In the New York Times today, Margaret Renkl rails against book banning:
During the 2022-2023 school year, PEN America, an advocacy organization that defends free expression, recorded 3,362 instances of book banning, a number that represents an increase of 33 percent in just one year....Book bans belong to the same categorical crime against democracy as denying red-state citizens the full range of medical care available to the citizens of blue states.
Maybe I shouldn't care about this use of language, but increasingly I do. We are not talking about book bans here. All of the books in question continue to be freely available at public libraries, bookstores, and online. All that's happening is that school libraries are deciding what books are appropriate for schoolchildren, and many of them are making judgments that we liberals don't like.
Hell, I don't like them either. Nevertheless, this isn't a "crime against democracy." It's just a misguided panic instigated by a small number of people in a small number of mostly rural, conservative school districts.
So what should we call this if it's not really a ban? A squeeze, because it reduces the number of places kids can find some of these books? A restriction? An exclusion? A suppression? I don't know. But until we're genuinely banning books, as we used to in the days of Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer, we really ought to find something else to call it.
POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, PEN America says that about 1,400 books were added to its index in 2023 through June, of which 60% are “banned pending investigation.” In other words, they were temporarily removed while a challenge is considered. The number of books that have been removed permanently is considerably smaller.
If a book is forbidden to be in a particular depository for books, it has been banned. It may not have been universally banned, but it most certainly has been banned.
And many of these bans are in public libraries, not just schools.
Of course. A school board or other authority can only ban books within its jurisdiction, but a ban is a ban is a ban. If Kevin really "increasingly" cared "about the use of language," he'd understand that.
If Texas bans abortion but abortion is still legally available in California, that doesn't make the Texas ban any less a ban.
Likewise, with local bans on books.
Oh baloney. If a hospital chain in California decided not to offer abortion because of protests, abortion wouldn't be banned there, it would just be the hospital chain isn't offering it. Words have meaning.
And yours do not. FOAD, troll.
I call your baloney and raise you two salamis and a bierwurst.
A hospital chain is a private business and not a government entity. It can decide what services it will provide (within constraints of the law).
A school board is a local governmental unit with authority as granted by the state.
In Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that school boards are restricted in removing and banning books from school libraries because students have First Amendment rights to access and read books of their own choosing. If you're arguing that school boards removing library books is the same as private companies removing services they provide, that's not right and contrary to the law of the land.
Don't think for one second that he doesn't already know this.
If a librarian decided not to buy a book because they liked other ones better, is that book banned? How about if they run out of space and get rid of it? Or decide independently that it doesn't fit what the children need? Banned? Banned?
Please.
For the record, a librarian is not a school board.
Supreme Court, Pico (1982):
The ALA and AASL have best practices for collection development and deaccessioning policies, and MLIS programs have entire courses dedicated to this topic. Your question is not a new one, nor an unconsidered aspect of librarianship within the profession. It is also completely tangential to the problem of book challenges and policy dictates from school boards that engage in a pattern or practice of violating students' civil rights.
Thanks. My first job out of college was in the St. Louis Central Library, where I clerked for the book-selection librarian. There is all the difference in the world between an educated professional choosing additions to a collection on the basis of stated policies and consideration of the clientele, and elected boards attempting to micromanage and second-guess the professional staff.
And /most/ kids only have access to the books in their school libraries.
They don't have access to private libraries or money for bookstores (who in practice have fewer books than libraries).
When I was young, I could read books that friends could not because of "the Index", a Catholic publication. It ran from 1600 or so up until 1966 when, as we all know, the world in general descended into vile sexualized anarchy. Good times!
Do I support the recent waves of book, uh, suspensions? No, I oppose it for the most part is ill-informed and as part of an attempt to create an echo chamber that is unhealthy for the civic life of America.
Do I place the same weight to this politically as bans on abortion and gender-affirming care for trans children and adults? No, I do not. Margaret Renkl apparently does.
"All of the books in question continue to be freely available at public libraries, bookstores, and online"
Books are being banned from public libraries as part of this moral panic as well. After which the law, in its majestic equality, permits the rich as well as the poor children to purchase as many books as they like.
come on, kevin. we all know that a book can be banned in a specific place, and we all know that these bans are in specific schools and school districts. is it not a ban on abortion if it's only in one state because abortions are "freely available" 300 miles and 5 states away?
This has been the latest installment of Kevin Drum's long-running series, "That Thing You're Worried About? It's Not a Big Deal to Me".
So what should we call this if it's not really a ban?
Banal riot?
+1
It shouldn't be called a ban, it should be called a magnet for young eyes. The more noise, the more powerful the pull.
“Well, I'll take these pages and move on. Things are happening elsewhere. Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice - they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now - misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch, until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want every one to scratch himself to death.”
One issue that is missing here is that for many children access to books is school or nowhere. No means to buy books, no means for transportation to some other library that may or may not have the book in question. All of these arguments assume folks have the money to buy the books or the means to travel to the nearest library with the book. I don't really care what we call it, because its effect is to restrict access in particular demographics.
Contrary to Kevin's misinformation, the current moral panic by conservatives over books is not the mere efforts of a few local malcontents in flyover country. In actuality it is a nationwide astroturf movement being funded by billionaires.
I agree it's important to be precise about what's happening, but you're leaving a big part of it out. Young Adult novels with LGBTQ+ characters, for example, haven't been "banned" in Florida, in that it is at least theoretically possible to acquire them from bookstores and adult libraries, and they're certainly available online. But their removal from school libraries and curricula is based on claims made by government officials that a segment of society is attempting to "sexualize" or "groom" schoolchildren. That means these titles are being demonized in the same way vulnerable populations are. History has taught us what comes next. Reporting that this is nothing more than a limited argument about what children should lead is entirely misleading.
And Kevin should have at least mentioned the political astroturf operation noted by Big Texan above. Kind of an important part of the story.
It's a slippery slope. Making it harder to obtain material that may broaden the mental horizons of soon to be adults eligible to vote, is a step in an ongoing battle to destroy democracy. A certain portion of the population want to control what adults can think about. These are the people who claim that their interpretation of the One True Book is the only basis for all thought.
"school libraries are deciding what books are appropriate"
Perhaps, but school libraries are *not* deciding just what 'appropriate' means. The government is telling them. That could not be a more salient fact.
Book _banning_ and book _burning_ are indeed different, and I'll follow Kevin there-- these books aren't being publicly burned, yet, as far as we know.
Back in the day, like maybe as late as the 1950s, "banned in Boston" was an actuality (that was sometimes used to goose sales). What it meant was that a small private group of busybodies, the Watch and Ward Society, had enough pull to get people warned and arrested for indecency wrt books, plays, art, etc. So really most of the time all they had to do was warn, and that was enough. That's what banning was. It was vigilantes. They needed the police to do what arresting there was, but it was they, a private group, who decided what to ban. It wasn't the government.
So banning historically can be hydra-headed. It can be (has been) done by private groups. It can be done by government authority, as by school boards and, say, county commissioners who fund libraries. As Big Texan and Five Parrots point out, the current drive is largely a coordinated astroturf operation. And I'll add that in given localities, the vast bulk of requests to ban (or restrict, or whatever you want to call it) comes from very, very few people.
It doesn't have to get to book _burning_ to be bad and dangerous.