Banned Books Week 2016: September 25 - October 1

Banned Books Week is an annual event that highlights freedom to read. Libraries, publishers, and booksellers draw attention to books that have been banned or challenged. This event exists to protect and promote intellectual freedom.

The American Library Association (ALA) on intellectual freedom:

ALA actively advocates and educates in defense of intellectual freedom—the rights of library users to read, seek information, and speak freely as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Intellectual freedom is a core value of the library profession, and a basic right in our democratic society. A publicly supported library provides free, equitable, and confidential access to information for all people of its community.

DACC Central Campus Library
Front Door Decoration

The ALA isn’t the only organization to get excited about protecting your intellectual freedom. The American Booksellers Association created a charitable organization in 1990 - American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE) - to “promote and protect the free exchange of ideas, particularly those contained in books”.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) supports Banned Books Week with outreach and events. This year’s focus of Banned Books Week is diversity. Diverse books are books on diverse topics and/or written by diverse authors. They are more likely to be challenged because things outside the ‘norm’ are more likely to frighten and upset the ignorant. Exposure to diverse books encourages people to become more curious, independent thinkers.

You might be thinking sure Robyn, you have to care about intellectual freedom, you want to be a librarian someday. Librarians have to care about that kind of stuff. But why should I care if some parent group in the next county wants to ban some books from the library?

The reason you need to care when books are being challenged or banned in the next county or another state is that any successful banning of a book creates a precedent that makes it easier to ban other books.

Books are challenged or banned for a variety of reasons:

• Unsuited for age group
• Offensive language/profanity
• Sexually explicit
• Homosexualilty
• Religious viewpoint
• Political viewpoint
• Nudity
• Violence

As a parent, you might be thinking that there are some books that you don’t want your children to read, or maybe just don’t want them to read until they are older. That’s fine. That’s good parenting. Where it becomes a problem is when someone decides that, for example, since my ten-year-old daughter shouldn’t read this book, I’m going to ask the library or school to keep it away from all ten-year-old children. That is impinging on other people’s intellectual freedom. If you ban a book from a public or school library, then nobody gets to read it, not just the ten-year-olds you think you are protecting.

DACC Central Campus Library
Banned Books Week Display Shelf

It is getting harder to ban books because of events like Banned Books Week and the advocacy of groups like the American Library Association, the American Booksellers for Free Expression, and the Association of American Publishers.

In 2013, right here in New Mexico, a parent tried to have Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman removed from the curriculum in Alamogordo. Although the book was removed from classrooms and kept only in the library during the review process, it was eventually returned to classrooms.

In a perfect world, no one would even try to keep other people from having access to books. Until then we have Banned Books Week to shine a spotlight on the problem.

The ALA website includes a list of frequently Banned and Challenged Classics. Do you remember reading any of the books on this list when you were in middle or high school?