I belong to a Banned Book Book Club (BBBC) that meets once a month via Zoom. At each meeting, we discuss where and why our book was banned – often more difficult to determine than you might think. This month’s selection, for example, Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker, seems to have been challenged as “supplemental reading” in a Georgia school district in 2020 for “explicit” or “unacceptable” content. This content may have been the homosexuality of some of the characters, the sexual behavior of other characters, or the violence and horror of some of the scenes. Regeneration takes place during World War I, and there’s nothing more violent and horrible than the trenches of France in 1917.
I’m learning to question the offhand use of the word banned. Is a superintendent’s refusal to okay a book on a supplemental reading list the same thing as banning? If parents question a teacher’s assigning Slaughterhouse 5, is that the same as banning? If a district removes Judy Blume’s books from their library, is that the same as banning? Does the Department of Defense’s removal of almost 600 books from their schools’ classes and libraries—focusing on subjects like diversity, race, puberty, and LGBTQ themes—constitute banning?
These actions seem different to me, but they’re all lumped under the umbrella term banned books. In some cases, a more accurate term might be challenged. At the very least, such book challenges complicate the lives of teachers and librarians. At the worst, they may result in firing or impair readers’ ability to read books. But a particular school’s deciding not to teach I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is not the same as, say, an entire city removing Maya Angelou from its libraries.
I recently tripped over another complication with the term book banning. Having just read Making Mary Poppins: The Sherman Brothers, Walt Disney, and the Creation of the Classic Film by Todd James Pierce, I picked up the original Mary Poppins by P. J. Travers, which I had never read. Thinking about the concerns some fundamentalist Christians have with The Wizard of Oz and other books involving magic, I googled to see if Mary Poppins’s magical adventures had ever been banned. They have, but not by conservatives.
Some on the left have trouble with Mary Poppins. They have objected to Travers’s use of the word Hottentot. Mary tells her little charge Michael not to behave like a “Red Indian.” In the original edition of 1934, Mary and the children use a magic compass to visit the four corners of Earth and encounter “Eskimos” in the North, and people in the South who are “black all over and with very few clothes.” Travers changed this chapter, called “Bad Tuesday,” first in 1967 and then again in 1981, transforming the people into animals (e.g., a polar bear and a macaw).In 1980, a librarian named Joan Dillon defended the San Francisco Public Library system’s removing the book from circulation, saying, “It’s not censorship. It’s selection after careful review. It’s not a very good book.”
I understand the concerns about race and stereotypes, but I’m not comfortable with Ms. Collins deciding that a book can’t stay on the shelves because it’s “not a very good book.”
Also from the left, J.K. Rowling books are being blackballed, not because of the wizards and spells, but because of Rowling’s expressed attitudes about transgender medical treatments.
One more. In July of 2008, I recall a friend’s suggestion that copies of Barry Blitt’s controversial cartoon cover of the New Yorker depicting the Obamas as militant radicals be burned. She knew that the image was satiric, but most people would take it literally, she said. An avowed liberal, she wanted to burn the magazines she objected to.
I’m not going to sum things up here at the end, because I’m not sure what I think about all of the above. I lean toward a libertarian dissemination of books and information, but I respect parents’ rights to have a say in what their kids read, just not in what other kids read. Otherwise, I can tell you that I recommend all the titles mentioned above, especially Regeneration.