With The Banned
It's Banned Books Week, in a banner year for censorship. Here's what you can do.
Days before the 2009 Banned Books Week, the Wall Street Journal published an article arguing that the annual event was obsolete, and “finding censorship where there is none.”
That year, the Journal claimed, the American Library Association was raising undue alarm about 186 bans or challenges to books in schools or libraries between 2007 and 2009. This year’s Banned Books Week comes after a school year that saw 3,362 book ban cases, according to new research from the anti-censorship group PEN America.
Those ban attempts come as right-wing legislatures, activist groups, and trolls use books as a broadside against LGBTQ existence, Black history, and the funding of public schools and libraries.
Banned Books Week, which runs from October 1-7, has expanded accordingly.
“In the same way that book bans have now become a mounting movement, the efforts to prevent them and fight against them have also grown exponentially, which should be hopeful to all of us in this fight,” Sabrina Baeta, Program Consultant with Freedom to Read at PEN America told me.
“PEN America has been tracking this work [book bans] for two years now. Even year to year, the number of events during Banned Books Week has grown exponentially, so much that we now have Banned Books Month at PEN America, throughout October.”
Some of those events are organized by large anti-censorship organizations like PEN, or by library groups like the American Library Association. Others, Baeta noted, are independent, community-based, or backed by a new crop of advocacy groups mobilizing against book bans.
The Journal—which ran its 2009 story alongside an unflattering caricature of a librarian shushing patrons—cast Banned Books Week as a hysterical performance of persecution. But 14 years later, in the face of legislative crackdowns on literature, the 2023 Banned Books Week programming suggests real roadmaps for resisting an increasingly aggressive censorship agenda.
Here are some of the Banned Books Week resources and events I’m most jazzed for:
-For The People, a new “leftist library project” is hosting “How They Did It: Community-Based Efforts to Defend Public Libraries” on Thursday, October 5, 6-7:30 pm EST. The session will feature advice for pro-library activism on a local scale, from speakers with Minnesota’s Hennepin County Library Patrons Union and Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship. There’s a Q&A session for attendees who want to apply the Minnesota and Louisiana groups’ models to their own libraries. It’s free and streamable on Zoom. https://www.librariesforthepeople.org/events/how-they-did-it
-PEN America and the ACLU of New Jersey are collaborating on Monday, October 2, 6-7:30pm EST for a discussion on the anti-democratic agenda behind book bans. “More Than Empty Shelves: How Book Bans Undermine Identities And Restrict Information” will explore how censorship campaigns threaten our ability to speak and think freely. The panel will be livestreamed on Facebook: https://pen.org/event/more-than-empty-shelves/
-The Boston Public Library is joining an expanding effort to offer free ebooks to young people across the country, regardless of whether they’re eligible for a standard Boston library card. The Books Unbanned program offers Boston Public Library cards to anyone ages 13 to 26, allowing teens and young people to read books that might be unavailable at their own schools or libraries. Boston is the third city to add its catalog to the collection, following New York and Seattle.
-The New Republic is organizing a Banned Bookmobile tour that will give away challenged titles through some of the most censorious states. The tour route starts Sunday in Brooklyn, heading south through Florida and wrapping the month in Texas. Its schedule is available here. Penguin Random House also has a Banned Wagon tour on the road this week, making stops in Nashville, New Orleans, and House. Its schedule is here.
-Saturday, October 7 is the first Banned Books Week Day of Action. Backed by organizations like the American Library Association, it’s a day-long pressure campaign in defense of libraries and their most threatened books. Suggested actions range from checking out a challenged book at the library (“circulation data can be used to support keeping challenged books on shelves and to justify ordering more books by the same authors or on the same topic”) to contacting local lawmakers.
-Organizations like For The People and PEN America are offering blueprints for supporting libraries and blocking censorship campaigns. Check out For The People’s “How To Speak Up At A Public Meeting” guide (it’s printable and pocket-sized) or their “Board Watcher Bingo” (a gamified way to spot administrative bullshit). PEN has its own script for very politely fighting back against book bans at local meetings.
The Journal’s 2009 essay (written, incidentally, by the editor in chief of a short-lived book company that published an incredible density of books arguing against working mothers) was a preview of a now-common conservative talking point: that book bans are not technically “bans” but reasonable restrictions. A book about LGBTQ life is moved to an “adults” section of a library, accessible only with parental permission. A school pulls books from shelves en masse to undergo a long and opaque “review” process. Etcetera.
“There's not been a single book banned in the state of Florida,” Ron DeSantis, governor of the leading state for book bans, argued earlier this year. “You can go buy or you can use whatever book you want.”
That argument might have worked in 2009, when the Journal bemoaned that Banned Books Week organizers were wrongheadedly “more interested in confrontation than celebration.” But 14 subsequent years of censorship campaigns prove those librarians were right to keep confrontation in their catalogs.
Are you reading anything good? Anything from your library? I’m on a library ebook kick, and it’s roughly doubled the number of books I finish. I used to hate the idea of reading a book on my phone, but so much of my current parenthood stage is just waiting around for a swim class to finish, daycare to let out, a nap to end—all prime occasions for looking at a screen. Last year I joked that, for all the time I spent scrolling Twitter, I may as well be reading Anna Karenina on my phone. Then I read Anna Karenina on my phone, because it was a good joke. Now I’m reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa on my phone, via my library app. It’s great.
Here’s what else I’m reading.
-Abortion bans are making it too difficult for OBGYNs to practice in some red states, leading to dangerous maternal health deserts. NBC News has a sobering report from Idaho, where expectant parents must drive 90 minutes for maternal care. “When this closure [of a northern Idaho that shuttered its maternity wing] was announced, we were getting a lot of calls from women asking, ‘What do I do?,’” a director of an Idaho hospital said. Her facility recorded its highest-ever number of births in June as it took in women who’d driven across the state to deliver.
-Covid-era childcare subsidies, expiring today, are expected to set off a wave of daycare closures. That, in turn, is expected to drive mothers out of work. New polling from Data for Progress found that “53% of women voters say they would consider cutting their work hours if they lost access to child care.”
-Last month’s Republican “Pray Vote Stand” summit was a melting pot of longtime conservative activists and newcomers who’ve entered the scene through right-wing school board politics. Ominous!
Alright, that’s this week’s MomLeft. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider subscribing or passing it along to a friend. See you next Sunday!