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Banned books all about fear

Meghan Doenges

As a book lover and employee of Maria’s Bookshop, I would like to draw attention to an issue important to all true book lovers: banned books. Once a year, an alliance of diverse organizations joins together for Banned Books Week in an effort to increase awareness about banned or challenged books in celebration of the freedom to read.

This year, Banned Books Week will take place from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1. New and old challenged books are already generating headlines.

For 2016, the thematic focus of Banned Books Week is diverse content. Over the years, the majority of books banned or challenged have fallen into this category, including topics that encompass rape, religious issues (such as the Holocaust), mental illness, gender identity, political instabilities and racism. More than half of all banned books are by authors of color, or contain events and issues concerning diverse communities including subject matter on non-Western areas such as the Middle East.

Any book included on the list has been banned or challenged by one or multiple people across the country, most often in public schools and libraries.

The list continues to grow, but here are a few of the titles included this year I found interesting: Beyond Magenta (Susan Kuklin), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), Diary of a Girl (Anne Frank), The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini), Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky) and Another Country (James Baldwin). Beyond Magenta, a book about transgender teens, is one of many LGBT books on the list.

Kuklin’s opinion of the banned books list is that we are “learning the country is more frightened than we thought it was, we are moving forward, things are changing, we can either choose to grow as human beings or stay the same.”

In our current political climate, I can’t help but agree with Kuklin. To ban a book is censorship, and as quoted by the banned books coalition, “censorship thrives in silence; silence is its aim.” In this case, silence is applied in large part to the many groups who have suffered historic and ongoing discrimination. In contemporary America, there is an overwhelming misunderstanding of the true issues we face in the world today. True issues that are highlighted in these banned books.

To censor reading based on real tragedies we face as humans is to ignore those tragedies and continue to let ourselves be controlled by politicians who must then tell us what it is we fear. What we should fear is totalitarianism, oppression that can start with something as simple as banning a book from a high school library for controversial content.

In actuality, the act is not so simple at all. It is an act that conveys to children certain topics are not tolerable, topics we must not forget. If every school banned Anne Frank’s diary, not only is that a great disservice to those who suffered through the Holocaust, but it sends the message that it is a subject that is OK to be silenced. As someone who has personally visited Auschwitz, I can tell you that it is not acceptable to ignore the events of the Holocaust.

As Timothy Snyder writes in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, such actions only make it possible for such atrocities to reoccur. Despite it being an uncomfortable topic – “a real downer,” the cited reason for challenging Anne Frank’s diary – the Holocaust is not an aspect of our history we should be allowed to ignore, and that is our fate as humans to accept.

In addition, we cannot allow the silencing of rape issues, as an “activist” in Florida tried to do with Laurie Anderson’s book Speak. A part of the curriculum for many middle schools, Anderson has cited countless readers who have been given courage through her book on a teenage sexual assault to speak up about their own similar experiences.

Nor can we ban books because they are “written by a Negro” as Georgia officials have attempted with works by author James Baldwin. Disturbingly, I could continue this list forever.

Anyone with any semblance of current events will know these issues and more are well and alive today, they are applicable and in fact, they are boiling over.

Censorship of books is giving in to prejudices, ignorance and fear. With education comes power and understanding. More than ever, we all need to be reading, learning and empathizing with the dark aspects of our human condition, historical and current.

If we are not able to do this, if we are not able to accept diversity in all of its forms, we will not survive as a species much longer. And with all of the great books we have written, that would be a real shame.

If you are interested in learning more, Maria’s Bookshop is supporting Banned Books Week until Oct. 1. Look for books displayed in the window or with orange bookmarks to find a banned book you might like to read yourself and join in the quest to end censorship!

Meghan Doenges is a student at Fort Lewis College and an employee of Maria’s Bookshop. Reach her at madoenges@fortlewis.edu.



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