Read Between the Lines: America’s Wannabe Censors at Work
This week (Sept 22- 28) is nationally observed as Banned Books Week, a public relations effort led by the American Library Association, calling attention to individual books whose circulation and availability has been constrained.
Libraries, schools , and bookstores are hosting events focused on freedom of expression and titles being removed from bookshelves. The San Diego Public Library’s events are listed by location at this web address. San Diego County’s public library’s website offers events, giveaways, and readings relating to the banned book week.
Brooke Binkowski writing at Times of San Diego:
Last year, the San Diego city library in Rancho Peñasquitos was targeted by right-wing activists attempting to steal and censor LGTBQ+ books.
“The county library is dedicated to providing a collection that is both representative of our residents and also allows readers to explore the perspectives and experiences of others,” said Migell Acosta, library director of the San Diego County Library system.
“We acquire and curate materials for everyone, we provide reading materials in the county’s threshold languages as well as other languages that are actively used in the community.”
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Suppression of books in public institutions has been on the rise in recent years. PEN America has documented an explosion in books being removed from school shelves in 2023-24, tripling to more than 10,000 over the previous year. More than 8,000 were pulled just in Florida and Iowa, where laws restricting the content of books have been passed.
Simultaneously, the ALA found a substantial drop in 2024 so far in complaints about books stocked in public, school and academic libraries, and in the number of books receiving objections.
As this Associated Press article explains, the twin findings are not necessarily contradictory; the counting methodologies differ and the start of the school year (where challenges gain publicity) hadn’t happened yet.
Words printed on bound pages and represented in pixels on screens have become ammunition for a tiny minority of people involved in schools and libraries who have sought public conflict as a means of driving their own agendas and orchestrating distrust in society and politics.
Critical Race Theory (CRT), incorrectly used as an epithet for condemning materials incorporating observations or discussions regarding racial matters in the US. Literature deemed “uncomfortable” for whites is still the basis for books being removed from institutions in conservative school districts.
In the non-institutional marketplace of ideas, newly minted “intellectuals” (by virtue of their employment by conservative think tanks/colleges) have argued that such literature was damaging society at large and possibly even hindering efforts for racial equality. Retrospectively, it’s a shame that their research methodologies and associations weren’t critically examined by those in the mainstream media giving oxygen to such arguments.
Nowadays, the refrain of banning absolutists includes the letters LGBTQIA or some variation thereof. Accusations of impropriety by members of those groups inevitably wander into projections about pedophilia and brainwashing.
Some book banners are upset about any mention of sexuality expressed in schools and libraries. These are the same people who fight sex ed in schools, and they’ve achieved a level of success in Florida, where many systems have simply abandoned instructional efforts in this area. Gov. Ron DeSantis has decreed that course materials on this subject not include mentions of anatomy and contraception, and focus on abstinence instead.
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Banned books week started in 1982, as the nascent evangelist movement began its efforts to remake the world to its vision. Efforts to remove certain books from libraries and schools were getting noticed in the media. Book lovers, authors, and book publishers pushed back.
You’ll notice the early eighties was also the period where anti-abortionists became a political force, and the private segregated academies of the South morphed into the charter school movement. Reaganomics increased the de-unionizing of the workforce, and the so-called trickle down economy was establishing the basis for today’s super wealthy.
In the big picture, banning books/parents rights are part of a larger religious and political movement being used by authoritarian politicians seeking power.
From The Advocate:
The main forces behind the book-banning movement are state laws and groups and individuals that claim to espouse parental rights as an excuse to remove books from shelves. Iowa and Florida, both of which have laws that enable book bans, accounted for about 8,000 of the book bans in 2023-2024.
Iowa’s law prohibits books with any depiction of a sex act, and this has been interpreted to ban books with any content related to sex or gender, and the law also contains “don’t say gay” language that has been used to ban LGBTQ+ content. The statute went into effect in July 2023, leading to thousands of titles being banned in the 2023-2024 school year, up from just 14 in the previous two academic years combined. Under Florida’s law, which became effective at the same time, any book that is challenged has to be removed while it’s under review, and this “has been linked to a significant rise in book bans during the 2023-2024 school year,” PEN America reports.
New laws in Utah, South Carolina, and Tennessee are likely to lead to increased book bans in the 2024-2025 school year, the group notes.
As your friendly local right wing troll will gladly inform you, there are no banned books in the USA. It’s true; government men with guns and badges are not breaking down the doors of publishing houses to suppress books the President or some other authority figure doesn’t like.
Yet.
Project 2025’s promised ban on pornography (which I’m sure is hypocritical) could change all that.
Alison Law, writing at Bitter Southerner, says this is about Controlling the Narrative:
Project 2025 defines “pornography” broadly, including not just the stuff you might find on Pornhub, but to include “transgender ideology” and the “sexualization of children” — which in turn includes basically any recognition that trans people exist, and any recognition that children have human bodies (sex ed, etc).
