When Is A Book Ban Not A Book Ban? Are Reading Restrictions Just Curation In Action?
Over at Forbes, looking at the question of when we’re banning books and when we’re just curating.
As the call to remove certain books and materials from schools has spread, so has the backlash against it. Americans, it turns out, are not fans of banning books.
Responding to that backlash, groups leading the charge, like Moms for Liberty, insist that they are not calling for book bans. “We’re not looking to ban any books,” M4L co-founder Tiffany Justice told Newsweek. Yet, M4L leaders repeatedly appear doing just that. And their complaints move beyond just porn to complaints about books portraying amputees, sexy seahorses, “gay” penguins, children’s biographies of Black Americans, and Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem, “The Hills We Climb.”
PEN America has emerged as one of the primary trackers of book bans, finding thousands of instances of books being banned that contain “themes centered on race, history, sexual orientation and gender.” But not so fast—Jay Greene and Madison Marino of the Heritage Foundation charge that PEN America’s list of books removed from schools during the 2021-22 school year is “simply false.” Those books aren’t banned at all.
But not so fast so fast—on Twitter, Jeffrey Sachs (Acadia University) pointed out that Greene’s “debunking” of the PEN America list called a book ban false if the ban was reversed later (as was the case in one example from Missouri, where a ban was reversed after a suit by students and the ACLU).
The arguments that book bans aren’t really happening cover a broad spectrum. On the one hand, it’s reality that there is finite shelf space in a library. Librarians and school officials must pick and choose, and that includes picking and choosing which books will not be placed on those shelves. On the other hand, if a book ban isn’t a book ban when it is rescinded, overruled, or circumvented, then no books have been banned, ever.