What Are We Protecting Children from by Banning Books?

[babylonsister]

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-are-we-protecting-children-from-by-banning-books

What Are We Protecting Children from by Banning Books?
Reading the titles that have been challenged and removed from public-school libraries across the country.
By Katy Waldman
March 10, 2023

snip//

Book bans, spearheaded by politicians and advocacy groups such as Moms for Liberty, have been proliferating over the past few years. A PEN America paper, published last September, records 2,532 instances of book banning in thirty-two states between July, 2021, and June, 2022. The challenges are spread throughout the country but cluster in Texas and Florida. Their targets are diverse, running the gamut from earnestly dorky teen love stories and picture books about penguins to Pulitzer-winning works of fiction. Some are adult potboilers that have found their way onto school-library shelves: three out of twenty-one books reportedly recently whacked in Madison County, Virginia, were written by Stephen King, and two were written by Anne Rice. Other bannees—including “Strega Nona,” a charming folktale about a pot that won’t stop cooking noodles—are presumably vectors of witchcraft. Still others, if you squint, could fall under the category of “pornography,” which is outlawed by DeSantis’s H.B. 1467. (“Tricks,” by Ellen Hopkins, is an introduction to grimy realism, replete with drug use and blow jobs.) Yet a whiff of pretext surrounds more than a few of the cries of obscenity. “Lawn Boy,” a semi-autobiographical work by the writer Jonathan Evison, was flagged for pedophilia yet portrays a twentysomething recalling a sexual experience he had as a fourth grader with another fourth grader.

The most frequently banned class of books are those intended for “young adult” readers—between the ages of twelve and eighteen. It makes a certain amount of sense that Y.A.—an awkward, gawky genre, as hard to delineate as adolescence itself—is the target of the majority of bans. Some Y.A. novels are essentially adult novels with the ages changed; some seem intended for much younger children; a lot of them fall somewhere in the middle. PEN’s list includes pitch-black and intense books that take up mental illness, addiction, cruelty, or social ostracization. (“The Truth About Alice,” by Jennifer Mathieu, considers slut shaming; “Speak,” by Laurie Halse Anderson, posits mutism as a trauma response to rape.) And a number of the banned titles—“13 Reasons Why,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “We Are the Ants”—address suicide. But many more of the prohibitions seem to cohere around a specific political vision. According to the PEN report, forty-one per cent of the banned books featured L.G.B.T.Q.+ themes, protagonists, or prominent secondary characters; the next-largest category of non grata texts has “protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.” Other problem subjects include “race and racism,” “rights,” and “religious minorities.”

snip//

But a glance at the list of most frequently banned books makes clear that “mature content” is a fig leaf: what parents and advocacy groups are challenging in these books is difference itself. In their vision of childhood—a green, sweet-smelling land invented by Victorians and untouched by violence, or discrimination, or death—white, straight, and cisgender characters are G-rated. All other characters, meanwhile, come with warning labels. When childhood is racialized, cisgendered, and de-queered, insisting on “age-appropriate material” becomes a way to instill doctrine and foreclose options for some readers, and to evict other readers from childhood entirely.

The recent wave of bans comes as many Republicans, in their opposition to gun control, climate science, food stamps, public education, and other social services, work assiduously to render the lives of American children as unchildlike as possible. A number of grownups apparently feel emboldened to spend their lives playing peekaboo with reality. Their kids may not have that luxury. ♦

[The Unmitigated Gall]

1. Empathy and diversity.

Hated by RWNJ’s the world over.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. "Protecting" them on behalf of the narrow-minded conformity of the community that

birthed George Babbitt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbitt_(novel)

[hildegaard28]

5. Maybe we should turn the

Commie accusation against them. They want everyone to be the same just like a bunch of Communists.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Ideas.

Especially the one that holds in the United States of America all people are equal under law.

[hildegaard28]

4. We're not protecting them from anything

The people pushing book bans are trying to stifle free thought and the free exchange of ideas. They want only their narrow view taught to children and acknowledged by adults. They don't like how free the youth has become, so they are trying to stifle that freedom.

[no_hypocrisy]

6. "Protecting the youth" from registering and voting as

DEMOCRATS!!!!!!!

[sinkingfeeling]

7. Knowledge and understanding.

[The Magistrate]

8. They Protect Themselves, Ma'am, Not Children

Children know far, far more than the blinkered, often vaguely disturbed parents raising them. In a quite ordinary neighborhood in a mid-sized city during the 'Leave it to Beaver' days, here's a few things went on.

We had a boy, the youngest of his family wore his big sister's clothes, out in front of God and everybody. His brother was mean to him, but would defend him against anybody else, and when kids we didn't know came through on bikes and started yelling at him, we all (there were three boys and the girl at the end of the block who threw like a boy) drove them off with violence. The girls let him play dolls with them (there were three more girlish sorts), neutral things like cards and Parcheesi he was just one more kid.

