1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them | Hacker News Reader

1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them

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59 pointsarmanhq86 comments

> it’s important to note that they are to the end of positive social change

The end does not justify the means. Name me one single objectively bad political movement which internally thought of themselves as bad or negative. There isn't one. They all claim and for the largest part of their membership believe to serve the greater good. Therefore I find this argument of the author extremely weak. Surely they can come up with some less naive arguments?

To move away from sophistry and towards some concrete understanding, which of the sample books they provided for that blurb would you say is "true negative"? Others which aren't explicitly highlighted would also be acceptable.

- Enough! 20 Protesters Who Changed America

- Gays and Mental Health: Fighting Depression, Saying No to Suicide

- I am Martin Luther King, Jr.

- Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights

- Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality

I did not communicate my point well enough. I'm sure a lot of these "bans" are not well justified, and good arguments can be found against them. Why use something weak like "we are the good guys and the ends justify the means"?

I see, I misunderstood the point you were making, apologies. I agree, I think that's one of the weaker points of the article. The data itself makes a much stronger case.

> Irregular bans are ideologically driven.

> They are supplemental to and fall outside of the standard book exclusion process at schools and libraries. Standard exclusions prevent books that promote violent, hateful, or mature/17+” topics from being placed on school bookshelves while irregular bans do not have robust processes and can be influenced by interest groups or local officials.

Seems like when the book is removed from library using an opaque, bureaucratic process, it’s called “standard exclusion”, and when it is removed using different, more public and democratic process, it’s called “banning”. Otherwise, there is no difference in the actual outcome: whether it is “standard exclusion” or “banning”, the end result is simply that book is removed from library (or prevented from being added) all the same.

Therefore, I agree that the “bans” are “ideologically driven”, because the reason this democratic process of excluding books from libraries is called “banning” is indeed very much ideological.

This might also be useful to non-Americans, who aren’t necessarily intimately familiar with US politics and language games: no book have actually been banned in US in the standard meaning of this word. Every single book on the banned list is completely legal and typically easy to obtain and possess. Even in the schools where these “banned” books were removed from libraries, I believe that the students are entirely free to possess and read these “banned” books: I never heard of schools actually treating these books as contraband. This whole “banning” narrative is simply describing removal of books from libraries through democratic instead of bureaucratic process, and the choice of the word is meant to invoke mental connotations of some sort of authoritarian/totalitarian state.

> whole “banning” narrative is simply describing removal of books from libraries through democratic instead of bureaucratic process

Put another way, through a political versus administrative process. That's rightfully problematic. It's not a ban, but we purposely ring-fence libraries from politics.

I do not believe there is any sort of “ring fence” between schools and politics. The entire point of public school boards and elections thereto is to enable voters to exercise the political control over the branch of government that is providing public educational service. If your argument indeed is that the public schools should be fully and wholly independently ran by nonelected bureaucrats entirely as they please, with no input from voters whatsoever, while being publicly funded, then well, let me just say that I am adamantly opposed to that, and so is most everyone else. You cannot just claim that “we ring fence schools from politics” and expect people to acquiesce to relinquishing control of the public service they fund and make use of.

> point of public school boards and elections thereto is to enable voters to exercise the political control over the branch of government that is providing public education

Fair enough. Perhaps the answer is school libraries are Constitutionally problematic–we can call them book bazaars and acknowledge that minors under state custody do not have the right to a library.

Politicians removing books from libraries is a clear boundary. These aren't books being put in front of students as part of their curriculum. They aren't even in classrooms. They're in a library, and when we normalize plucking books from school libraries we normalize doing that at public libraries, where there are also nutters levying the same arguments to get books pulled.

I don’t think that non-school public (ie. government-ran) libraries here are any different from legal perspective: since I am funding my local public library, and since the library has a limited budget, I expect to have a say as a voter as to what books I want it to stock and take space on shelves. For example, I am very much opposed to it stocking books in foreign languages, because few people even can read these, and so I don’t consider it an effective use of public resources. This is no different than, say, having a say (through elected representatives) in where I want public infrastructure resources to be spent on. Point is, voters have every right to direct the government to buy or throw away any books from public libraries as they please.

