Given the current state of the culture wars, Banned Books Week — this week, Sept. 18-24 — carries a greater relevance today than it has in the past.
In 2021, the Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services, affecting 1,597 books.
That quadrupled the number for the previous year, when 156 challenges were made, and constituted the highest number of attempted book bans since the American Library Association (ALA) began compiling the lists 40 years ago. The number of challenges has grown even larger in 2022.
Books most commonly banned address racial issues and gender and sexual orientation. ALA’s most challenged book last year was “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe. Earlier this year, “Gender Queer” was virulently targeted for banning at the library in Jamestown, Mich. A library director there resigned after being harassed. Then, the town voted to defund the library after it removed the book from shelves but kept it available.
Additionally, Patriot Mobile, a Texas-based cellphone company, bankrolled 11 candidates for four different school boards with $600,000 in order to take control of those boards and ban books, NBC News reported.
In a challenge, a person or group attempts to remove or restrict ostensibly offensive materials. Banning is the complete removal of said materials.
“Banned Books Week, simply stated, is celebrating our freedom to read whatever we choose,” said Elizabeth Scamihorn, strategic communications manager for the Vigo County Public Library. “As a library, we want to encourage everyone to read — and celebrate the freedom to do so,” she said. Scamihorn said that the library has not received any formal requests to challenge or ban anything in its collection.
“We have had discussions with customers regarding certain materials — and we like to share the idea that while a book may be right for one person, it may not be right, or preferred, by everyone,” she said. “We want everyone to feel included and know they have the freedom to borrow whatever they choose.” Indiana State University sociology professor Dr. Thomas Steiger said, “Look at history and the U.S. has a relatively long list of examples of book bans. Even ‘Harry Potter’ was attacked for discussing witchcraft. For whatever reason, people feel threatened.”
Steiger himself got in trouble for bringing a copy of “The Communist Manifesto” to school in 9th grade, even though that was a subject he was studying in a civics class.
“What were they afraid of?” he asked rhetorically.
There are a number of reasons to ban books, Steiger said. “It’s not as much about just books as it is disruption — to suggest things are not working right. It’s part of the continuing assault on public education in general. There’s certainly an illiberal element to this. When people are fearful of what others are reading, you take that seriously.”
He added, “The goal is also to delegitimize the work — if it’s not in the library, then something must be wrong with it. It’s an attempt to control the information flowing into young people’s minds, but kids have First Amendment rights, too.”
There’s an element of cynicism behind the motivation, as well.
“For people fund-raising, controversy seems to work,” Steiger said. “There’s a sector of the population that are easy pickings for this type of thing — they’re susceptible to having their opinions manipulated.”
And, ironically, he added, “A lot of people have never even read the stuff,
but they hear things from other people and jump on the bandwagon.”
Asked if the Vigo County School Corporation has experienced any book challenges or is concerned about this year’s candidates for the school board, Teresa Stuckey, executive director of elementary education, Title I, & communication, issued a statement: “We are not having much said about that here in VCSC, so we do not have a story about that.”
Rob Haworth, school superintendent, was not made available for comment.
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