Beware of the Book! Censorship

[angelaudie]

I couldn't find a thread for censorship in literature so I hope it's ok to start one. It would have been more appropriate for Banned Book Week but oh well!

Maybe it's because I'm in the education field but I'm always interested in people's attempts to have books banned. This is probably because the reasons are at times downright bizarre. For example, ALA provides this list of bizarre reasons for banning books:

The Top Ten Ludicrous Reasons To Ban A Book
1. “Encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.” ( A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstien)
2. “It caused a wave of rapes.” ( Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights)
3. “If there is a possibility that something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it?” ( Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown)
4. “Tarzan was ‘living in sin’ with Jane.” ( Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
5. “It is a real ‘downer.’” ( Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank)
6. “The basket carried by Little Red Riding Hood contained a bottle of wine, which condones the use of alcohol.” ( Little Red Riding Hood, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm K. Grimm)
7. “One bunny is white and the other is black and this ‘brainwashes’ readers into accepting miscegenation.” ( The Rabbit’s Wedding, by Garth Williams)
8. “It is a religious book and public funds should not be used to purchase religious books.” ( Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, by Walter A. Elwell, ed.)
9. “A female dog is called a bitch.” ( My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara)
10. “An unofficial version of the story of Noah’s Ark will confuse children.” ( Many Waters, by Madeleine C. L’Engle)

The most recent case of calling to get a book banned really appalled me though. A man is calling for Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak to be banned from schools. According to him Speak is soft core porn. The book is about a young woman coming to terms with her rape by a classmate. The rape is described in the book which is what he is calling the soft core porn part. I'm sorry but if you read a description of a young girl being raped and think this is meant to turn readers on then you've got some serious issues.

[Smilla]

According to him Speak is soft core porn.

Um, no. I read Speak last year and the description of the rape is abstract at best. It's mentioned, IIR, once, (because obviously the main character is too traumatized to be dwelling on it) and it is in no way placed in an erotic context.

On a related note, in the back of my copy, there's an interview with Anderson in which she criticizes the mass consumption of pornography by young adult males and says she thinks it contributes to the desensitization of young people re: sexual assault and other violence.

Book banners are insane.

[GirlyGhoul]

It would have been more appropriate for Banned Book Week but oh well!

There's never a wrong time to discuss people who want to limit Freedom of Speech and ban all 'dangerous' ideas that don't fit their narrow agenda!!! Carry on!

I've actually visited this topic again and again in my life (doing speeches and papers for school assignments as well as making a banned book display when I worked at Barnes and Noble) And the one that always burns my biscuits up the most is the Rabbits Wedding. I mean look at this! It's adorable. And this banning wasn't about stifling a dangerous agenda... it was about pushing a racist and hate filled one. *shakes fist angrily*

Most recently the books being banned that got my panties in a wad were the "Harry Potter" series. I worked in a library around the time they first came out and these books were getting kids reading and getting excited about reading. Before that, what I'd seen kids getting most excited about were the Goosebumps books- which ok, at least they were reading. But the Goosebumps series, kids were going through and tossing aside like junk food. Harry Potter got them engaged. Really captured their imaginations. And the books were well written, strong well rounded characters, intricate plots- great use of foreshadowing and symbolism. I mean, this was real literature and kids were loving it and LEARNING from it.

So of course someone had to make a stink

In comes a bunch of harpies who have not read the books at all, but have been told by their ministers that these books are of the devil and that they teach children not only to use witchcraft but guides them to the dark arts with specific workable spells... Really? Where do they come up with this.

I finally, after growing weary of arguing with one woman I flat out said ,"Ma'am, If these books contained actual working spells I would be getting hooked up! I'd love to know how to point a wand at someone say a word and make them freeze and shut up! I'd also love to know where all these kids are who are using these spells. Why aren't they all flying around on brooms right now? 'Cause all I'm seeing is a bunch of kids pressing their nose in a book instead of against a tv screen and reading some great literature!"

