Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature from the WSJ
My wife and DIL are both children's librarians, and they far more often fielded the attempts at censorship from the conservative, local end. One only hears about the upstream censorship if one follows publishing, and awards, and national media - rather than local (or religious or partisan) media. Those censors stand right in front of you or complain about you in person at budget hearings, rather than fairly anonymously depth-charging you with your NYC publisher. If you don't like to hear it, you can turn the page for the one, and pretend that your people don't do this if you are dealing with one group, but you are stuck with angry people in your face for the other.
I have been on it for years that the ALA's Banned Books Week contains a lot of deception. If you look at the titles in the picture, they have all been published, right? So they aren't completely banned. Some of them were not banned at all, only challenged when they were assigned as required, or allowed in the public library. Some that were banned were banned in other countries, not here. Some were banned decades ago, or only in a few places. Enough with the high dudgeon.
I have also mentioned that my wife quickly discovered that a lot of challenged material could be dealt with by moving it up in age, from the elementary school shelves to the middle school, or the middle school to the high school - and that was not merely an evasion. It was often entirely appropriate.
In a previous censorship post I quoted YA author Sherman Alexie "...As I've written elsewhere, the right-wing are censorship
vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas." Full context at that link.
1 comment:
I also worked at a library's research/information desk a bit more than twenty years ago; it was a good part-time job while I was finishing my Master's degree and needed to be in a library a lot anyway. Much of the day I could read and work, and the occasional request for help was a pleasing diversion as a rule.
I think 100% of the complaints from the public were from the right-wing side in my time there. However, I would note that this was partly because the librarians tended strongly to be left-wing types who loved to build displays of books that were meant to get up the right-wingers' noses. The fact that we were in a rural county (suburbanizing at the time, now totally suburbs) in Georgia only made it more fun; the conflicts were a very predictable effect of their actions.
That tendency got much stronger in the Obama era; I no longer worked in libraries, but I would still go to them. At that time I was living in a truly rural part of Georgia about an hour outside of Athens. Go in the library in this solid red district, though, and all the displays would be about Gay History Month or Brave Feminist Voices. Sometimes they would have a selection of recommended biographies of heroic leaders like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Hillary Clinton, and of course Barack Obama.
I absolutely believe that there are more right-wing populists yelling at librarians than left-wingers. How could it be otherwise? Especially if, as you point out, the right-wing books often don't get published anyway.
Post a Comment