What Would YOU Ban?
The danger of school censorship isn't only in the past.
I was in high school when The Satanic Verses was first published in 1988. It's a complicated literary novel that explores issues of migration, love, death, and a number of other themes. But it's famous mostly because a few Muslim clerics condemned it as blasphemous. The result was widespread protests, bombings, bans around the world, and literal book burnings, culminating in the leader of Iran at the time-- Ayatollah Khomeini-- calling for the author's assassination and putting a bounty on his head. The author, Salman Rushdie, has been the target of attacks on his life ever since, the most serious of which took place in New York just last year.
I think the injustice of the response to The Satanic Verses is pretty easy for all of us to see. The rush to condemn a novel by some backward Islamic mullahs doesn't surprise many Americans. And it's easy to be outraged by the censorship and physical attacks on an acclaimed author who did nothing more than write a story.
But what about the many parallels between the story of The Satanic Verses and stories that hit closer to home? Take Kanawha County, West Virginia. In 1974, the schools in Kanawha County adopted a series of new textbooks that were widely distributed nationwide. But one local mother, Alice Moore, was upset by the change. She called the books "filthy, disgusting trash, unpatriotic and duly favoring blacks," and warned her neighbors that the new textbooks would be teaching white kids "to speak in ghetto dialect." She won a seat on the local schoolboard, and helped lead more than a year's worth of violent protest against the books that spiraled into school closings, boycotts, worker strikes, shootings, and bombings.
The calls to censor textbooks in Kanawha County mirrored those that had been made before in America. Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1851 Uncle Tom's Cabin was widely banned because of its anti-slavery message. A century later, segregationists tried to ban the 1958 children's book The Rabbits' Wedding because they felt it encouraged interracial sex by depicting a white rabbit marrying a black rabbit.
Is all this ancient history? Maybe not. According to the American Library Association, the number of attempts to ban or restrict library materials in the U.S. has risen 813% in just the last two years. That's not a typo. Last year, there were 1,269 such censorship attempts, compared to just 156 in 2020. There's already been another 695 attempts to ban almost two thousand different titles in 2023, the majority of which have targeted school districts. And Pennsylvania is among the handful of states where more than 100 different books have been challenged by censors this year alone.
The number of attempts to ban or restrict library materials in the U.S. has risen 813% in just the last two years.
It's easy to see attempts to censor The Satanic Verses as a threat to free expression, because the concerns of the would-be book banners are so different from our own. But attempts to ban or restrict books right here in our own community use exactly the same logic: that some parents should be the final authority on not only what is best for their own kids, but what is best for everyone else's kids as well. Book banners are no longer as open about why they want to hide or destroy certain books as the censors in the past. But the logic is the same.
Let's not allow history to repeat itself here. Let's celebrate Banned Books Week (Oct. 1-7) by resolving not to allow this logic to win out in our own East Penn schools.
Here are some other posts on censorship in our schools that might interest you:
not-so-fun fact: A final twist that ties the stories of The Satanic Verses and the book banning in West Virginia together: The very first thing Alice Moore found objectionable in the textbooks she tried to censor was a quote that spoke favorably of Islam. Ironic, given it was its relationship to Islam that led to so much controversy around The Satanic Verses.
...and yet another note: The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina tried to even ban the celebration of Banned Books Week this year. They withdrew the ban after public outcry-- your voice matters!