Having the legal argument out of the way, I think that there is very little interest in political action directed to remove books from non-school public libraries. People who can get their books from there, can also just buy them on Amazon, and these certainly are not and will not be banned by any sort of government in the United States. Thus, it would be pointless and ineffectual to exercise political power here.

In any case, it is extremely hard for me to not be angry at activists, who, through language games, are trying to confuse people into supporting their goal, which is to force the people to buy and make easily available to children certain books that the people very much do not want to buy and make easily available to children.

> since I am funding my local public library, and since the library has a limited budget, I expect to have a say as a voter as to what books I want it to stock

Then, put simply, it's not a library. It's a store of books. Libraries have deeper historic, political and legal significance than books the majority wants around. (You can call it whatever you want. But it shouldn't receive federal funding nor the legal protections we extend to libraries.)

> there is very little interest in political action directed to remove books from non-school public libraries

It's a prominent and increasing trend [1].

[1] https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/03/record-book-...

> Libraries have deeper historic, political and legal significance than books the majority wants around.

If a public library doesn’t do what the majority of people want, why should they keep it around? In our political system, the people are the sovereign, and they have the ultimate right to decide how they want their government to operate, limited by constitution and other law. Public libraries don’t have a right to independently exist as some sort of feudal benefice, with right to extort the local peasants attached to it. Their existence and operations stem solely from the will of the people, and they will it to work differently or not at all, so shall it be.

> It's a prominent and increasing trend

As far as I can tell, the article linked is overwhelmingly talking about school libraries. Have you read it? I hope you haven’t, otherwise it would be rather dishonest of you to give it as evidence to support the point about non-school libraries.

what exactly bothers you so much about kids reading slightly more mature books exactly? it’s not like 50 shades of grey and 20 copies of A Birth of a Nation are sitting around in school libraries and plenty of kids read well above their age level.

It sounds like you just want to control things

"Banned in the United States" does not mean the same thing as "Removed from Middle School Libraries"

Hm, seems pretty similar to me. Especially when the article itself identifies only 1.6% of the books as having a 17+ rating.

[edit] Anyone who believes in freedom of expression and the first amendment should recognize this as a negative step, and a clear thin-edge issue. These are ideological decisions made by partisans with the goal being to shape the corpus of thinking of youth. "Will someone think of the children" is a well worn path. There's plenty of books about this kind of thing, like The Giver, but you know, it's probably on the list.

Hmmm...so it only counted 1.6% of the books as explicit because they had "publisher-provided" maturity ratings of 17+.

I wonder how many books that had explicit material within them were not properly labeled as such by their publishers? This seems like a very subjective standard that would be very easy to manipulate.

I wonder what the people who want books removed from school libraries consider "explicit".

>These are ideological decisions made by partisans with the goal being to shape the corpus of thinking of youth.

You support neo-nazi propaganda not being in school libraries, so certainly you too believe that it is the duty of school libraries to curate the content. It is just incredibly dishonest to pretend that you are upset at this for any reason other than that you want these particular books available to children, which is exactly as partisan as demanding their absence.

> It is just incredibly dishonest to pretend that you are upset at this for any reason other than that you want these particular books available to children, which is exactly as partisan as demanding their absence.

That's not possible, as, and this is true, I didn't go through the list. I suggest that you may be assuming a lot about me.

You do not support the removal of these books.

My claim is that: - Everybody supports the removal of certain books - Demanding the exclusion or demanding the inclusion are both partisan issues. Neither is a politically neutral stance.

This suggests that this is not a free speech issue at all, but a political issue with two sides wanting/not wanting children to read particular books.

> two sides wanting/not wanting children to read particular books.

No.

One group of people don’t want any children reading certain books. The rest leaves the choice of reading the books in question up to the children (and/or their parents).

An important distinction.

>The rest leaves the choice of reading the books in question up to the children (and/or their parents).

