The Book Banning Scourge: Coming to a School Near You?

On January 10, 2022, the McMinn County Board of education held their monthly meeting. On the agenda was one item: to discuss the eight grade's English Language Arts Standards curriculum. While the purpose of the meeting was to discuss all the curriculum and how it’s developed, specific to the curriculum was the comic book story, "Maus," by Art Spiegelman, published from 1980 in installments, appearing in collected form in 1991. It won a Pulitzer in 1992 – the only graphic novel to receive that honor – and has sold millions of copies since and has been used as education material for decades.

The discussion was around the appropriateness of the material the book portrays and how it portrays it. There were 8 profane words and one image of nakedness (a female mouse) that induced the most objection. After extensive discussion about whether it would be legal, per Fair Use, to redact the objectionable words and image and continue legally to use the book – a discussion that included, among other things, the appropriate carbohydrate and fiber ratio for cattle feed, used as an analogy for how to teach a subject – it was decided that the book would be removed entirely from the curriculum for 8th graders in the county.

News of this decision went national 2 weeks later, the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Once the media's Eye of Sauron turned its gaze towards the issue, book bans, book burning, and anti-Semitism became the order of the day.

For a few days, legacy media ran segments on "Maus" and a seeming growing tide of anti-Semitism. Social media was a wall of memes about book bans and in particular claims of a right-wing effort to keep ideas out of the hands of the youth while at the same time suppress the teaching of the Holocaust, race, and any other subject found undesirable by "Republicans" and conservatives. A week later, Pastor Greg Locke, in a suburb of Nashville, got national attention with an event he organized burning books like "Harry Potter" and "Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson (#1 and #28, respectively, on the top 100 list of challenged books of 2000-2009) because they promote satanism and witchcraft.

If one's primary source of news is social media (and for more than 70% of people, it is a source for at least some news), then that person might be under the impression that the country is but moments away from a dictatorship like was experienced in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Soviet Union or Airstrip One in Oceania.

First, the initial focus on anti-Semitism was misplaced in this instance -- even if concern about it in general isn’t -- once you look at the minutes of the meeting. Do that, and what you'll find are the concerns of adults in a conservative community for the welfare of their children. 

Fears of book banning, or the throttling of ideas and the closing of minds is understandable given the larger national narrative context of the last two years, as parents were forced to become more involved in their children's schooling due to Covid stay-at-home orders as they became more aware of what was taught or proposed for being taught in schools. But again, in the instance of the McMinn County School Board, this doesn't appear to be at the heart of the matter. (To note: "Maus" was added to the curriculum as part of the ELA standards modules but had not been taught before). 

None of this is to say that the orchestrated effort to make ideas and knowledge in the form of the written word isn't something to guard against (it is). This isn't to say that concerns of acts of anti-Semitism are a waste of time (they aren’t). But the media's use of the McMinn County School Board vote to gin up support for the notion that we are on the precipice of a collapse akin to Weimar Germany in 1932 is both disingenuous and an example of how media continues to enable a structure of social division and conflict not based on either the common experiences of most people or what they really think about each other. Like recent examinations by intelligentsia concluding that we are at, or upon, civil war, there is a hint of hyperbole, fear-mongering, and self-fulfilling prophecy built into media's representation of these events. 

Let me repeat: the willful suppression of free thought, the organized and systematic discrimination and violence against a person or peoples because of their heritage, origin, race, creed, or politics must always be guarded against. Right, left, center, up, down... being able to live unmolested and equitably regardless of any of the above should be the priority of any civic structure to enable and enforce.

The price of freedom is constant vigilance, but hysteria tends to self-propagate, particularly if hysteria is the form vigilance takes, seeing threats at every turn.

"In 2020, more than 273 books were challenged or banned," states an American Library Association (ALA) release. That number is down from the 377 challenges logged in 2019. It's likely that this was because many libraries and schools being closed or moved online for much of the year.  This calls out an important thing to know about book challenges: 

2018: 347 tracked challenges

2017: 354 tracked challenges

In the last 10 years, books most frequently challenged were a combination of contemporary published works such as "George," by Alex Gino (#5) and "Fifty Shades of Grey" by E.L. James (#8); to curriculum classics like "To Kill a Mockingbird" (#15) and "Of Mice and Men" (#28). You might be surprised that others on the list are "Captain Underpants" (#2), The Goosebumps series (#46) and "The Hunger Games" (#12). I was shocked to find that the Holy Bible ranks #52, and "The Diary of Anne Frank" ranks #62 among the top 100 challenged books from 2010 to 2019.

