It’s the first day of Banned Books Week 2024. If you don’t know me and/or haven’t read my blog, I should tell you I’m passionate about books and viscerally opposed to banning. For years I posted regular news roundups about book banning and censorship, along with reviews of books targeted by the torch & pitchfork mob. In fact I still read and review banned books, and publish those reviews here and on Goodreads.
In honor of Banned Books Week, I offer my annual defense of calling book banning by its proper name:
Every year those who want to ban books line up to tell us Banned Books Week is a hoax. Books aren’t banned in the USA, they claim. We’re protecting the children! Restricting access to age-inappropriate literature is not book banning! It’s just common sense to keep books that might turn our children gay or trans out of their hands!
They hate words like ban, banning, and banned. In the years I’ve been writing these YCRT! posts, more than one reader has called me a liar for saying that’s what they’re up to.
But that is exactly what they’re up to.
In the USA, not a week goes by without parents in one state or another showing up at school board meetings to demand the banning of books from reading lists and libraries. Not a week goes by without some politician or administrator ordering books removed from shelves.
Regardless of whether the same books are available on-line or in bookstores, the intent of those who call for their banning is to keep others — kids at first, but eventually adults as well — from reading them. This is the very definition of banning.
The government no longer bans books at the national level, but it used to. Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer, for example, was banned in the USA from its publication in 1934 until the Supreme Court overruled the ban in 1964. Even during the days when it and other books were literally banned in the USA, though, conservatives advanced the argument that such books weren’t really banned, because you could always board an ocean liner, sail to Paris, and buy copies there. Conservatives today recycle the same argument: you can buy “Gender Queer” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” from Amazon, so what’s the problem with removing them from the children’s section of the library?
Book banners want to control what we read. They may no longer be able to ban books nationwide, but they’ll do whatever they can to get books they disapprove of banned from libraries, bookstores, and classrooms. Sometimes they succeed, and banned books are the result. Ban, banned, banning: these are the correct words, and that is why I use them.
Yes, Virginia, books are banned in the USA. It happens all the time, and if you haven’t heard, now more than ever. When people quit trying to prevent me or my children from reading books they don’t like, I’ll quit using the word, but not until then.