Book bans are in the news but censorship happens quietly all the time
In 1939, a German transatlantic liner brought 900 Jewish refugees to our shore. The Jews were fleeing from Hitler after Kristallnacht, “the night of broken glass,” in which homes and businesses of Jews were vandalized, making it clear that Hitler intended to create a “Master Race” and eliminate all Jews from Eastern Europe. The refugees were turned away, and the Jews had no choice but to return to Germany, where their death sentences had been sealed.
Whoopie Goldberg regrets saying the Holocaust was not about race, but does she understand that between 1933 and 1945, approximately six million Jews were gassed, starved, beaten to death or murdered in other ways in concentration camps? Confusion over the Holocaust says something shocking about American education, history classes, and – of course - censorship.
In 2009, I responded to a Lexington Herald-Leader news story about Montgomery County parents who had challenged a teacher’s book selections. One parent was quoted as saying, “It’s not censorship when you make wise decisions about what can be used in the classroom.” Wrong. Censorship is exactly what it is.
Censorship is as old as recorded literature and as recent as a Tennessee school board’s banning of “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize -winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. Arizona and Florida legislatures are considering banning books about LGBTQ issues. While these book-banning efforts are in the news, in reality, most censorship is unreported and even unrecognized.
Subtle or overt, censorship is defined as any attempt to suppress materials presenting certain viewpoints or to exclude those viewpoints from a library or classroom. Books can be challenged for any reason at any time. In a speech at a convention of the International Reading Association, Katherine Paterson, author of prize-winning books for young people, said, “If I have a right to remove a book from the library shelf that offends me, then everyone else must have the same right until…there are only two books left in the whole library, and one of them is not the Bible.”
Working on a second major in history in the early 1950s, I took classes from five different college history professors. I didn’t learn about Kristallinacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” until I started researching a book I was writing. Later, on Jan. 6, 2020, I watched armed vigilantes storm our Capitol, intent on murdering the Vice President and the Speaker of the House, the two Americans next in line to the Presidency. Was this our Night of Broken Glass? In the future, will some claim it didn’t happen? Books about this insurrection will be filled with cursing and violence. Will these books be censured for young readers?
Those of us who value free inquiry and intellectual freedom need to become advocates for the right to read, to question, to weigh opposing views. This joint statement by the American Library Association and the Association of American Publishers has been endorsed by the National Council of Teachers of English and by many organizations:
“We here stake out a lofty claim for the value of books. We do so because we believe that they are good, possessed of enormous variety and usefulness worthy of cherishing and keeping free. We realize that the application of these propositions may mean the dissemination of ideas and manners of expression that are repugnant to many persons. We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”
Shirley Baechtold of Richmond is a former community columnist.