Led by moderator Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, three panelists provided an update during BEA on book banning in America, impressing upon their audience that assaults on the freedom of expression of writers and illustrators are as prevalent as they have ever been, if not more so. Even dictionaries, one panelist explained, are being banned from schools and libraries because of complaints about their content.
The session was sponsored by the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, in conjunction with the Association of American Publishers, Freedom to Read Foundation, and PEN American Center.
Bertin insisted that many incidents of censorship are vastly underreported, with schools and libraries simply removing the materials under fire in response to complaints, rather than reporting it.
Book banning involves “not just books you might expect,” Bertin said. “Those books considered edgy, because they talk about vaginas or penises; but also books you might not expect.” She then read down a list of fiction and nonfiction titles considered classics. Dictionaries that include images of the human body have been censored recently, she noted. The National Coalition Against Censorship has been receiving reports of books assigned at every grade level, from kindergarten to high schools, being banned.
“We’re seeing more complaints about high school AP classes,” she commented. Book banning has also been a growing problem in school’s gifted student programs, with panelist Pat Scales, a retired South Carolina school librarian and past president of the ALA’s Association for Library Service to Children, saying that “on the one hand, they want to push their kids, and on the other hand, they want to label the books, blame the books.”
Robie Harris, a children’s book writer who has written 25 books for children about their bodies, including It’s Perfectly Normal, It’s So Amazing!, and It’s Not the Stork!, was described by Bertin as a frequent target for book banning. “She must be doing something right,” Bertin said. “We get lots of complaints about her,” prompting Harris to assert that writers aren’t the real heroes, it’s librarians who are the heroes. “They’re on the front lines, while we’re safe, sitting behind our computers,” she said.
Harris insisted that children’s book authors who write about child development for children don’t usually set out to write “edgy” books. “What we write is in the best interests of the children,” she said, recounting that a Florida group copied pages of her books and burned them in a huge bonfire this past year. “The message to children is, ‘if you don’t like something, destroy it,’ ” she complained. But, she said, she will continue to write such books, because of the incidents like one in Delaware where, after a girl read the chapter on sexual abuse in It’s Perfectly Normal, talked to her mother, and her father was subsequently convicted of molesting her. “The book was used in the trial,” Harris said, “The judge called the book the hero.”
Author Laurie Halse Anderson, whose YA novel, Speak, was under assault last fall by a right-wing firebrand in Missouri, argued that people should keep an open mind and attempt to start a dialogue with those who seek to ban books. Delving into the mindset of those who would try to ban books from schools and libraries, Anderson described many of them as “terrified parents” who are motivated by fear and don’t know how to talk to their children. “My approach is to honor that fear,” she said, explaining that her father was a preacher, so she understands the “religious, conservative mindset in America.” Anderson insists that the real villains in these situations are the “evil bastards” who manipulate people’s fears and shut down dialogue about the books in question. Last year, when the “evil-hearted guy” sought to have her novel banned from schools and libraries, she bought 20 copies of Speak and sent them to Missouri libraries, asking people to read it for themselves instead of responding impulsively to the calls for its banning.
However, Anderson argued, it’s not just the conservatives seeking to ban books. Liberals have also been guilty of trying to suppress authors’ freedom of expression. Citing Wintergirls, her 2009 novel dealing with eating disorders among teen girls, she castigated the “very liberal readers of the New York Times” for condemning it and wanting to ban it. “Again, their inclination was to protect their kids from this book, because it’s a very difficult topic,” Anderson noted.
“You have to stand up” and oppose censorship, whether it’s coming from liberals or from conservatives, Anderson argued, “if you care at all about this country.” Scales pointed out that organized groups are using the Internet to “rate” the educational value of books on their Web sites, and to drum up opposition to them among parents. “Web sites are using engines to generate fear. It’s fear mongering,” Bertin noted, prompting Harris to issue a call to arms to those opposing censorship. She urged authors, booksellers, and librarians to continue speaking up against book banning, to “make sure children get the information, the stories they need.”
