Censorship, Book Bans, and Our Role in the Prevention of Harm

Chamutal Noimann, English

When I first proposed a special topic English course in 2009 entitled “Banned Books and Censorship,” I never imagined it would become a popular course. I was afraid the course would not fill because, at the time, banned books were only a topic of conversation among scholars in my discipline. One cannot be a children’s literature scholar of any persuasion without possessing deep knowledge of the history and evolution of censorship. Children’s literature is a distinct genre of texts for children that was created in large part to ensure censorship of certain subjects and themes deemed to be inappropriate for children. The Puritans, who are credited with originating the genre in the seventeenth century, demanded children only learned to read “real” stories because fiction is telling lies. All fiction was banned in favor of such best-selling original creations as A Token for Children: Being An Exact Account Of The Conversion, Holy And Exemplary Lives, And Joyful Deaths Of Several Young Children by James Janeway. The history of children’s texts is history as much of book bans and censorship as it is of publishing and reading. It is, therefore not a great shock for children’s literature scholars that books are being banned all over the United States in schools and libraries now. Even the record-breaking scale of the attacks we are now witnessing on children’s First Amendment rights is not surprising to those of us who lived through and studied the previous record-holding Evangelical Christian attacks on children during the 1980s. My special topic course did fill, and I have been teaching it ever since because, disturbingly, its substance has become more and more relevant as time progressed.

Throughout history, different kinds of people and groups of all persuasions for all sorts of reasons have attempted—and continue to attempt—to suppress literature that expresses views that conflict with their own beliefs. Censorship means different things to different people. According to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a censor supervises conduct and morals: as a) an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter; b) an official (as in the time of war) who reads communications (as letters) and deletes material considered harmful to the interests of his organization.  According to The Catholic Encyclopedia (a publication of the Catholic Church), however, “censorship of books is a supervision of the press in order to prevent any abuse of it. In this sense, every lawful authority, whose duty it is to protect its subjects from the ravages of a pernicious press, has the right of exercising censorship of books.” In China, according to the Dictionary of Library Science and Information Science, “Censorship is also called ‘inspection system,’” referring to the actions taken by the national government or institution to change content, detain or prohibit writing, publishing, sales, circulation, and speeches on the publication, dissemination, circulation or sale of dissident works through legislation or enforcement procedures.  Especially when we understand censorship as part of a larger cultural process of wachdogmanship, we also understand its influence not only on the publication and dissemination of books but also on the process of writing itself. The threat of censorship leads writers to self-censor their own writing; a practice we shamefully see with too many young adult literature writers in the U.S. today as much as we do in anti-freedom of speech countries like China and Russia.

Moreso than on any other sector of our culture, censorship has been fought on the backs of children and affected their education. They are almost universally the excuse for oppressive restrictions on freedom of speech and expression. Even John Stewart Mill’s case for the protection of individual expression in On Liberty makes exceptions for children. Mill’s argument in the book, known as “The Harm Principle,” disallows any restrictions on an individual’s free expression so long as the individual’s actions cause no physical harm to others. The Harm Principle, however, does not apply to children. He writes, “We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury.”[1] This denial of children’s basic human rights and freedoms would be shocking if it wasn’t so commonplace. It is a fact universally accepted that children do not deserve the same human and civil rights as adults do. Their state of dependency and necessity for protection condemns them to a state of silence when it comes to their education, including the choice of books they may read.

Not surprisingly, then, in any given year, as much as seventy-five to eighty percent of the books on the list of censored literature in the U.S. are children’s books. Most of the books on the American Library Association’s Most Challenged Books list are books written for or about children, their social life, education, sexual development, and religious awareness. Even adult literature on those lists is usually representative of books that are assigned to high school or college students, like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Censorship in public schools is a complex issue, involving disputes about what constitutes acceptable social values and about what relationships should exist between church, state, educators, parents, and children. The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom reports that the top three reasons cited for challenging materials are:

  1. The material is considered to be “sexually explicit”
  2. The material contains “offensive language”
  3. The material is “unsuited to any age group”

These three reasons, or excuses, are always presented as acts to protect children and defend them from harmful knowledge. Censorship is most commonly a tool of oppression used by conservatives, but there are many instances where liberals and progressives use it for the same reasons, as for example in the case of Dr. Carolivia Herron, an African American Jewish professor of comparative literature, accused of racism and antisemitism. Her picture book, Nappy Hair, is banned for offensive language by parents for whose children it was written as a celebration of African American traditions of storytelling, music, cultural heritage, and family.

The objective of my course is to investigate the issue of censorship from multiple perspectives. In the process, I hope to clarify students’ values and thoughts about the role of literature in shaping their views, as well as the role of religion in the schools and issues around separation of church and state, the freedom of the press, and what limits there ought to be, if any, on the freedom to read, and who, if anyone, should be authorized to set those limits. My students spend the semester working on one project that investigates the practice of book banning through its history and cites several case studies from four subjects that include the most egregious cases of censorship: religious censorship, political censorship, censorship of books that include instances mentioning sex and gender, and censorship of books that address issues of race. We begin the course by reading the text of the First Amendment carefully, followed by an analysis of John Milton’s seminal defense of free expression in Areopagitica. The first jolt of understanding the complexities of censorship comes from the realization that our freedoms of speech and expression were not guaranteed in the original text of the Constitution. That came through an amendment. The second jolt comes from Milton:

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labors of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserved and stored up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slays an immortality rather than a life.

They begin to see that the act of censorship is an act of premeditated violence. As they read and analyze each case study, I ask my students to think of four fundamental questions: what is the difference between truth and fact? Does personal opinion matter? What is the value of honesty? What are the limits of tolerance? Very quickly, we find that the practice of banning books is a way to ban not only opinions and ideas but to ban people. When they study the life and teachings of Socrates and the reasons for his execution or Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the violent acts conducted against him and anyone associated with the book following the Fatwa against him, they realize that Milton was not being hyperbolic in his description of the banning of books as a massacre. The German Jewish essayist, journalist, and poet Christian Johann Heinrich Heine wrote the now-famous and ominous warning in his play Almansor: “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too” (243-244). What we are witnessing now in Florida, Texas, and other states, the banning of thousands of books from schools and libraries, laws that prohibit teachers and librarians from discussing certain topics, and the manipulation and sanitizing of textbooks, is nothing short of a holocaust. But literature has never been the only form of intellectual or artistic expression subjected to censorship. There are people, texts, and theories in every field and discipline that have been the victims of it.

I believe that as educators, fighting against this wave of oppression is our most important and urgent duty. I have urged my colleagues across all disciplines to include banned and censored texts in all their classes in order to raise our students’ awareness and maybe prevent the violence perpetrated against the free expression of ideas, the accumulation of knowledge, and reason and truth itself. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” Milton declares. In the end, understanding the motivation behind censorship leads to the truth, “For who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious, those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power: give her but room, & do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true.” Knowing the truth is the essence of liberal education, the education of the free. Binding the hands of educators to prevent the teaching of truth and fact is tantamount to the suppression of critical thinking, the stifling of historical awareness, and ultimately, the perilous path toward repeating the darkest chapters of human history.[2]

Works Cited

[1] He goes on to make the same exception for “those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage,” essentially equating people of color to children as well.

[2] The American Library Aassociation’s 2023 Banned Books Week is October 1-7, 2023

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