Last month my friend’s grandson spoke at a school board meeting against a new book challenge proposal.
The change at the Virginia high school where he’s a student would replace a simple review policy with a complex document including a paragraph allowing the school soard to add or remove any materials at any time, without a review process.
No one would even have to read in full the books in question.
Profanity-laced signs accompanied supporters of the change, which is based in part on profanity in the books. Thus began my quest to dig deeper.
I drove to the Santa Barbara Public Library armed with a list of the 100 most challenged or banned books from 2010-19 from the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
A librarian graciously helped me to navigate among the Children, Young Adult, Graphic Novels, and Adult sections.
Grabbing several available titles, I headed back home to my patio to start my summer reading.
“Captain Underpants” was first. Business Insider called the series by Dav Pilkey,
“The Most Banned Book in America” in 2013. The reasons cited are offensive
language, partial nudity, violence, misbehavior, and blackmail or threats.
In the book I read, a duo of troublemaker boys designs a machine to transform their principal into a sort of anti-hero, whose outfit is a pair of underpants.
My grandsons enjoy reading “Captain Underpants,” and appreciate its silliness. While the characters show disrespect to the principal, their antics do not go unpunished. There are logical consequences for both children and adults.
I might rather they be reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “The Diary of Anne Frank” for their intellectual prowess, but those are on the banned list also.
“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie, is narrated by a Native American kid subjected to bullying, racism, family alcoholism, and other issues. He is an outcast in his reservation community for choosing to attend a better funded off-reservation school.
This boy’s upbringing was about as far from mine as I could imagine. The book gave me insights into what someone might feel like with that background.
Too rough for middle schoolers? Certainly there were some parts that would have surprised and maybe embarrassed 14-year-old me from my upper middle class white junior high. Which is why it could have been a valuable part of my education.”
“And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson, is an endearing picture book that tells the story of a pair of male penguins in New York City’s Central Park Zoo.
Zookeepers plant an about-to-be abandoned penguin egg in the nest Roy and Silo have built. They successfully hatch and raise the chick.
I suppose you could call it a thinly veiled attempt to introduce the topic of homosexuality to kindergarteners, but it happens to be a true story that gives children a glimpse of the wonder and variety of nature. I loved it.
Which is not my reaction to E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey.” I skipped the middle 150 pages or so and missed very little character development in the jump. Talk about a graphic novel.
The most common justifications for book challenges are sexually explicit content, racism, and damaging lifestyle, according to Publish Your Purpose.com. I agree with a Huffington Post assessment of “Fifty Shades:”
This erotic novel is, “the least titillating crap ever published.” It contains few redeeming qualities to make it worthy of placement in a non-adult library.
While you can find Internet claims that children have borrowed it from their school library, the librarian at the Virginia school writes, “I can’t imagine that 50 Shades of Grey would be in any K-12 school library! I think that’s a fabrication.”
The main reasons not to ban books include avoiding censorship, encouraging democracy, preventing a stagnating society, and supporting marginalized communities.
In my sample of banned books thus far, I am swayed particularly by the idea that adults, youth and children can embrace the heterogeneity of the human race by reading about people different from themselves.
Meanwhile, the Virginia school board voted unanimously to adopt the veto-power policy and required 17 books to be removed immediately from the library, with more to come. The librarians were called “porn-pushers” and “groomers.”
The librarians aren’t sure what lies ahead. But I’m enjoying re-reading Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” In this frequently banned book, Black teenage Celie processes her rural Georgia upbringing through letters to God. Too late to ban the movie.