Photo: SCTCC Librarian Mary Jordan chats with students about banned books during a pop-up in the BookStore.
When the task of researching banned books for Banned Books Week landed in my corner of SCTCC, it felt too vast to fit into a short article for the weekly news. The number of banned books, and the reasons behind their bans, fall as plentifully as autumn leaves beneath an old maple tree.
Still, I managed to gather a few striking examples worth closer examination, in hopes of finding a deeper lesson on the subject:
- Loggers vs the Lorax – Who knew that a town like Laytonville, California could be the center of a censorship firestorm regarding the Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax. Yet it all started when a young boy named Sammy read the book and took the lessons to heart. He told his father, an owner of a logging supplies business, that “If you cut down a tree then it’s just like someone coming and taking away your home.” The picture book became the tipping point for a firestorm between conservationists, teachers, and loggers; a firestorm with implications for Sammy that he “had to choose between Dr. Seuss and Daddy” according to his mom.
- ChatGPT Told Me to Do It! – A more recently banned book Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger got ejected from the game in Mason City Community School District in Iowa. Reviewers, trying to comply with a new state law used ChatGPT to look through over 100 books to make sure they were age-appropriate and without “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.” On further review this turned out to be one of those famous AI "hallucinations."
- Declaring a War on Words – Escambia County in Florida pulled the Merriam-Webster dictionary from its school library shelves as they reviewed it along with 1600 other books for content that did not comply with a new 2023 law. It does not appear that these books remained banned, but the reasoning why they needed to be removed while other districts in the state did not remove them during the review, remains undefined.
- Taking the Tree – One memorable book from my childhood, the Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, got cut down back in the 1988 in a public library in Colorado for exemplifying a sexist and unhealthy relationship. In the end, I’m just a bit stumped by this decision.
- That’s the Wrong Bear – Who knew that a book could be banned because the author had a name similar to a different author who was the real target of the ban? Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr had the target of toddlers, but was banned by the Texas Board of Education because a different Bill Martin wrote a book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation which was presumably not for toddlers.
It’s clear that not every book belongs in every library. Books should be appropriate for the audience, so this is a sacred responsibility of librarians to foster their collection whether in an elementary school or a public library. Yet like these examples above, sometimes the decisions to ban books are taken too hastily.