Every October, American book lovers come together to celebrate and spread awareness about the censorship of literature through a widely popular yearly publication by the American Library Association: The Banned Books List.
As the end of this month approaches, it’s important to remember why Banned Books Month exists and how all literature-lovers can help advocate for and protect their First Amendment rights.
The first banned book in U.S. history was ‘The New English Canaan’, by Thomas Morton, critically analyzing Puritan governments—extremely controversial at the time.
This act sparked what would be a contentious occurrence through the history of the United States, as in just 2021, “…nearly 23,000 book bans in public schools nationwide since 2021, a number never before seen in the life of any living American.”
Individuals who hold significant power in this process include minority conservative groups, politicians, and school boards—stimulating debates around why select groups are put in charge of filtering out certain content.
Alyna Morvice, an Honors English 10 teacher at Tahoma Senior High explains that, “It seems like lack of understanding of the book often plays a role… people often crusade books they haven’t even read and so, I think it would be important that people read the books before promoting that…”
In the 21st Century, despite the selective magnitude to which censorship exists, the opposition against this imposed restriction of press-related expression is highly retaliated against by younger generations, who support expression, diversity and autonomy.
Greg Colette, librarian of Tahoma Senior High, expresses that, “When books are banned, it’s typically based on their morals… but that differs between the individual… They’re going to take that morality and put that into the policies and decisions they make… In the political party [situation] that we have, there’s always going to be a party of dominance.”
Several clear themes observed among banned books include ones with LGBTQIA+ representation, drug-related or sexual content, political allegories and propaganda, etc.
But is there an extent to which Banned Books should exist?
Colette explains, “Do I want a 12-year-old reading ‘50 Shades of Gray?’ Absolutely not. But, can an 18-year-old? Yeah, that’s their choice at that point. I’m not going to say ‘Let’s never publish that book, let’s remove that book completely…’ People assume the worst case scenario, that some 8-year-old is going to get their hands on something and it’s gonna totally change their mind and they’re going to be corrupted by it and, I don’t think that happens, to be honest.”
Despite these measures, reading is especially important as it’s “…one way to develop empathy… I think that [through censorship] we’re missing an opportunity to learn more about the world and different people and trying to put ourselves in their shoes and establish empathy with those people… that’s a really dangerous thing—to not understand other people and to be lacking empathy.” Morvice emphasizes.
See a review of Morvice and Colette’s favorite books below, along with a PEN America article further discussing Book Bans.
