Banned Books Week starts on September 26
By Paul Biba
Here is the word direct from the Banned Books Week site. Please go over and take a look and then think about what you can do during this week.
Banned Books Week is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. It was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than a thousand books have been challenged since 1982. The challenges have occurred in every state and in hundreds of communities. Click here to see a map of book bans and challenges in the US from 2007 to 2009. People challenge books that they say are too sexual or too violent. They object to profanity and slang, and protest against offensive portrayals of racial or religious groups–or positive portrayals of homosexuals. Their targets range from books that explore the latest problems to classic and beloved works of American literature.
During the last week of September every year, hundreds of libraries and bookstores around the country draw attention to the problem of censorship by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events. The 2009 celebration of Banned Books Week will be held from September 26 through October 3.
The purpose of this Web site is to help the public join the celebration of our freedom to read. The easiest way is to visit a participating library or bookstore. There is a list of Events, to help you find one in your community. (If you want to post information about an event in your community, please click here.) There is also a list of suggestions of other activities that will help remind people of the importance of free speech, What You Can Do. If you want further information about BannedBooksWeek.org, contact us at info@abffe.com or bbw@ala.org.
Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. Banned Books Week is also endorsed by the Center for the Book of the Library of Congress.
Thanks to Nathaniel Hoffelder for reminding me of this.
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Most of the ‘banned books’ displays that I have seen are pitiful. Those who post them seem to lack the most basic element of good sense–discernment.
1. They often give prominent position to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Are thugs roaming the streets, breaking into homes and searching for contraband copies? No. It’s simply that, from time to time, some black parents dare to “challenge” the judgement of school officials who make the book mandatory reading, despite the fact that it has vicious remarks about black people that could hurt small children. The same is true of other parents protesting violence and promiscuity in the books they kids are being forced to read.
I will be blunt. What those parents are protesting is an evil just as bad as censorship: state indoctrination. Both censorship and indoctrination are characteristic of repressive regimes and (in our country) bureaucracies run amuck. These parents deserve praise rather than condemnation.
2. The displays I have seen also seem to pay little attention to real censorship, the kind nasty governments impose on their cowed populations. A few years ago, library organizations in the U.S. refused to denounce Cuba for imprisoning those who had libraries of books banned by the government. The librarians’ excuse? Well, it seems that those running this libraries didn’t have degrees in library science, so these weren’t really libraries. Pitiful.
The real reason is, of course, that the left almost never finds the time to criticize repressions by those further left. That was all too obvious when Reagan gave his famous “Evil Empire” speech. “Evil empire, what evil empire?” liberals said. And odd as it seems, more recently the censorship of Islamic states also gets little attention. It’s almost that they like real censorship much like they so clearly love indoctrination, at least when they do it.
3. The Bible, the most censored book in the public arena in the U.S., rarely makes these lists. That’s odd, because far more often that the unfortunate Huck Finn, some school or other will be telling a student that he or she can’t read the Bible, even on their own time riding to school or between classes, never mind in a commencement address. Taken to court, these school officials always lose, but they keep trying. Since censorship is really about the books the government bans, this sort of behavior should go to the top of any banned books list. Instead, it’s almost never mentioned.
I’m sure many of these people mean well, but there is clearly an elitist, anti-democratic agenda at work here. Parents, concerned about their children, get treated as Nazis, while school officials, behaving precisely like their counterparts in 1930s Germany, can censor at will without being denounced. Worst of all, the most repressive regime in the Western hemisphere, Cuba, gets a free pass.