"The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie was the #1 most challenged book overall, since it was published in 2009.

Go back ten years, and the Harry Potter books show up a lot in the first half of the decade (and it made an appearance in 2018 on the top 10 list).

According to the ALA, challenges aren’t just for books; books make up over 50-60% of materials challenged, but it can include artworks, films, or other forms of representation.

It's important to take a moment here and distinguish between the increasingly onerous gradations of sanctioning.

A challenge is the first step, when a book is officially suggested as being inappropriate for a given audience or in each setting.

A ban is the act of officially preventing access to the text. These bans go as follows: curriculum, school library shelves, then public library shelves. The most serious form of ban in the United States is officially preventing a book from being published or distributed at all. The more famous books that fell at one point in this "most dangerous" category are Joyce's "Ulysses," Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," and D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley’s Lover."

Many books that have been subject to the most serious form of sanction were for obscenity, falling victim to the prohibitions under the Comstock laws -- first passed in 1873 to ban birth control -- making it a criminal act to transmit using the US Postal Service materials related to obscenity, contraceptives, "abortifacients" (any drug or agent that can cause the premature termination of a pregnancy), and sex toys. Even personal letters with any sexual content or information were subject to oversight.

The Comstock Law was ended in 1957, and obscenity restrictions on printed materials were lifted in most instances, though the Comstock laws continued to influence community decency standards for years afterwards.

In the last few years, according to the ALA's site: "Demands to remove books addressing racism and racial justice or those that shared the stories of Black, Indigenous, or people of color grew in number. At the same time, books addressing themes and issues of concern for LGBTQIA+ people continued to dominate the list."

But if you look at the long list of books challenged over a 10-year period, or over several decades, you see that the primary trend has been to seek the restriction or removal of books has to do with any sexual content, whether its LGBTQ+ in recent years or good old fashioned cisgender dalliances both current and going back nearly 100 years.

Some will say that I'm naive to think that a larger, more nefarious effort isn't underway to render the U.S. as a one-party state where dissent is unilaterally suppressed, and the dissenter is violently oppressed.

To offer a different voice in the legacy media echo chamber… one of the variables always left out of these expressed fears is the systemic decentralized nature of U.S. civic powers. Yes, local school districts have banned books. Crazy, wild-eyed white supremacists march to advocate the white race and scream about “replacement.” Local municipalities enact election rules that create “polling deserts.” But in this country, you also have school districts that have “Heather has Two Mommies” on their shelves; there are marches for racial justice, people helping the homeless, and groups that stand up for transgender rights; and where people are allowed to show up day-of-election to vote. 

The point is, there’s more diversity of thought and action throughout regions of the nation that threaten the hegemony of dire predictions that come from either the right or the left. What Weimar Germany didn’t have, that we do, was a large and diverse “messy middle.” It’s what makes Americans difficult to rule and frequently incorrigible. 

At the poles of both right and left it is sometimes said that too many people are indifferent and just shrug their shoulders when faced with threats to free ideas, free elections, free religion, social equality. I propose there are a LOT of people who aren’t indifferent, they just aren’t offered quarter in legacy media. They take a less binary view of their world and are flummoxed by what they see around them, and if they have questions, and those questions challenge the stern poles of binarism, all those people have at their disposal is the featureless firehose of Google to get answers for them. Thousands upon thousands of people from all backgrounds, during a pandemic, marching in the wake of a single man murdered by police, is a testament to how the American people might not be so docile in the face of tyranny and cruelty.

The marketplace of ideas should be where the ideas are allowed to succeed, whether based on their quality, their usefulness, their beauty or even their outrage. Ideas can’t be treated like thalidomide or lawn darts or Pintos. Ideas are unique because even when they come packaged in a complete form, they aren’t complete themselves. They are part of an open and always-evolving system of the dialectic.

Again, the price of freedom is constant vigilance, but we should guard against hyperventilating every time the media accentuates the aberrant of non-random decontextualized facts, or we’ll all fall over passed out while real tyranny easily steps over our unconscious bodies on its way to fulfill its will.