I got busted down pretty hard for arguing with a patron, (I did not have a good working relationship at that library anyway) but to its credit, the library never took the books Harry Potter books off the shelves. There were some books that were literally about witches and witchcraft (Encyclopedia type reference books on the subject) that they kept behind the circulation desk to appease the harpies. But Harry and his Wizard friends got to stay.

[Smilla]

What always baffles me about book banners is that they get mad about the wrong things. Like the ones who tried to ban Fahrenheit 451 and As I Lay Dying not because those books showcase anti-authoritarian sentiment and contain references to suicide and abortion, but because both books feature blasphemy (specifically the expression, "god damn.")

[sumire]

The Rabbits' Wedding is adooooorable. And it makes me think of the old Peanuts storyline where somebody (Linus? Snoopy?) was protesting the banning of the latest Six Bunnie-Wunnies book, The Six Bunnie-Wunnies Freak Out by Miss Helen Sweetstory. I always wondered what the heck was in that book. (Apparently, the Six Bunnie-Wunnies were up to a lot of stuff in the 70s.)

I know banning books is bad and all (library-school dropout here), but I've never quite been able to muster up outrage that somebody would want to ban Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories books. My God, the childhood trauma of those illustrations...

[Smilla]

I can't imagine my childhood without Alvin Schwartz.

[Mutagen]

5. “It is a real ‘downer.’” ( Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank)

My brain just broke.

[Smilla]

Has anyone else experienced the same shock I did after discovering that the classics they read in secondary school were covertly censored?

I thought I'd read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in eighth grade, and when I picked it up again in twelfth grade, I realized after a couple of chapters that the copy I'd read in my middle school textbook had been drastically edited. Namely, the parts about Maya Angelou being raped as a child and later becoming pregnant as a teenager had been removed. I couldn't (and still sort of can't) believe textbook editors cut out the, well, important parts of that particular book and didn't even acknowledge students would be reading an abbreviated version (neither did our English teacher, who had a Masters in American lit and would have known it had been slashed.)

[angelaudie]

Oct 7, 2010 9:33:21 GMT -4 Mutagen said:

5. “It is a real ‘downer.’” ( Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank)

My brain just broke.

Oh come on now! Kids would totally benefit from reading cheerful books about the Holocaust! The whole mass genocide of groups of people because they didn't fit one man's narrow vision of the world is just so unpleasant! *

In my adolescent lit class we did get in to the conversation of challenging books and book banning from school libraries or trying to force teachers not to teach from a certain book. Anyway, the professor did read some bizarre reasons people have argued to have books taken off shelves or banned from the classroom. The class thought the most bizarre is the argument a book is sad and would make kids sad. For example, On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer has been challenged on these grounds. The book is about two friends who disobeys the father of one of boys and goes swimming in a dangerous area. One of the boys drowns. The other boy freaks out and out of guilt and fear doesn't reveal immediately what happened. It is a very sad book but very beautifully written and moving. Yet, apparently parents don't want their kids reading it because they fear it will bum out their kids. Never mind, that it teaches the valuable lesson of obeying your parents and standing up to your peers when they are pressuring you to do something wrong!

My professor, a former English teacher, also warned us when parents come running into our classrooms, full of righteous rage over a book being read for class, to prepare ourselves for the following response when we ask if they read the book:"No! But my minister says...." According to her, at least in her experience, most of the parents that protest a book have never read the book and are only going by what other people have told them. She encouraged us to try to convince the parent to read the book first. In her experience, if she could convince a parent to read the book they would usually drop their protests. Though she did say most parents have usually made up their minds before they see you and you'll simply have to prepare an alternate plan for their child.

She also stressed we need to learn the process of challenging a book in our school district and be vigilant about it. Apparently, sometimes principals will freak out when a parent protests and just yank the book off the shelves without following the process. In her view, and I do agree with her, it's our responsibility to make sure our rights as teachers and librarians are respected. Plus, I think it's also the rights of students we protect as well. Just because one mom thinks Harry Potter is corrupting our youth doesn't mean other children should be denied the right to check it out at the library!

*I feel the bizarre need to stress that I'm being sarcastic.

[Smilla]

Apparently, the Pentagon's attemps to censor a book made it a bestseller.

Oops.