Complete nonsense. Libraries are not staffed by children nor their parents. What goes into a school library is not some ideologically neutral ground where books just happen to appear, because of the inner desires of children. These books are bought because the people in charge off filling a library want children to read them. This is true for all books in a library, but it automatically guarantees that school libraries are curated. And curation is not ideologically neutral.

It is totally disingenious to pretend that this is not about you wanting children to read those particular books.

> Especially when the article itself identifies only 1.6% of the books as having a 17+ rating.

You presume those ratings mean something.

"Getting It: A Guide to Hot, Healthy Hookups and Shame-Free Sex. An empowering guide to casual sex and hooking up from sex educator and Girl Sex 101 author Allison Moon."

I'm sure that's entirely age appropriate for my 13-year-old daughter to be reading from the high-school library.

There's a good chance your 13-year-old is hooking up and about 100% chance she's hearing about friends hooking up. A guide like that is useful for identifying healthy and unhealthy behaviors around consent, health, and emotions.

Have you actually read this book? Or are you making assumptions based on the title?

I included the title and its own summary.

And FWIW, the age of consent in the U.S. is 16+.

13...my goodness man...

The age of consent and the age teens are having sex with other teens are two different things.

The average age of first sexual intercourse in the US is ~17 for both boys and girls, and rising. The hypersexuality of adolescents is overstated in popular media, though probably varies by region. I grew up in a pretty promiscuous environment, and even there, while there were 13-year-olds having sex, and we were aware of it, that was by far the minority experience.

And minority experiences are not allowed? How would that be any different from "5% of the population is gay, so we're just not going to allow that to be talked about"?

The difference is that it's a destructive behavior.

If 5% of teens use drugs, we're going to team them how to score fentanyl-free coke?

This is a foolish comparison. You never want your kids to do cocaine. You do, in all likelihood, want them to have sex at some point.

"Hookups" encompasses activity other than sexual intercourse. This book would likely help its readers negotiate how to engage in that activity safely and with consent. And 13-year-olds hook up with each other, as do kids 14 and older, which your daughter will in all likelihood become.

Again, if you had bothered to actually read the book, rather than make a snap judgment based on a one-sentence summary on the internet, you'd probably be better informed.

> "Hookups" encompasses activity other than sexual intercourse.

Getting It: A Guide to Hot, Healthy Hookups and Shame-Free Sex. An empowering guide to casual sex and hooking up

Dude, stop trying to teach 13-year-olds how to have casual sex.

Dude, what an enlightened comeback.

Fwiw, I think psychologists would say it's healthier than stigmatizing sex and pretending it's a concept that pops into existence once people turn 16 or 18. (Ironically, some people are molested way before that age and don't even understand what's happening and why it's bad -- probably because they had no educational resources on the subject thanks to attitudes like yours.)

Removed from one percent of middle school libraries (138 out of ~13000 school districts).

Perhaps not, but for people in most other countries, the idea that some public schools will just ban whatever they want in an ad hoc fashion amounts to the same thing as saying that it’s the government doing it.

From an international-vs-US perspective, education being state-run or locally-governed is really more of a technicality than anything, because education policy is largely a national concern.

In many (or most?) other developed countries, there is a public-private divide where there is a pretty well established expectation that the government doesn’t ban things it deems “merely immoral”, an expectation exemplified by the separation of church and state. Private institutions on the other hand are given more leeway on that front, because their services are opt-in.

> public schools will just ban whatever they want in an ad hoc fashion amounts to the same thing as saying that it’s the government doing it.

There's a huge difference between "we're not going to stock this in the school library" and people not being allowed to read it.

> education policy is largely a national concern

Education is entirely controlled by the states, except that federal funding comes with some strings attached.

"Books banned in the US" has two correct readings (regarding banned books by governments):

1) "Books that were banned, somewhere within the US"

2) "Books that were banned, across the US"

In this case, at the behest of state and municipal governments, there are books that fit into reading one.

Every single book is “banned” from “somewhere” in the US, so your 1) is true, but vacuously so.

I don't think that's the case.

Where is "Where the Sidewalk Ends" by Shel Silverstein banned in the US by a state, local, or federal government?

You cannot bring it to a final calculus exam in many public universities, for example.

