As Banned Books Week ends, the work continues

As we wrap up Banned Books Week, we want to encourage you to take the time to really dig into what it means for us to have the freedom to read year-round, and what that means to us in our democracy. The ABA’s Right to Read Handbook (linked below) is a wonderful easy-to-pick-up start to that thought process, and we highly recommend reading it and banned books with your book club, reading groups, and community organizations.

Further reading:

The ABA Right to Read Handbook: Fighting Book Bans and Why It Matters  

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century  

Revolution in Our Time by Kekla Magoon: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People 

PEN America: “The Normalization of Book Banning: Banned in the USA, 2024-2025” 

Unite Against Book Bans Book Resumes 

American Library Association’s Freedom to Read Statement (Adopted June 25, 1953, by the ALA Council and the AAP Freedom to Read Committee; amended January 28, 1972; January 16, 1991; July 12, 2000; June 30, 2004)  

The Register Citizen: “Goshen Library puts 'Gender Queer' back on the shelves amid parent complaints” 

Transcript

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And PEN America found that for the 2024 to 2025 school year in particular, vast numbers, like 97%, of the books that were banned or pulled off the shelves pending investigation and permanently banned came as a result of fear of legislation by school boards, administrators, and educators. What that means is that there was no law in place, just the threat of a law. And people were pulling those books or refusing to buy those books. Like I said, there's a reason I don't have a job in diverse books anymore. Hello and welcome to The Curious Cat Bookshop Podcast. I'm Stacy Whitman and I'm the owner of The Curious Cat Bookshop. And I've been thinking a lot this week and last week and a lot of weeks about banned books. And now we're approaching the end of Banned Books Week, which is October 5th to the 11th. I'm filming this on Friday the 10th. And the big thing that I want to emphasize here today is that the end of banned books week should not be the end of us thinking about banned books and censorship right now in the United States Here in relatively blue Connecticut--though up here in the northwest corner It's a little bit more purple-- I talk to a lot of people who think that book banning, censorship is a far-off thing something that happens in Florida, something that happens in Texas But it was just last year here in Northwest Connecticut in Goshen where there was a big issue with people wanting to get the book Gender Queer by Maya Kobabe. Is it Kobab or Kobabe? I'm not sure. Sorry for mispronouncing that. They wanted to get Gender Queer taken off the shelves of the Public Library in 2024. According to our local paper, The Register Citizen, and I quote,"a controversial book is back on the shelves at Goshen Library. while library officials review the 40 or so complaints filed against it to determine if it should remain. Library officials said the book, Gender Queer, a memoir, was incorrectly pulled after parents complained to the town's board of selectmen, who then told the library board president and director to take it down. But the library board said that that didn't follow the protocol. and put the book back while it follows its regular complaint process." And that's really important because most libraries have a process in place for if you object to a book being on the shelves, in this case, the shelves were the young adult shelves, not the children's books shelves, but the young adult, which is for ages 12 to 18. They have a process for you to ask, why is this book in the library? And they need to go through that process before someone can determine whether that book should be available to the public. And if your library doesn't have a process in place, we'll discuss that in a moment. That's just one example of so many that according to PEN America, which tracks these challenges, they said this year that "never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from so many libraries," school libraries in particular, across the country."Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide. Never before have so many politicians sought to bully school leaders into censoring according to their ideological preferences, even threatening public funding, to exact compliance. Never before has access to so many stories been stolen from so many children." And that's from PEN America. I'll link below. They looked at the 2024 to 2025 school year. They track these things every single year. But they noted that diverse books are the major target of these challenges. Books by and about BIPOC, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. and books by and about LGBTQ+ people and those books that meet at the intersection of those two very broad identities. And I can tell you from personal experience, I was just laid off from my position editing and at one time publishing diverse books for children. And yes, there are a lot of active laws and policies that are trying to be put in place and are being put in place. But there's also a lot of soft censorship going on. We're losing funding for diverse books or people are obeying in advance and they are cutting their diverse books before they're even asked to do so and that means significant losses for publishers and that means losses of jobs for people in publishing like me. I'm not the only one who's lost their job this year. And it's so frustrating. 10 years ago, I was a part of the We Need Diverse Books movement, and this is clearly backlash against that movement and the good that it did. I started Tu Books back in 2009 and became a part of Lee and Low in 2010. And we made such progress over the last 15 years in making diverse books accessible to children, making representation available to children. it feels like all of that is just getting sucked away. So like I said, PEN America tracks the numbers on these things and I'll link below to their entire study and they'll give you all the numbers. I think it was six or eight thousand challenges just this last school year alone, but I don't have the exact number in my head. But I'm going to summarize their article that I'm linking below on book bans from the 2024 to 2025 school year. where I got a lot of my data, but I just encourage you to read the whole thing and to dive into their data to get a better sense of what we're talking about. And then we're going to talk about the most important thing, which is what you can do to help fight book bans locally and on the state level. Here are the points that PEN America makes from what they learned about that 2024 to 2025 school year. Number one is that federal efforts to restrict education use rhetoric from state and local efforts to ban books. They're talking about how the local grassroots efforts, which were really more astroturfing because it had a lot to do with Moms for Liberty and their allies going into schools and just making lists of 600, 800, 1600 books at a time. Every book that I've ever published has been on one of these lists of all those books. They're just making huge lists of books that happen to be about diversity, that happen to showcase diversity in some way. Whether it's a book about a black child enjoying the autumn or a book about an LGBTQ child who is figuring out who they are. It's all the same in these lists and they just get banned just collectively overnight. And these these groups that are working on the astroturfing have a lot of money behind them. And in some areas, it's not even groups, it's one person. I saw a report that in Florida, in one particular school district, something like 97 % of the book bans were just one guy going down these lists of 600, 800 books and challenging every single one. He's never read all those books. He's using those lists to target these books for spurious reasons, really. And for me, the biggest takeaway from these parents' rights groups is that they fail to recognize that parents other than themselves also have rights. Other parents and other adults have the right to read and let their children read what they would like. And that means that the public access to those materials cannot and should not be restricted. Just because your values say don't want to read this doesn't mean that you get to therefore say that means you don't get to read it either. Personally I think here in New England we've got this live and let live ethos that I personally live by. You get to parent your children and other people get to parent their children. I love seeing in the bookstore the interaction between parents and children when the parent is truly involved in what their children read. And if the parent is concerned about certain kinds of content, whether that's sexual content or violence, or they know their child might have nightmares at night, that story about snakes might be triggering for their child, and they are actively looking for books that work for their child that their child will enjoy, I love to see that kind of parenting. It is an active... involved parenting that every parent has the right to exercise