In Which It Is Banned Books Week Again

I've posted before (here, here, and here if you want to read) about book bannings and #BannedBooksWeek, but unfortunately the topic is perennial and needs to continue being addressed. Books bannings have continued to increase over the past year. The continued increase in books featuring BIPOC and queer characters seems to really scare certain groups of conservative parents, and those groups know how to organize and how to make a lot of noise.

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in some of the lists I've seen put out this week featuring banned books. A lot of them are classics (such as Lord of the Flies or To Kill a Mockingbird) or older children's books that were the subject of bans in the past but are overall really well known (such as Harry Potter).

The real danger right now is the hundreds of books that are being quietly removed from classrooms and school libraries because parent groups are challenging them. These groups assert that the very fact that a book stars a BIPOC child and mentions racism means it promotes Critical Race Theory and, even more often, that the very fact that a book features a queer character makes it "pornography". There are picture books being challenged as being "pornographic". Think about that for a minute. 

Unfortunately this phenomenon isn't limited to schools either. A small town in Michigan lost funding for its library in a vote this summer after a conservative group raised concerns that the librarians were "groomers" pushing "pornography" on children. Which is not in any way, shape or form what children's librarians who have books with queer characters in their collections are doing. I've heard anecdotes of Pride month displays in libraries all over the country being tampered with, everything from patrons checking out every single book to keep them out of the hands of children to outright vandalism.

A swift perusal of my shelves and my daughter's shelves produced a pile of middle grade books that I know have been challenged and removed from classrooms and/or libraries along with books I don't know for sure have been challenged but are likely to encounter challenges for the reasons cited above. If I looked for longer I could likely find even more books that commit the apparently grave crime of making children aware that racism still happens and queer people exist.

So, what can you do if you want books like this to get into the hands of readers? On a larger scale, if you know books bans are happening in your community, make your voice known. If your community and/or local school library is open to having the kinds of books that are being banned in its collection, request that they purchase books like this if they have funds to do so. If the library doesn't have the funds and you do, consider donating such books to your local school and/or community library, or to your child's classroom library or the classroom library of a teacher in your circle.

If you're a parent, godparent, aunt or uncle, or otherwise have a role in a child's life that involves buying gifts for them, give them books that have been challenged. There are books with queer and/or BIPOC kids in every genre and you can certainly find a book the child in your life will enjoy. Whether the child in your life will see themself in these books or whether they'll see that kids who are different from them can be heroes it's equally important for them to read these books.

I have a lot of hope that the generation nearing and just entering adulthood is going to bring about a sea change in the way our society sees and treats queer people and people of color. I'm not an idiot. I know there will also be pushback and challenges, but the young people I know give me a lot of hope that we're moving in the right direction and the larger part of their generation will be on the right side of history.