If you want to complain that this is not what you meant by “banning” books, I fully agree with you, but that’s the whole issue here: activists decided to name some normal stuff like removing some books from some public libraries to be “banning”, despite the fact that this is not anywhere close to what normal people think of when they hear “book banning”.

> You cannot bring it to a final calculus exam in many public universities, for example.

That is not what is happening here

This is an impractical delineation. If any unit of government is treating any book as contraband, everyone be worried.

The actual levels are books being:

1) removed from classroom curriculum;

2) removed from a school library;

3) confiscated from students at school;

4) removed from a public library; and

5) confiscated from adults anywhere.

One seems unproblematic in general. Five is universally alarming. Two is largely what is being discussed, though it has a habit of sliding into Four. Three is a strange one; I haven't thought about it.

I have no comment on the specific topic of this thread, but: I'm confused by your characterization of #1 as "unproblematic in general". Removing books from curriculums for religious or political reasons is a pretty high-profile form of book banning, historically, isn't it?

Yeah, I would argue #1 has been commonly involved in genocides in the past, where works of a particular culture are removed from curricula to prevent children from learning about their cultures.

> Removing books from curriculums for religious or political reasons is a pretty high-profile form of book banning, historically, isn't it?

The context is "books banned by governments." There are areligious, apolitical and even legitimate reasons for school boards to remove books from classroom curriculums. In general, the action is not problematic. That doesn't preclude problematic instances.

What are you quoting?

Do you mean, "banned across America"?

Sadly, the word "ban" has been used all too inapropriatley lately. And this website doesn't seem to help as nowhere did I see exactly what they meant by banned, who banned them, or exactly what the ban entails.

Banning, in this case, means removal from libraries. Sometimes it is by state order, sometimes it is via independent action taken by the school district (although that is usually also in an attempt to adhere with state board of education guidelines).

The linked data source cited for this article provides ban classifications for each and every book they list as banned.

Where did you see that? I saw where they explicitly state that is not what they mean:

>Namely, they are not and have not been about the physical removal of a book from a shelf.

It's in the linked dataset: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRKM3peCW-ND...

They're not being literal in that comment, they're alluding to the fact that such broad bans, which even DeSantis has called overreach in some cases, are moreso about aligning to an ideological narrative than actually caring about which books are in school libraries. But the books are also being removed, from school libraries and from classroom libraries.

It is fascinating to watch the progress from "don't be hysterical, no one is going to ban books" to "we're offended that you're calling it a ban".

> Irregular bans are ideologically driven.

> Standard exclusions prevent books that promote violent, hateful, or mature/17+” topics from being placed on school bookshelves while irregular bans do not have robust processes and can be influenced by interest groups or local officials.

Overgeneralized.

For example, Lord of the Flies is on the list. The standard "violence" filters weren't enough to filter that one out, apparently.

One of the books is literally titled "Sex & Violence." Again, "standard exclusions" didn't filter that out.

This is really interesting, I really like that the dataset is embedded in the page. Is there a general place where banned books are reported?

>We Reviewed All of Them

Am I blind? Where are the reviews? The website is also utterly broken on my device...

What I always find interesting is what exactly "banned" means. Certainly there is no government which punishes distribution, printing or reading of those books.

> Certainly there is no government which punishes distribution, printing or reading of those books.

Yes, state and municipal level governments have banned books in the US?

Here's a list of some example laws in, e.g., education: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tj5WQVBmB6SQg-zP_M8u...

>https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tj5WQVBmB6SQg-zP_M8u...

Why are you posting google doc links? These things are made to track you. Do not ever click such a link or share it. Absolutely one of the worst ways to share information.

In any case, when was the last time a book printer faced criminal charges for printing a book? A book reader for reading a book? A shop for selling a book?

> Why are you posting google doc links?

Because that's the way the organization makes the information available. Is Google docs on topic?

> In any case, when was the last time a book printer faced criminal charges for printing a book? A book reader for reading a book? A shop for selling a book?

You forgot: "A book owner for owning a book."