for themselves, but not for somebody else. To me, the problem begins when a parent decides that if they won't let their child read something, therefore no one should have access to the book. Did you know, for example, that Charlotte's Web was banned in the 80s in certain places because the book portrayed talking animals and therefore wasn't Christian? Who gets to decide what form of Christianity is Christian? I have spent a lifetime being told that I'm not Christian enough for certain Christians in my family and friendships, and nobody gets to tell me what my beliefs are. I feel very strongly about that, and I think that live and let live is the best way to these kinds of communal disagreements. Number two, Penn found that persistent attacks conflate LGBTQ identities, just their existence, as sexually explicit and erase LGBTQ representation from schools. And I said before, LGBTQ authors and books about the very existence of LGBTQ people are under attack. Penn found that about 30 % of the challenges in recent years are challenges about books that represent these identities simply for being these identities. Like their very existence as people is represented as being sexually explicit or obscene. The most common banning target are children's picture books about real life events and people such as And Tango Makes Three, which was the real life story of two penguins who raised an egg together. I think it was in the Bronx Zoo somewhere in New York and people just cannot handle that that happened in nature and they want to erase it from existence. I'm going to pause here and note that that was 30% about LGBTQ identities and the other 70% includes something like 30% of challenges are about Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Their very existence when we're talking about the real lived experiences of real life BIPOC people. That's about another 30 % if I remember right. And most of that involves them telling their own stories, either fictionally or non-fictionally, about things that they have experienced in real life like racism or our real history here in the United States. And the rest is a kind of an amalgamation of all those things where we might be talking about Reconstruction. We might be talking about the 1619 Project, which was highly objected to to the point that it was banned in Florida because these scholars and they are historians who go to the actual records of the time period who say you know hey look at our real history, we need to understand it to make things better and for book banners that's unacceptable because they want to control the narrative and that doesn't include different perspectives. When we're talking about whose stories are represented in the public sphere, censoring, book banning, book challenges are often individual people or astroturfing groups who have a specific agenda to erase the stories that they don't agree with. And the next point from PEN America is the one that frustrates me the most because most of these book bans are not due to decisions made in reconsideration policies and processes. And as I discussed before with our own local book ban, the books are often pulled before anyone has a chance to even consult the policy of the library or school. And PEN America found that for the 2024 to 2025 school year in particular, Vast numbers like 97 % of the books that were banned or pulled off the shelves pending investigation and permanently banned came as a result of fear of legislation by school boards, administrators, and educators. What that means is that there was no law in place, just the threat of a law, and people were pulling those books or refusing to buy those books. Like I said, there's a reason I don't have a job in diverse books anymore. The number one rule to resist authoritarianism, which I highly recommend this tiny little book, On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder. But the number one rule is do not obey in advance. Read the whole thing because there's a whole lot more such as supporting our institutions and making sure that we believe in truth and that we stand out. My saying these things out loud might make people tell me, oh well, It's not truly a book ban if it's available on Amazon. Well, yeah, I'll sell the book too, but that doesn't mean that it's on the shelves of a particular school and available to all children. I'm selling books. I am not the government. I am curating books. The government saying you can't make these books available to a librarian. school librarian, a public librarian. That is what defines censorship and that is what violates the First Amendment.

