As part of a pro-LGBTQ package of public school initiatives designed to be administered through the Department of Education, the Biden administration announced it will soon be appointing an "anti-book ban coordinator." The department will get in touch with locally controlled school districts when it feels that public school library "bans" may violate anti-discrimination laws. This emerging policy will be fully in line with the aggressive culture war stance of the White House.
The administration's language is as harsh as it is deceptive. Book bans are features of totalitarian societies where reproduction, distribution and ownership of suppressed materials entail criminal punishment. For instance, in 1968, the Soviet Union held a show trial of four students—Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexey Dobrovolsky and Vera Lahkova—for the typing of samizdat, or clandestinely published books. The students were accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and sentenced to up to seven years of hard labor. Nothing of that nature is happening in the United States.
Over the years, I've seen enough wonderfully nerdy American kids with "I read banned books" pins clutching beloved paperbacks with slick covers. I don't think they've ever actually seen a banned book. I've never read a book that was forbidden for me to read either, but I've seen them. My parents read samizdat when I was growing up in the 1970s and early '80s. They were extremely careful about it—they certainly didn't advertise their connections to the literary underground with pins—so they never got caught.
The experience was less than user friendly. There was typically a queue of people interested in a samizdat publication, so readers had to frequently wait for their turn for months. Because the state owned the means of book production, samizdat was published in low-tech modes—usually by typewriter or photography, so the print quality was poor. The pages were held together by simple binding—no need for attractive design to entice the consumer. My mother ended up ruining her eyes reading Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel. My dad gave up on that copy after a couple of days staring at the tiny blurred letters on the photographed pages. Either way, they felt fortunate to merely hold the forbidden volume: samizdat's reach was extremely limited, just 200,000 readers in a country of over 250 million.
Although such book bans are a completely alien experience to us in the United States, we are sadly familiar with cancelling, or ensuring that a wide range of ideas are unavailable to the general public through intense social pressure and appeal to public and private bureaucracies. Cancelling puts intense psychological pressure on the writer, serving as a warning to others. Contemporary woke cancelling is done largely on social media, but something like this method was also in the Soviet totalitarian toolbox. It wasn't enough to ban a book; the party had to make sure to drag the author through hell.
Though it doesn't go as far as a total ban, an American corporation like Target can, for instance, cancel Abigail Shrier's Amazon bestseller Irreversible Damage. Ultimately, it's powerless to keep the tougher-than-nails writer from publishing and readers are not criminally liable for owning a copy, even if some do get cancelled for reading a taboo book. For instance, Winston Marshall—the banjo player for Mumford and Sons—was fired from his band and lost many friendships for recommending Andy Ngo's Unmasked on social media.
For decades, the American Left rebranded "book ban" to mean something entirely different from either cancelling or an actual ban. Now it's used to characterize mere curation, and more often than not it pertains to the curation of children's libraries in public schools. But public school libraries usually have very limited—and increasingly unimpressive—collections. They were never intended to provide access to every book ever published. Ideally, they serve the purpose of showing students what's essential. Very few books make it onto public school library shelves and each one is a subject of frequently politicized decision-making by government bureaucrats. But now that Florida public school librarians removed some books with pornographic content, activists are crying "book ban" and the President of the United States sends in the Department of Education.
Like other parents, I am aware of the low-quality children's books that fill the bookstores and public schools' libraries—I myself have banned quite a few of them, such as low-brow woke propaganda The Anti-Racist Baby, from my coffee table. Many LGBTQ-themed books that fall under the allegedly "banned" header contain smut and erroneous scientific assertions, typically that a boy can be transformed into a girl and vice versa. Of course children's libraries reject them.
Taking pornography off school libraries' shelves, the White House rightly notes, is a recent development. But it's taking place today not because of some explosion of homophobia, but because nobody tried to put them there in the past, when it was considered common sense that kids should be protected from this kind of content.
Not all "banned" books are pornography. It's genuinely frustrating when schools don't have access to great works of literature. It usually happens to classics that contain words and themes considered racist or otherwise unacceptable in today's environment, regardless of what was considered normative at the time they were published. Our children are growing up alienated from their own cultural heritage, books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. It's doubly tragic because students are still assigned books with other kinds of charged language and themes, including the pornographic titles Florida is removing.
"Book bans" are usually blamed on conservatives, but progressives are prodigious blacklisters of classics. For instance, last year California Governor Gavin Newsom took a picture of himself in a café reading Toni Morrison's Beloved with To Kill a Mockingbird laying on the table on top of a stack of paperbacks. The caption stated, "Reading some banned books to figure out what these states are so afraid of." But some schools in his own California no longer teach To Kill a Mockingbird because of racism concerns.
Not permitting Mark Twain or Harper Lee in the classroom doesn't mean that their books are banned. It just means that the school curriculum is poor. The Biden administration is not going to fix that problem by bullying librarians.
Katya Sedgwick is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