School librarians in the US face prison time for owning books in parts of the US. Has anyone actually been prosecuted for those laws? Not yet, they are new laws.

Has anyone decided to stop owning books because those laws exist? Yes, absolutely.

The government telling you what books you can own, and if you do not comply, threatening you with prison is absolutely a thing that's factual in the US.

>Is Google docs on topic?

No. I had to open it in Tor.

>School librarians in the US face prison time for owning books in parts of the US

No they don't. Stop lying.

>The government telling you what books you can ow

No. The government tells them which books to put into their libraries, read your link. Can you tell the difference? It is public vs. private.

I'm disappointed in the low quality of your arguments here. They border on bad faith, but, in truth, are probably simply lazy.

I googled "new law prison time for school librarians banned books" and the following was the top result: "School librarians face prison time for distributing banned books" (actual title slightly different)

In keeping with the ethos and guidelines of Hacker News, please apply the principle of charity and do a bit of research before doing a low-effort takedown of someone you disagree with.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/18/school-l...

>provide ‘obscene’ books to minors

If you had read my previous posts you would know that this is irrelevant.

By that standard the state has banned pretty much anything. Alcohol is banned in the US because giving alcohol to minors is a crime, see how absurd this argument sound if you apply it to literally anything else?

> No they don't. Stop lying.

I'm sorry you don't believe me, but librarians are facing jail time in Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Librarians (typically school librarians, but in at least one state also public librarians). The books their collection owns is a book they own. The states are telling them they could go to jail for owning a book in their collection.

In Arkansas, a librarian can now face 6 years in prison for 'Obscene material' but provide no guidance on what 'Obscene' means. Laws that are selectively enforced and provide no clear guidance are laws that are designed to limit speech and limit freedom.

Simply saying "no." and accusing me of lying does not change the fundamental truth of the matter.

No. You missed the point of the law.

The state mandates curation of libraries. No librarian is under any legal threat because of private ownership. Stop halucinating.

None of these laws punishes possession, printing and reading any books, and the only distribution restrictions are about some public libraries (typically school ones), which are directed to not stock these books, but otherwise there are no restrictions on distribution of these books.

> None of these laws punishes possession ...

> which are directed to not stock these books

You see how these are opposites, right? Stocking a book in a library is possessing it. The laws punish libraries for having a book in their collections, and that punishment can include years in prison.

Years in prison for a library having a book in its collection.

Libraries are some of the bastions of freedom and liberty in our nation, they represent the fundamental ideal that free speech should be accessible. Telling libraries that they should not stock books is antithetical to freedom and liberty.

>Stocking a book in a library is possessing it.

Nope. That is not how (most) libraries work. School libraries purchase books, which then are owned by the school and managed by librarians.

>Years in prison for a library having a book in its collection.

Libraries do not go to prison.

>Telling libraries that they should not stock books is antithetical to freedom and liberty.

Libraries are curated in all cases. The speech they provide is 100% determined by the purchasers and staffers. If those people are ideological, then so are the contents of libraries. Calling them a bastion of free speech is hilarious.

Personally I never looked at any book in my school library and avoided anything but the technical books in university.

I wonder what the methodology is. If I mail a copy of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" to some NYC school, and they decline to devote library space to it, does that mean it's "banned"? Or does it require an existing inclusion, and subsequent politically-motivated "banning" by upset parties?

Glancing at the list, it looks like quite a bit of the usual leftist propaganda, but also some bland stuff like "14 Cows for America". No one is really "banning" that in a sincere way. You want "banned" look for some David Irving down at your public school library.

I wonder how the authors feel about restrictions on books such as The Bell Curve or others. I don't particularly like or agree with those sorts of ideas, but I am curious of there is a double standard or if these people are generally interested in and/or opposed to the banning of books generally.

Book banning seems like a strange red line to have forgotten. If your kid is going to be corrupted by going into a library and finding a book that's naughtier than your taste, they're probably ahead of their similarly-corruptible peers who aren't in a library at all.

I'm not in favor of banning books, but "it's not the worst thing that could possibly happen" isn't exactly a strong argument for supporting something.