But do not obey in advance: 14:56

number one rule and that's what is exactly happening when it comes to these book bans. The next thing PEN America talks about is how the impact of state bans on students is significant. Utah has a statewide do not read list. There are 18 books currently on that list. And the policy means that if three of the smallest, most conservative school districts says, we don't want anybody reading this book, that means that no one in the state is allowed to shelve that book in their school library, even if they're in Salt Lake in the most liberal area of Utah. There are currently 18 books on this Utah list, and that might not seem like a lot when you're looking at lists of 600. 1200 or whatever in Texas and Florida. But all but two of those books are books by women. A full third of the list is just Sarah J Maas alone. One of the books is written by an Iranian American and it follows that same pattern of marginalized people's books are targeted as inappropriate for children and that means anyone under 18. There is a vast, vast developmental difference between a two-year-old and a 17-year-old. But YA books aren't bought for elementary schools, are they? Our educators know how to curate age appropriate materials for their students. And having a state legislature step in between our professional educators and their students, I think... is throwing a gauntlet that we don't really want thrown in the United States. I trust educators to be able to choose age-appropriate materials for their students. And I think that we're in a time where, rather than opting out, certain parents have decided that the entire school district, the entire state, must not have access to certain books and that is a dangerous path we tread. Their last point at PEN America in this particular article, like I said I'm linking it below, is the most important one and the one I'm going to spend the rest of the time in this video on. Where there are everyday book bans there's also everyday resistance. Of the 87 districts impacted by book bans this year, said, 70 contained evidence of a public response against censorship, whether from individuals, organized groups, or whole communities. Many are local freedom to read project affiliates, but a lot of them are just parents, educators, librarians, and students saying, not here. We're not going to do this. There are so many resources that you can connect with if you're dealing with something like this locally. And so let's talk about them. What can you do if something like this happens near you? And that's where I'm going to pull out the American Bookseller Association's Right to Read handbook. This is such a nice, it's a tiny little book, a very fast read, one that I highly recommend that you pull out in parent groups, in book clubs, anywhere you want to talk about banned books. Like I said, it's the end of Banned Books Week, but it shouldn't be the end of the conversation. Now, in this wonderful little book, They've got so much information. They've got interviews with people who fight book bans. They've got interviews with authors whose books have been banned like Malinda Lo. They've got a condensed history of the history of book bans in the United States and they are they've got a lot of great information about the recent history of book bans in the United States and what we can do. I'm going to start from the beginning because on page seven they have a declaration of the rights of readers and this is just wonderful. I'm going to summarize a few of them. You should go and read it. I'm linking this book in the description as well because you need to read this. Number one in the declaration of the rights of readers they say all people are entitled to literacy and access to books. That is one that is a fairly recent occurrence in our society. Having a fully literate society is essential to a fully literate democracy. Number two is everyone, everyone has a right to be represented in literature. That means children and adults and especially in schools and libraries. No identity is age-inappropriate by default. Number three uh Readers are entitled to diverse literature. Number four, everyone is entitled to accurate histories, free from suppression, even and especially when that history is hard to grapple with. We've got some pretty hard to grapple with history here in the United States, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a right to learn about it and really discuss it. I mentioned The 1619 Project. It is really important for us to read that. and understand the perspective of scholars who are looking at the actual records of enslavement and genocide in our country and understanding how to prevent that going forward, how to mitigate the results of it. know, generations later, we're still seeing echoes of that history. How do we make our lives better for everyone here in the United States? Understanding our history is a huge part of that. I really love, for example, being able to pick up books like How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Imawar. There was a really great interview with him on NPR, I don't know, two or three months ago where he talks about this book. He talks about how the United States started becoming an empire right around the time of the Spanish-American War, which is the war with where we acquired the Philippines for a little while. I never learned about that in school. And that is really it shows a lot. of gaps, all of these wonderful books that we have access to that we should not lose access to. Gaps that I didn't know about, a lot of us didn't learn about in school or maybe we weren't paying attention because we were sixteen and obsessed with, you know, the basketball game that night or, you know, the dance that weekend or whatever. We all have gaps in our understanding of this country and I think it's wonderful that we can fill those gaps with these books that people have worked so hard to bring to our attention. Number five, children have a fundamental right to literacy, intellectual curiosity, literary exploration, and growth through literature. Number six, parents have a right to raise their own children and supervise what they read. I absolutely agree with that. Parents don't have the right to decide what other people's children should read. I absolutely agree with that as well. Number seven, readers have the right to access libraries, bookstores, and literary culture. Number eight. A society