Sept. 23 to 30 has been designated as this year’s Banned Books Week. According to the American Library Association, more than one book a day faces expulsion from open public access in U.S. schools and libraries every year.
Christine Jenkins teaches in the areas of youth services librarianship, children’s and young adult literature and literacy studies at the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences. Her research focuses on the history and development of literacy, literature and librarianship for people 18 years old or younger. She was interviewed by News Bureau humanities editor Andrea Lynn.
Have you had any personal or professional experiences with the banning of books?
I began my professional career as a school librarian, and during my 13 years in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, we had a number of book challenges, including several to books in my library collection. I became active in ALA’s intellectual freedom work and later spent two years as Intellectual Freedom Information Coordinator for the state of Wisconsin. When Wisconsin librarians had reason to believe that library materials were going to be challenged, they could call our office and we would send them reviews of the book, plus awards or recommendations it had received, and also information about the book’s author, genre, or readership – all within 24 hours.
Some of the challengers were acting on behalf of organized political or religious groups. Others were parents and guardians whose child had brought home a library book that the adult found disturbing. It might be a book that contained political, religious or sexual information with which the adult didn’t agree. Others contained slang or swear words that adults did not want their children to use. Still others featured characters who were ‘poor role models’ and did things that the adult did not want children to emulate – anything from sassing their parents to setting fires to making friends with a witch. Sometimes the book would be award-winning literature. Other times it would be a mass-market series book. ‘Cheap reading’ – whether chap books, dime novels, comic books or other forms of mass culture – has been the target of censors for centuries.
Have complaints changed over time, and if so, how?
During the McCarthy Era, books written or illustrated by suspected communists or ‘fellow-travelers’ were challenged regardless of their content, so that an edition of ‘Moby Dick’ illustrated by Rockwell Kent, an artist who was on the radical left, was challenged by members of the radical right Minutewomen. A picture book about a red-haired boy and a red-furred cat titled ‘The Two Reds’ received positive reviews, but some critics felt that the title mocked the seriousness of the Red Menace. William Steig’s ‘Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,’ a talking-animal fantasy about a donkey’s encounter with a magic wishing pebble, won the 1970 Caldecott Medal. In the early 1970s, the book was challenged because the animal-community’s police are pictured as pigs. After a while, police-as-pigs were no longer a hot-button issue, but in more recent years, the book has been challenged by those who worry that the magic wishing pebble will encourage occult practices. This concern about occult content in children’s books has been a common reason for book challenges in recent decades.
What do people who challenge library books really think they are achieving? Surely they realize that a book removed from a library shelf is probably still available elsewhere.
I would say that all censorship is political, with ‘political’ being not simply partisan politics, but rather the strategies used in claiming, wielding and defending social power, and thus controlling human societies.
Book burning, like flag burning, is an intensely political symbolic act. On May 10, 1933, Hitler youth staged book burnings in town squares throughout Germany. The books they burned were written by Jews, communists and others considered ‘degenerates’ by the Nazi regime. Of course they could not rid Germany of all such books in one night, but rather, this symbolic act expressed their opposition to the books’ authors and to the ideas contained in those books.
To be sure, challenging a book is not the same as burning it. But a book challenge – an effort to remove a book from a library or school – can also be viewed as a symbolic act. I think you could say that every book challenge is an expression of social tensions writ small.
