I wrote an op-ed for the KC Star back in June to advocate on behalf of the long suffering Intellectual Freedom heads in Missouri. It’s a dismal state of affairs, per usual, for school librarians, parents, kids, and others who value the freedom to read. Stickers of the below title are available for free if you see me out and about somewhere. My submitted version is below, since the Star took a few editorial liberties with it, but you can find the published editorial here- https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article289412116.html
Book Bans are Bullshit
Another day, another book ban. Technically, “book bans” are more accurately labeled “book challenges’, or at least the process of challenging a work is where the real heart of the problem lies. While it is true some would have certain books banned from public spaces – especially books and materials that reflect the experiences of people from historically marginalized populations, the broader act of challenging books in public schools and libraries presents a more pressing and distressingly resilient threat across Missouri and the country at this late political hour. The act of trying to have something removed, of challenging a single book in a school library immediately kicks into gear an unwieldy censorship machine that is advertised as moral imperative to protect children from harm, but in effect terrorizes educators, alienates kids and other readers, and undermines the very institutions built to support public education and welfare. In Cameron, Missouri, about 45 minutes northeast of KC, the Cameron School Board and administration have been surreptitiously cutting off access to award-winning titles, and engaging in alleged skullduggery resulting in removing materials from school shelves. Intellectual Freedom advocates on the ground note an overabundance of credulity toward Cameron School administrators on the part of the board, as well as violation of the board’s own policies (e.g. IIAC-R1 in the school board policy manual) in pursuit of shielding the youth from the conservative cultural bugaboos, chief among these: The reality that LGBTQ+ people do indeed exist and might even be interested in reading books in which their lives and experiences are reflected. Parents and educators point to administrator use of a suspicious review platform, BookLooks, that promises to be “A busy parent’s quick reference to objectionable material …” If you look at BookLooks’ actual rubric, you’ll notice use of terms like “gender ideology ” as a criteria for mediating access to work for younger readers. This buzzword signals a disavowal of the undeniable movement for visibility of LGBTQ+ people over the past several decades, in particular the strides made by Trans and Non-Binary people for civil rights. You can read the Missouri Library Association Intellectual Freedom Committee’s letter to the board, which gives a good description of the pro-reader viewpoint on the topic, a committee I might add that recently won the prestigious Downs Intellectual Freedom Award for its years-long work promoting the freedom to read in this state. They ask the Cameron School board “ to consider the irreparable harm that undermining intellectual freedom causes to students and their trust in public institutions that come between them and attempts to understand their world.”
One begins to wonder to what end this glut of censorship is being undertaken. Why for example, are conservative parents’ groups and censorship-forward websites so focused on books as sites of scandal, when pretty much any kid who can pick up a tablet can instantly find something more salacious on the internet without leaving home? Research has been done on cycles of cultural paranoia, moral panic, and attempts to challenge the centrality of the written word in education, and how these fit together in the broader political and cultural fabric of our democracy. Dr. Emily J. Knox, an important scholar on intellectual freedom said in her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past September that books about LGBTQ+ folks are frequently incorrectly assumed to be all about sex, and books about non-white characters are deemed unacceptable if they do not conform to a narrative which she and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie call “the Single Story”. Knox concludes that there is a fundamental misunderstanding baked into the framing of book challenge attempts by those who would censor materials in libraries: “When it comes to parents, they do have the responsibility to talk to their kids about what they are learning and reading and to steer them towards appropriate choices for their children and their family. However, they do not have the right to make those choices for other children and families.” Book challenges are never about protecting children, they are about protecting their parents from the reality that the world around them is changing. Book challenges are a maladaptive social band-aid for deeper cultural issues that we need to understand in order to discuss, and that is doubly true of our kids who will be living in the world we leave to them.
Joe Kohlburn 