may and should limit judgements of obscenity in recognition of the literary, artistic, historical, educational, and scientific value of a text. Something is not obscene just because it includes sex. Number nine. Everyone has the right to be free from book bans. A book ban is any action that restricts access to a book based on dislike of its content, where it was previously available. So those rights are the basis of what comes next in this book. And that is what I'm going to cover is on page 15. And that is the most important page to me because they have a playbook for using this book in a hurry. And that is a page where they're like, okay, you need to use this book right now. Here is something that you can use anytime you can go and dive into the history of book bans in the US. You can read about the ongoing book crisis. You can join or start a book club. You can support diverse books by shopping local and we're going to get into that in a minute. But when you start hearing rumors of book bans, they're going to talk about how to combat disinformation. They're going to help you to connect with free expression organizations in a chapter in this book. When your school board is considering a book challenge or policy change, they've got information on how you can look into that more depth. And when book ban legislation is introduced in your state, they've got a guide on that as well. We have the power to do something about these things in our local and state area by connecting with people who are already working on the problem and letting people know that we stand for the right to read. And then if you turn the page, there's the list of seven things that you can do right now, even if you don't think that there is a problem in your area right now. So Connecticut, this is for us. Even if we don't think that there's a problem here for us right now, there are things that we can do. Number one, you can start or join a banned book club. You can start discussing the books that have been banned with your friends and neighbors. And I would highly suggest that you not only read the classics. mean, Charlotte's Web was banned at one point, and I think that it's a lovely read. But I think it's more important for us to look at books that have been published recently by living authors, number one, because those authors are losing book sales. Malinda Lo had a wonderful talk about that recently where she said, you know what, there is this cliche that if you get it on banned books list then somehow you're going to make it on the bestseller list. And that might have been true at one point for the biggest authors. Judy Blume, for example, has been on the banned books list for 50 years. Stephen King has been on the banned books list for at least 40. But what about the authors that you've never heard of because they were banned before they could become bestsellers? They were banned quietly because their identities were offensive to the people who banned them. What about those books that never came on your radar because they were diverse books and someone didn't acquire them for the library or for the school library or someone just thought they weren't important enough or they proactively didn't want to be arrested just in case that book violated some new state law. Those are the books that your banned book club should be looking out for. Take a look at those lists of 600, 800, 1200, 1800 books banned in various states. Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, Utah. Like I said, the list in Utah is only 18 at the moment statewide, but... The fact that people are making these lists at all is very concerning. Take a look at those lists and see if you can read a book that you've never heard of before and talk about those books with your friends. And the second thing on this list that you can do right now is to register to vote and then take a look at your local politicians and see what their policies are on banned books. Recently, here in my area of Connecticut, my town elected a guy to the state legislature who believes in banning books. He's all for it and he's working to do so in the state. So what does that mean for us here in the northwest corner of Connecticut? It's something that we really have to keep an eye on. We have to pay attention to our local and state elections because that is where a lot of this is happening. Number three, Learn who's on your school board and find out what their policies are on book bans. I don't think that they're on the local level is quite as partisan a question. I think that there are a lot of really wonderful Republicans in my area of Northwest Connecticut who are on local committees and who have been elected to local leadership. So I'm not saying that this is a Republican versus Democrat issue. This is an issue of people who want to ban books. and people who believe in the right to have access to whatever we want to read and the right for parents to parent their own children and not other people's children. So please understand me when I say looking at your state elections, looking at your local elections, looking at who's on your school board matters. And I'm not saying it in a partisan way. I'm saying understand what those policies are. Understand what your school board members believe in and learn how to advocate with them so that when you have a conversation with them and it's so much easier to have these conversations on a local level without it feeling like tainted by all these national politics that you can have a connection on a human to human level where we all agree children should be protected. But what does that look like in practice for each of you and how do we come to a consensus? for the freedom to read and allow common sense policies to be taken through their process and not preemptively censoring anything. Number four on the list, seven things that you can do right now is to follow the American booksellers for free expression and other organizations, PEN America, for example, on social media because they are really tapped in. They can share the news. And the data that PEN America gathers is key to us understanding this issue of banned books in the United States right now. Number five, get a library card, introduce yourself to your librarians, and understand your library's policies. As I was talking about before, the biggest problem of what happened with Gender Queer in the Goshen Library was not that anybody objected to the book, but that