Book Censorship News, December 22, 2023

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/creator of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/creator of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her subsequent e book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.

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‘Tis the season of reflection. Last year at this time, instead of looking back at 2022 in the rearview and teasing out some of the big stories or themes, I put together a guide to setting anti-censorship resolutions. Given what we know about how the landscape has changed over the last 12 months, it’s vital to each sit down and draft your objectives for the approaching 12 months and to take action with an eye fixed towards what occurred this 12 months. Let’s have a look again.

Lawsuits

The first lawsuit over e book bans hit Escambia County, Florida, faculties in May of 2023. Since then, a number of others have been filed throughout the nation. The Escambia lawsuits will probably be heard in 2024 and can play a major position in the way forward for e book bans.

Legislature

Illinois turned the primary state to ban e book bans. The language round this invoice is somewhat lofty, because the invoice doesn’t ban e book bans however incentivizes libraries to incorporate the Library Bill of Rights or comparable mental freedom statements of their insurance policies. Still, it set a strong commonplace, and several other different states have put ahead anti-censorship payments.

At the identical time, a number of different states have launched payments that might make e book bans simpler — together with in a number of of the states the place anti-censorship payments are being thought-about (amongst them are Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania).

Two payments aiming to amplify anti-book ban work have landed in U.S. Congress this 12 months as nicely and will probably be into account within the new 12 months: the Books Save Lives Act and the Fight Book Bans Act.

The House of Representatives will take up one other anti-censorship invoice in 2024, the Prison Libraries Act. U.S. Representatives Emanuel Cleaver, II (D-MO), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), and Shontel Brown (D-OH) have launched a invoice that might broaden jail libraries and open up alternatives for these experiencing incarceration to raised themselves. This invoice would authorize $60,000,000 over six years for state prisons to offer library sources and companies — certainly, this isn’t nearly dropping tons of books into the prisons and shifting on. Trained professionals could be there to assist folks use the academic and leisure sources. The Act would additionally assist construct highly effective coalitions between prisons and the native libraries of their group.

Anti-Censorship Wins on the Polls

There was plenty of celebration in November when the majority of the candidates Moms For Liberty endorsed in native college board elections weren’t elected. This isn’t the attention-grabbing story — simply essentially the most headline-worthy and one which has inaccurately described the end result as the top of censorship (the very fact a founder however former energetic member of the group has been caught in a intercourse scandal isn’t it, both, regardless of the headlines).

The actual story is how many individuals confirmed as much as the polls to make sure that college boards had been stacked with individuals who truly care concerning the instructional wants of the scholars and who wish to be certain that educators are capable of do their jobs, too.

People additionally confirmed up for public libraries. After being defunded a number of instances, the Patmos Public Library in Jamestown, Michigan, received their millage within the midterm elections, and Pella Public Library in Pella, Iowa, received a really shut election that might have handed management of the library to the town.

Librarians Are Leaving the Field — Or Being Forced Out

Unfortunately, it might need been too late for a lot of librarians, who’re leaving the sector amid a number of components. Three of the largest? A scarcity of assist for his or her work, e book bans, and the every day barrage of name-calling they encounter from small pockets of their group (and bigger pockets of the web and right-wing instigators). Read Florida librarian Tania Galiñanes’s story right here and the tales of Missouri college librarians right here. You’ll additionally wish to learn Elissa Myers’s story of being queer in a public library the place LGBTQ+ content material was focused — and why she is now not at that job.

Although the above departures are emblematic of a bigger pattern, in different instances, librarians have been compelled out of their jobs for standing up for mental freedom. Former library director Patty Hector used her firing from the Saline County Library in Arkansas to launch a marketing campaign for a spot on the very quorum courtroom that allowed her to be fired within the first place. Campbell County, Wyoming, fired their director this 12 months, too — years into the e book ban combat plaguing the board and group. It was not met with cheers by these on the assembly.

More Groups Doing More Good Work

This 12 months marked the launch of EachLibrary’s highly effective, free organizing software, Fight for the First. It has been a useful resource utilized by dozens of grassroots anti-censorship teams to coordinate how you can defend the liberty to learn in their very own communities whereas tapping the data and sources of these doing comparable work throughout the nation.

Among among the new teams are the Texas Freedom to Read Project and several other student-led anti-censorship teams, together with the work that Central York’s PARU group wanted to do once more to finish e book bans of their college.

As good as it’s to get good PR for sending books to beleaguered states — and there’s a lot of media ink spilled on these efforts for “little banned book buses” and comparable — these efforts don’t create long-lasting change. They aren’t enshrining the rights of all to entry supplies, and lots of proceed to advertise the thought solely a handful of titles are these which are banned. The actuality is we want folks on the bottom and in assembly rooms demanding higher. We want to grasp that 86% of the books banned in faculties within the final 12 months had been “only” banned in 1 or 2 faculties. That is plenty of books, and most by no means get a lick of consideration. Often, the authors don’t even know the books they wrote for youngsters or youngsters are banned from them.

Groups like these do the arduous work and are desirous to have you ever be part of them of their efforts.

More public libraries supplied digital entry to banned books this 12 months, too. Though not an answer to the larger systemic points — one thing they’d agree with! — it’s a extra far-reaching avenue for entry.

It doesn’t contact upon the lies perpetrated by teams like Moms For Liberty lie concerning the provenance of BookLook/BookSeems, the lies they’ve unfold through a chapter-created “playbook” for banning books that omits essential parental rights granted to them through a public college instructor, the intelligent framing of a political cartoon that criticizes them to make them appear to be protectors of youngsters and never victimizers of them, and Groups that aren’t Moms For Liberty — keep in mind, they’re huge not doing this alone, and so they could not even be the largest — have taken to mendacity by omission, too. It’s the e book banner approach since our legal guidelines about obscenity don’t meet their agenda. The Miller Test makes use of “as a whole” twice in its 60-some phrases. It doesn’t matter, although, when the manufactured outrage can personal your complete information cycle.

Also not talked about are the ways in which people are cashing in huge from e book bans. Nothing says America fairly like revoking foundational rights and “developing” an answer for folk to navigate them.

We haven’t touched on the wave of bomb threats to public libraries, both, nor the unbelievable will increase in e book bans in faculties over the past 12 months and the developments that present e book bans beget extra e book bans.

And whereas the responses to the trio of surveys on parental perceptions of libraries run by Book Riot and the EachLibrary Institute present that the lies being perpetrated are having an impression, these surveys confirmed one thing else: the overwhelming majority of individuals belief librarians, disagree with e book bans, and really feel protected in libraries.

Equally vital is the stress within the outcomes of these surveys the place we discover alternative. What can we do to counter these lies and fight mis-, dis-, and mal- data?