’re not important or ominous. Politically, they may be more successful in creating coalitions of people who then run for office or take other direct action. And these days, they may be less grassroots than funded by dark money, as a recent article by the Guardian pointed out. Today the school board, tomorrow the governor’s race.
UK history professor Karen Petrone studies censorship in Soviet Russia, and said she’s alarmed by the ways that book banning leads to the kind of authoritarian thinking about what to think. She’s now working on a statewide initiative to help train teachers about how to teach the Holocaust. She was particularly concerned about the Tennessee decision on “Maus,” which she calls one of the “most important works on the Holocaust.”
In 1933, the Nazis encouraged German citizens to bring banned books to the public square to be burned. “The first book was “All Quiet on the Western Front” because it did not represent the German war effort in World War I as heroic,” Petrone said. “What’s alarming about the Maus example is the echo of that, but also the way they banned it seems like they didn’t understand it, which worries me in broader terms about the effects that censorship is having.”
Censorship
School curriculum is one thing because it’s dealing with a captive audience. But it’s more troubling to try to ban books at public libraries, where you have a choice of going and choosing books. Joe Schweiss, director of the Bullitt County Library System, said a group of residents have complained about the memoir “Gender Queer,” and since then the complaints have branched out to other LGBTQ books. When people submit challenges to books, the library go through a committee process to decide if they should be moved or removed. The committee decided to leave “Gender Queer” where it was.
“It’s an attempt at censorship and an assault on anyone these people don’t feel are ‘normal,’” Schweiss said. “Its an assault on people’s personal freedom. It saddens me that guns will have more rights than authors.”
Jean Ruark, executive director of the Paul Sawyier Public Library in Frankfort said the basic philosophy of libraries is that parents gets to decide what their children read. If they don’t want them to read a certain book, then they don’t have to check it out, but other parents might want to.
“My personal belief is that (book banning) is an illusion of control — they feel they’re acting in a child’s best interest, but they’re forgetting that other parents get to make their own choices for their own children. Banning a book isn’t going to achieve what they really want.”
If people are worried about or oppose book bans, then they should speak out too.
They can say ‘we support the library having something for everyone,’” Ruark said. “It’s become cliche, but if the public library is doing its job, it’s going to have something on the shelves to offend everyone.”
Whitney Kimball Coe, who works for the Center for Rural Strategies, is a community leader in McMinn County, Tenn., which has recently been in a lot of national headlines over the banning of “Maus” on Jan. 26.
Those headlines have not been helpful. “I don’t see our school board going back and revisiting this,” she said. “Just like the rest of our politics in the rest of the country, the more push back they get from outside McMinn, they really will dig their heels in deeper.”
The school board’s decision took many by surprise, and the community has a lot of questions, Coe said. At a community meeting this week, concerned citizens talked about their many questions and what to do next.
“The baseline thing is show up at the next school board meeting and ask these questions and offer our dissent to this decision, so they don’t think we’re a monolith opinion on this,” she said. In addition, faith communities could start conversations about the importance of understanding the Holocaust.
“I’m part of this community, I’m not interested in denouncing individuals, I’m interested in exploring what are the pathways to repair,” she said.
Then again, as she pointed out, what started as a book banning has turned into a community-wide read of “Maus.” And that’s what matters in the end — more books, more reading, more understanding. Book bans don’t give anyone more control. They just make us dumber, less inclined to listen to each other and put us further apart on either side of wider and wider divides.