somebody pulled that book without following the library's policies. the library had a very specific outline of actions that should be taken if somebody challenges a book being on the shelves for the public. And that policy was not followed. And so they needed to take a step back and then go through the process. And as a community, we can then determine, does this violate our community values or not? And the library will have a specific set of, this is what we value in the books that we put on our shelves. Number six, educate yourself and brush up on talking points. And that includes there's a whole section in this book on combating disinformation. A lot of times these lists that are circulating around that I'm talking about will have"this is why this book is offensive." Oftentimes no one who has put that book on that list has even read that list. So, in the coverage of Gender Queer in the local banning that I talked about earlier, in the local coverage in the paper someone noted that he read the book and he's like, oh I feel misinformed because I read it and there was nothing in it that really said what everybody said was so terrible about it. It wasn't as terrible as everybody said it was. That's why it's so important for us to read these books. and to be able to combat disinformation about them and overall about, you know, the idea of protecting children from books that might harm them. There is, there's just so much in here. I just recommend that you pick this book up and read it and then dive more into the resources that they recommend. Number seven, and this goes back to the banned books book club we were talking about earlier, read banned books and then read banned books resumes. So, this is such a wonderful project, the banned book resumes project. Lee and Low where I used to work has made a banned book resume for every book that has been affected by book bans for us. I've seen it from a lot of publishers and what what the resume does is it shows who has found this book to be literally admirable. um And I'll pull up an example of a book resume as I'm editing on the screen. So if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll be able to see an example. But if you're listening to this in the audio version, the address to find these are bookresumes.uniteagainstbookbans.org. And United Against Book Bans is a wonderful organization that has a lot of really great information that you'll want to reference as well. A banned book resume is just a wonderful resource that if a particular book gets challenged locally, you can go and If you haven't read the book yet, you can get a synopsis of the book and then you can see who's reviewed the book, how many starred reviews has the book received, how many awards has this book won, all the information about the literary value of this book that you can then reference as you read the book, as you make your own decision about the book, and as you discuss it with your community. These resumes are just such a wonderful resource for anyone who is like, How do I defend this book that I, if I don't, a lot of people don't feel like they're articulate enough to be able to explain why a book has value and the book resumes help you to be able to convey that with the information that they provide. And one last thing that I just want to reiterate, support diverse books by shopping local. Your local independent bookstore would love to provide diverse books for you. I would be honored to be that local indie for you if you don't have a local indie. We do ship and we stock so many diverse books and I can't tell you how disappointed I am when a book that I've personally curated to bring into the store because for example it tells the real story, the full story of the Black Panthers in the United States. Note that it won the national that it was a National Book Award finalist. that it won a Printz Honor, that it won the Coretta Scott King Award. This is such a wonderful book by Kekla Magoon called Revolution in Our Time about everything to do with the Black Panthers, the good and the bad. And when a book like that sits on the shelf, I get so disappointed. And conversely, I get so excited when a book that I've curated for the store about Indigenous people, Black people, when a book that I recommend because I love it so much and I learned so much from it, whether it's nonfiction or fiction of any genre, I love it when a customer is like, they come back after I recommended the book and they buy it and they say, you know what? You were so right. What else do you have? Your local booksellers love to do that for you. And of course we love to do it about any genre. any kind of book, but when it's diverse books we love championing them. So give us a chance to champion them for you. And I'm going to leave it there because there's just so much that we could cover, but check out the Right to Read Handbook. I've linked it below. Check out the books that I have recommended today including How to Hide an Empire. I think it's in paperback now. Check out the Right to Read Handbook. Check out On Tyranny. All of these books and more fiction by Malinda Lo, fiction by all the authors on the banned books list from PEN America that just came out. I feel like I feel like I'm at church and I'm saying you gotta live this throughout the year. But I really do think that it's important for us to remember that everyone's access to literacy is important no matter whether there's an election, no matter whether it's Banned Books Week, no matter if there is a current challenge going on or not. Making sure that kids are excited about reading, that they have access to what they want to read and what will enrich their lives. And that includes the good and the bad about the history of this country. That's what we're here for as an independent bookstore. That's what I'm here for as a children's book editor. And so I hope that we can all find places where we agree on that right to read no matter whether you're going to be careful about certain content for your kids or not because it's your right as a parent to parent your own children and it's other people's right as a parent to parent their own children. So that's my banned book speak spiel. I do hope that this was a useful podcast for you. Let me know in the comments. And if you are going to be commenting and saying, well, what's the definition of a book ban, pick up this book. There's a definition in there for you. Thank you. See you later.