When Book Banning Meets Hypocrisy

The Palmer, Alaska school board voted to ban* a number of books, classic books, wonderful books, and as everyone knows, book banning is bad.

A list of books deemed too controversial to be taught in electives including poetry, journalism, creative writing and American literature was presented at a Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District board meeting on April 22. The list cited “sexually explicit material” and “‘anti-white’ messaging” in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Maya Angelou’s seminal memoir, and raised concerns about language and sexual references in “The Great Gatsby,” the landmark 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The other books on the list — “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller and “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien — were judged to be inappropriate because they contained mentions of rape, incest, racial slurs, profanity and misogyny.

Classic works, without a doubt, and yet banned for a plethora of reasons that reflect many of the current concerns about what terrible things students’ eyes should never be forced to see, students’ minds never be forced to consider.

Sarah Welton, the board’s clerk, said at the meeting that she noticed a lot of her students lacked critical thinking skills and that removing the books could be a “disservice” to them.

“To me, the need for controversial subjects is part of education,” Ms. Welton said in a statement on Wednesday. “The societal issues brought forth in all of the books reflect the continued need for people to learn about experiences other than their own. Protecting students by hiding the issues or ignoring the issues does not help or prepare students for the world they inherit.”

This would seem to most to be a compelling argument, as if any argument was needed to prevent the school board from banning books. But then, there was the argument mounted in favor of the ban.

“If I were to read this right now, the board would have perfect license to admonish me,” Mr. Hart said in the meeting. “If I were to read this in a professional environment, at my office, I would be dragged to the equal opportunity office.”

“When you have books you could not read publicly without going to E.O., that’s probably a pretty good litmus test,” he said.

He’s got a point. The argument reflects yet another of the inane conflicts inherent in the current social justice regime of what constitutes a hostile work environment, what constitutes permissible pedagogy, what constitutes “hate speech” and what does not. While some would argue that these are classic novels, great novels, and removing such significant works from the curriculum deprives students of a critical learning opportunity, Hart’s point is that the exact same words, read aloud from these books, would very likely result in a finding that he created a hostile work environment.

You can’t have it both ways.

The American Library Association sent a letter to Monica Goyette, the district’s superintendent, and the board on Wednesday expressing concerns over the board’s vote.

The irony of the ALA’s “concerns” is palpable. This is the same organization that removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from its book award because her “Little House on the Prairie” books “included many stereotypical and reductive depictions of Native Americans and people of color.”

A division of the American Library Association voted unanimously Saturday to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s literature award over concerns about how the author referred to Native Americans and blacks.

This clearly falls short of the bold support for classic literature, except when it’s some other entity doing the banning.

The response to the otherwise valid point made by Board Vice President Jim Hart isn’t that classic books should be removed from the curriculum, but that the efforts to police campus and work environment to eradicate the vast array of words and ideas that offend the woke sensibilities are irrational. Of course these books should be part of the curriculum, and of course the reading of these books, the words, concepts and ideas expressed in them, should not give rise to liability or culpability anywhere else.

We’ve created an absurd and untenable situation by leaving it to the most easily or imaginatively offended to dictate what others may or may not say because someone might, substantively or performatively, claim offense. If it’s too offensive for the workplace or the dorm room, then it’s too offensive for a public school curriculum. You can’t have it both ways.

*Ban isn’t the best description of what happened, as the books were removed from the curriculum, but not the library. They can still be read, but no student will be required to read them for a course.

21 thoughts on “When Book Banning Meets Hypocrisy

      1. Jim Majkowski

        You, yourself, in a later comment stated “every censor thinks they’re right…” The point I was trying to make is that school boards are seldom composed of people with expertise in literature, or, really, anything. Besides, recently I learned a new word, “ultracrepidarian.”

    1. David Meyer-Lindenberg

      If English ever does get a word meaning “aphorism that’s undermined by the person who first said it,” we may need to expand it to books, if only to cover this one.

  1. Hunting Guy

    Well, at least they are equal opportunity banners since Maya Angelou is a twofer minority.

    Gotta give them credit for that.

    Stephen Fry.

    “It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what.”

  2. Noel Erinjeri

    The irony is that the best way to ensure that the average student will get *nothing* from a book, any book, is requiring them to read it.

    NE

    1. Hunting Guy

      Conversely, the best way to get children to read something is to forbid it.

      I wonder if that’s what’s happening here?

      Nah. That’s giving too much credit to the board.

      1. SHG Post author

        Why did the kids put beans in their ears?
        No one can hear with beans in their ears.
        After a while the reason appears.
        They did it cause we said no.

    2. Teecrafter

      The way to get them to read it is to list it as an evil book with vulgarity and explicit sex, like _Lady Chatterley’s Lover, _ _Portnoy’s Complaint,_ or a Henry Miller novel, and called it ‘banned,’ ‘obscene,’ and ‘illegal.’ Mark Twain discusses this psychological nudge in _Innocents Abroad_ and _Letters from the Earth._ It worked for me.

  3. Chris Van Wagner

    The more things change… . In 1972 the Roselle NJ school board voted 4-3 to ban four books because they espoused liberalism. The superintendent rushed delivery of all four books to his house (pre-Amazon) and read all 4 that weekend, then ordered them placed back on the library shelves with books that took opposing views. The books? “The Affluent Society” by JK Galbraith, “The Struggle for Peace” by Cecil Beaton, “Today’s Isms: Communism, Fascism, Socialism and Capitalism” by William Ebenstein, and “The Age of Keynes” by Robert Lekachman. The rational from the leader of the censoring majority? “I guess I’m known around here as a book burner, but it doesn’t bother me. In my opinion the books were too liberal and I disagree with their point of view.” As the late Yankee star Phil Rizzuto might have said, they’ve come 100 degrees around the circle.

    1. SHG Post author

      Funny how what’s unacceptable to those inclined toward censorship goes in circles, but every censor thinks they’ve got it right and they will be the history’s hero.

  4. Milwaukee

    Remember, you heard it here first:
    “When books are outlawed, only outlaws will have books.”
    Or that poem, they came for J.D. Salinger, but I wasn’t he and thought that a stupid book,…., when they came for me, there wasn’t anybody left to say anything.

  5. Jardinero1

    The typical school year is around 180 days and a literature teacher can only teach about half a dozen books a year. So, someone’s ox will always get gored. The mistake of this board was that they gave reasons. My dad was a public school curriculum guy for his whole career. Every year they dropped a book or two and added one or two to the curriculum. But the board never gave a reason, and kept the hullaballu to a minimum. They would just say, “Our curriculum people made this decision; we support them; and we just can’t fire them, sorry. We will look at it again next year”. If the parents kept up, the board would call my dad to the next board meeting, to be pilloried, by the angry parents, and he would say, “The teachers wanted it this way, and we support them, and we just can’t fire them, sorry.” But, that was then, when local school boards called all the shots in most states. But now, with state mandated curriculums and common core and all the other bullshit, they can no longer call out my dad as their whipping boy.

    Fundamentally, this anger about books, boils down to whether or not one favors compulsory governments schools or not. I tell people that and they get mad. But, if you favor compulsory government schooling, then you just have to suck it, and face the fact, that the tyranny of the majority dictates the decisions about what is taught and not taught, what is read and not read. If you don’t like it, then your problem is with government schools, not some book that is left out of the curriculum.

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