One day when the girls were paused on the sidewalk, a guy pulled his car over, asked if they could help him with some directions, he was lost. They came over like good Girl Scouts and found he had his pants open and was masturbating. I don't know a woman my age who wasn't subject to indecent exposure by her early teens.

I can recall from news of the time, but will not relate, horrific tales of children murdered by parents, or by people they were fostered out to. There was every form of sexual abuse, of what then was known as 'deviance', and no one reached puberty without some awareness of this.

These people aren't even trying to recapture their childhoods, they're trying to create the childhoods they never had and think they should have had and wish to God they'd had, that nobody ever has had, and wrap this around everyone else.

[Freethinker65]

9. Knowledge of the world outside their bubble and development of decision making skills.

[mackdaddy]

10. That little 'Rectangle of Knowledge' these kids all have is an endless source of 'stuff'.

When I was in middle school in the 70s someone would have an occasional Playboy mag they had lifted from their dad's stash. Now every type of pornography imaginable is just a few clicks away on the portable computers with high resolution screens that just about every teen has in their pocket.

Oh yea, I am sure none of them EVER click the button that says they are over 18..

But somehow banning literature and actual books is going to save them all.

This kind of snake oil 'Fix to protect the Children!' is pretty old, but tried and true.

'We got trouble right here in River City!'

[gulliver]

11. Unwanted influence, mainly, and emotional trauma

Parents have a rightful, ridiculously strong place in the process. Unfortunately, there is no process in most cases. It's too tough to figure out a balance of collaborative influence among the stakeholders: parents, teachers, non-parents, students, etc. We'd all rather "speak up and fight for our positions." That's fun and feels good, but it's ineffective and less than worthless when it comes to achieving goals.

A parent has the right to seek the influences on their children that they want their children to have. That includes the right to seek the exclusion of influences they don't want their children to have. Do they have the right to get their way every time? No. But most of the time, they do have that right.

Do I want Mein Kampf to be in the elementary school library? No. Do I want Dr. Seuss? Yes. Someone else might have the exact opposite opinion or might want to ban both. That's where we need a democratically elected board to make the tough calls. Something like a...a...school board!

[Joinfortmill]

12. Never banned what my children wanted to read (except porn). I was always there for the questions.

[IL Dem]

13. I kept my youngest daughter from reading only one book.

She was 15 when I got Stephen King's newest book, Gerald's Game. She loved King and wanted to read it, but I said no and hid it. I just couldn't try to explain what the game was all about. More my discomfort, I suppose, than hers.

Who knows, maybe she found it and read it on the sly. I do know she read it as an adult.

[milestogo]

14. The world as it really is.

The truth of history.

[2naSalit]

15. Knowledge.

Developed capacity for independent cognition.

[Behind the Aegis]

16. They are "protected" from reality.

I despise book bans and another popular, and similar form, and that is those who "sanitize" a book to meet modern standards. Both, to me, are despicable and counterproductive!

[Igel]

17. I seldom disagree, Aegis.

Here I do and have no good metric for what should and shouldn't be banned.


"The Hidden Tyranny" was assigned to a class. https://jweekly.com/2023/02/21/east-bay-high-school-teacher-called-out-for-antisemitic-lessons/

Now, I can see assigning this book (in a hamfisted manner) to say, "This. Is. Effing. Wrong. And. I. Effing. WILL. Make. You. See. Why." But if I assign this to 160 students and 155 "get it" and 5 are emboldened ... Did I do good or evil?

< On edit: I have absolutely no idea if this particular teacher wanted his students to think the book was true or simply insanely racist--not something ever on my reading list. I'm putting myself in his position. But still, the question remains. >

The other option ... Ban the book.

I got no solution. My ex-wife was sobbing a year or three back because a trans student pitched a fit at language in a novel written by an African-American using language considered acceptable in the 1950s, in which the offensiveness and racism of the language implicit in daily discourse was discussed. (But, wait, it was a black person using the epithet. What?) Do you bowdlerize the book? Ban it? Let teachers get raked over the coals? Hypersensitive students melt-down and pitch a fit?

Yet another reason I teach high-school science and not English. PV=nRT has few racial overtones. (There are some. I did have a student years ago say that V = IR was "wack" and "we need a *black* version of Ohm's law--maybe 'VI= R is better for folk like me!' I was pleased most stared or laughed; not pleased at the "yeah, we do, don't we?!" Student got an F for grades and missing work, didn't mind giving that student an huge F.)

[peggysue2]

18. Knowledge and the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another

The language of the Book Banners is an Us vs Them battle. They need 'the Other' to wage war with in order to sustain the myth of the good ole days, when America was really America.

White, Christian men need only apply.

There is no Other; there's only Us. That's what terrifies the Book Banners who (btw) will become Book Burners given a slight nudge. Scapegoating and censorship are tools of authoritarians. Republicans desperately want that here because the demographics are shifting.

The GOP is no longer interested in persuading people to their point of view. They intend to force people to keep their mouths shut, read only sanctioned material and get with the repressive programs. Before the demographic wave becomes a tsunami!