According to Project 2025, “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” To be crystal-clear: This isn’t just about shutting down what you and I think about as “porn,” although that, too, would be flatly unconstitutional. It’s about shutting down what the most censorious right-wing prude defines as porn.
Book banning is off the table for most Americans, who would say such actions are a violation of the First Amendment.
A 2022 survey commissioned by the American Library Association showed that seven out of 10 voters across party lines opposed book bans. And three out of every four parents trusted public school teachers and librarians to make decisions about classroom curricula and the books to make available to children.
It seems as though some like our censorship the old-fashioned way, with puritanical politicos ginning up fear about the collapse of civil society caused by words they don’t like.
Print all the books you like, the thinking goes, we’ll find ways to stop people from reading them, along with penalizing those who would resist our efforts. Some laws are promising to jail librarians who include the media making these crackers uncomfortable. Fear is the powerful censor of all.
Jonna Perrillo, writing at Slate, says The Chilling Effect Is Real:
Mary’s school board greeted teachers back to work this year with a list of seven novels up for removal. This is simply business as usual in many districts. She plans to testify before her board but expects that one of her favorite books to teach, Beloved, will be cut. Without an appeals process, there will be nothing she can do. The book “will be gone forever” from her classroom library, thanks, as she sees it, to “a lot of power in the hands of a few board members.”
Mary teaches in an American high school, but like the other educators in this story, she asked me not to identify her because she fears retribution from her school or district administrator. As her story suggests, it is not just the unprecedented number of book challenges over the past four years that has been so difficult, but the fact that the process and stakes have changed completely. Forty-one percent of book challenges in 2022 stemmed directly from school board and district administrators. “Parental rights” has become a major rallying call for conservatives, but in many cases, parents have little to do with the process.
The dynamic has left teachers feeling vulnerable. To prevent conflict, they are self-censoring, well beyond the most controversial books. Some avoid literary works found in their textbooks because they fear class conversations about anything related to social politics. Those fears are well-founded. Mary’s principal reprimanded her colleague for teaching Sherman Alexie poems anthologized in her district-approved textbook. Another elected not to teach Martin Luther King Jr.’s classic “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” convinced she would be unable to respond freely to student comments in class.
As long as pens and presses have been put to paper, there’s somebody who doesn’t want some words to be read. A large part of the population of the US were forbidden to even learn how to read back in the days where America was “great.”
Book burning has been a popular way to exercise censorship throughout our history as a means of stigmatizing ideas and content. Southerners were especially vigilant about rooting out abolitionist writings, especially after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
From Wikipedia:
Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873, inscribed book burning on its seal, as a worthy goal to be achieved. Comstock's total accomplishment in a long and influential career is estimated to have been the destruction of some 15 tons of books, 284,000 pounds of plates for printing such "objectionable" books, and nearly 4,000,000 pictures. All of this material was defined as "lewd" by Comstock's very broad definition of the term – which he and his associates successfully lobbied the United States Congress to incorporate in the Comstock Law.
If the Comstock Law sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the legal cover forced birthers want to use to ban contraceptives. It’s mentioned but not explicitly called for in Project 2025, page 459.
Learn more from these national organizations that are leading the fight against book bans and educational censorship:
PEN America
American Library Association (ALA)
Democracy Forward
National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC)
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
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Tuesday’s Other News to Think About
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A courts reporter wrote about a few trials. Then an AI decided he was actually the culprit. Via Simon Thorne at Neiman Lab
When German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his articles would be picked up by the chatbot, the answers horrified him. Copilot’s results asserted that Bernklau was an escapee from a psychiatric institution, a convicted child abuser, and a conman preying on widowers. For years, Bernklau had served as a courts reporter and the AI chatbot had falsely blamed him for the crimes whose trials he had covered.
The accusations against Bernklau weren’t true, of course, and are examples of generative AI’s “hallucinations.” These are inaccurate or nonsensical responses to a prompt provided by the user, and they’re alarmingly common. Anyone attempting to use AI should always proceed with great caution, because information from such systems needs validation and verification by humans before it can be trusted.
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With crime on the election agenda, FBI gives final 2023 crime stats by Perry Stein at The Washington Post
The report was released as former president and 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump has questioned the veracity of crime statistics while campaigning, blaming the Biden administration and Democrats for what he has falsely portrayed as “crime-ridden cities like we’ve never seen before.”
According to the report, violent crime dropped 3 percent between 2022 and 2023, with murder and nonnegligent homicide down 11.6 percent. Reported rape offenses dropped 9.4 percent. Property crime decreased 2.4 percent.
The drop in murders in 2023 was the largest year-over-year decline reported by the FBI in 20 years. In 2022, there were 6.5 murders for every 100,000 people. In 2023, there were 5.7 murders for every 100,000 people.
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Two in three shoppers won’t buy products in locked display cases by Andrew Adam Newton at Retail Brew
Locked display cases, the theft-prevention measure that makes shopping less grab-and-go and more wait-and-see, aim to prevent shoplifting, but a new survey suggests that particular solution might be worse than the problem.
Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is not locked up.