> "it's not the worst thing that could possibly happen" isn't exactly a strong argument for supporting something

Point is if your kid has the initiative to go into a library and find a book, they're probably fine. If they're not, they're going to get far worse from the internet and their peers-the library isn't your problem. Raising them to believe libraries are unsafe is more likely to backfire in the specific aims you're pursuing.

(Going out on a limb and assuming most of the people pursuing these book bans don't have kids in school and, if they do, they aren't in the top 90% of students checking out books from any library.)

> Book banning seems like a strange red line to have forgotten

Has book banning ever been a red line? Many Western countries, from Canada to France through US and New Zealand have banned many books for most of their existence.

Until relatively recently in the US, "banning books" was widely considered one of those morally reprehensible things that only authoritarian governments did, and people were outraged that the US did it at all.

It is legitimately weird how quickly that seems to have changed within the culture in the light of the moral panic over transgender "groomers" and the antiwoke movement. That, and the sentiment that the government should regulate or nationalize social media, or even make it illegal... and half the country seems to be in a competition to see how fascist they can become before the Supreme Court actually calls them out. It's like someone flipped a switch and suddenly all this dystopian shit was just ok with everyone.

> Until relatively recently in the US, "banning books" was widely considered one of those morally reprehensible things that only authoritarian governments did, and people were outraged that the US did it at all.

This is why I loathe the “book banning” activists, because their entire goal is to confuse people by using deliberately misleading language.

The fact of the matter is that nowhere in the US has any book been successfully banned by any government in recent memory, in the dystopian, authoritarian sense understanding of the term “book banning”. Activists simply decided to call removing books from school libraries “book banning” to deliberately induce misapprehension that this sort of dystopian, authoritarian shit is reality, when it simply is not the case.

Calls to remove books from libraries on the basis of ideology driven by a political party are a form of book banning, the distinction between it and a "ban by government" is one without a difference.

I’m so confused. Book bans in authoritarian nations mean that you can’t purchase the book because the government prohibits it. Is that happening anywhere in the US today?

You're not confused, you're just playing semantic games.

Congratulations on your apparent mind reading ability. Also I am pretty sure your post violates HN guidelines (is there a way to summon @dang?)

Was it, really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_the_United_...

Controversial, sure; but I'm not sure it was as universally loathed as you seem to think.

Reformed Protestant schools in The Netherlands have banned books with curse words, heavy language, sex, occultism and magic. You are not going to find any Harry Potter books there.

School books, the ones you learn from during the curriculum, are also heavily edited so that Christian school still buy them. Bikinis, short skirts, tattoos, female pastors, dinosaurs, astrology, everything is left out of the books out of fear that Christian schools will not buy them. Publishers are very careful with what they put in their books.

https://www-bnnvara-nl.translate.goog/joop/artikelen/uitgeve...

Their findings are that the book bannings are really for the purpose of

Virtue signal by people in positions of institutional power to voting-age parents interested in school choice, parental rights, and wedge social issues to the detriment of non-voting age students Reject and exclude topics that challenge a perceived status quo from the public discourse (e.g. non-heteronormativity, non-cis identity, non-traditional gender roles, and non-Judeo-Christian books are targeted

and that

Fortunately, book bans are widely unpopular amongst parents across the ideological spectrum.

It would make sense though given that reading can be transformative for some people but realistically I think most folks are worried about everyday problems like teen pregnancy and substance abuse or getting into fights - and to your point if they are off reading unbearable moral philosophy in some library they aren't out screwing around.

Its kind of funny to ban books when so few specially kids actually read. Clearly these policies are far more symbolic, an act of signaling.

People feel powerless and have no actual control, but going after the local book-shelf gives a feeling of accomplishment.

Not at easy to ban content from TikTok or Youtube.

The graphic is cool, but I would like to see some visual information that could give me a category of why the book was banned.

Are half the books banned for references to sexual material? It is hard to tell.

~975 are "Banned Pending Investigation" which is hyperbole for "Under Review".

If the books are unavailable while under review, then they are effectively banned.

nothing is being "banned". every one of these books can be purchased.

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