During Banned Books Week, Readers Explore What It Means to Challenge Texts

I don't think anyone is saying that. People are rolling their eyes because these lists are inevitably comprised of extremely popular books that were once, usually temporarily, removed from a single school library somewhere in the US.

There are books these libraries cannot even buy and which the school librarians will often not buy or even destroy for ideological reasons, but these books do not appear on these lists. Only the popular, famous, and widely available books that are often on required reading lists.

EDIT: A great example is To Kill A Mockingbird, which always appears on these lists. TKAM was once 'banned' because people considered it too antiracist, now it is often 'banned' (rare isolated instances in either case) because it contains racial slurs. Nevertheless for the past 20 years almost every American schoolchild has been required to read TKAM. It is absolutely absurd to speak of it in any meaningful sense as a banned book. It's just a book librarians and teachers love that sometimes gets complaints.

It's all about books that people read, not books they don't read. Nobody's going to read Mein Kampf because it's a boring screech.

For example, Harry Potter is on the 2019 list of challenged/banned books.

So popular titles are going to get challenged for various reasons.

When librarians speak of banned books, they are talking about books other people wanted banned, not the books librarians themselves wanted banned.

Harry Potter gets on these lists because some christian groups in America demanded that librarians remove the book from their shelves, while the librarians didn't want to. But books that the librarians themselves chose to not stock don't get on the list, because to a librarian, a librarians job is to select which books to stock and which not to. You are very unlikely* to find a copy of Myth of the 20th Century on the shelves of your local public library, not because of external pressure but because the librarians themselves think that people shouldn't read it. And to librarians, that is not banning.

*(I checked. Of the two library systems I have a card for, one doesn't have it and the other has a single copy in German, which they won't let you check out, but no copies in English. Since this is an American library, the German copy would be inaccessible to huge swaths of the population anyway.)

Remember--Amazon is just a private company, so it's not censorship! Say it three times fast and it becomes true :)

Schools are part of the government.

Yes, the annual banned books list is essentially a list of books favored by the averaged ideology of education majors, librarians, and journalists. There is never anything actually suppressed or controversial on the list.

I'm not even arguing that truly censored books do have intrinsic merit, but the banned books list is just a list of books certain people want you to think are edgy and that you should read to advance their ideology. It's marketing. Amazon and other bookstores are actually banning books, often in collaboration with government funded NGOs. 95% of these books are actual trash fires, sure, but those are banned books. On top of that, public libraries are performing slow, partly ideological purges of existing collections - there's probably more books being permanently destroyed/lost today than in the history of mankind.

It's funny that the latter description is probably just as accurate for the people who banned To Kill a Mockingbird as it is for the people who banned Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, given that the two groups are probably diametrically opposed to each other politically. Both groups seem to have a problem with depictions of racism.

Talking about censorship and banned books should be to highlight what is politically incorrect and indefensible in society, the ideas that are too dangerous to even consider. By seeing what ideas we reject on instinct we can highlight society’s biases. I find it hard to believe that most people would consider the books on this list too dangerous to allow people to read, they seem relatively tame. It’s much more likely that we would ban books dealing with pedophilia or rape, classified government information, COVID misinformation, or encouraging violence.

My wife, a librarian, would probably support banning a lot of Pikey's books and graphic novel in general before those dealing with mature or challenging content. Crimes against the word vs. the world, I guess.

There was nudity in Where's Waldo!?

If you read the reasons books are banned, it seems to come from both sides of the political spectrum, depending on the book.

How often has Dr. Seuss been banned?