Banned books week8/13/2023 ![]() Knox interprets this shift as a reaction to recent social change: the election of the nation’s first Black president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and awareness about trans issues.īook challengers are almost always parents who aim to make books inaccessible to young people in classrooms and school and public libraries, Knox says digital library sources, including the database EBSCO, have also come under fire recently. Similar concerns drive would-be book banners today, with a more intense focus on titles that deal with gender identity and critical race theory, an academic framework that has been wrongly conflated in many cases with narratives exploring Black life. “Book challenges are a lagging indicator of whatever is going on in society.”īooks targeted in the 1980s, for example, represented a backlash against wins by the civil rights movement and groups advancing the interests of women and LGBTQ people. ![]() “Book challenging is.a symbolic phenomenon about how people feel that their public institutions should share their values,” says scholar Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). Back then the Moral Majority, a conservative political organization led by Baptist televangelist Jerry Falwell, raised fears about progressive books corrupting young minds on subjects ranging from human sexuality to the Vietnam War. This rivals the spike that spurred the ALA to found Banned Books Week in 1982. The number of book challenges reached a twenty-year high in 2021, according to the ALA, with 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials, resulting in 1,597 individual book challenges or removals. “We haven’t seen censorship on this scale in a very long time-it’s an order of magnitude worse than I’ve ever seen it,” says Betsy Gomez, Banned Books Week’s coalition coordinator, who is helping to track readings, panel discussions, book giveaways, and other activities being held coast-to-coast to sound the alarm about censorship. Sponsored by a coalition of sixteen organizations, including the ALA and PEN America, Banned Books Week marks its fortieth anniversary this year, a landmark that underscores the persistence of book censorship in the U.S. ![]() These are just a few recent examples of book challenges, attempts to remove titles from schools and public libraries nationwide-a growing phenomenon about which Banned Books Week hopes to raise awareness through a series of special events to be held across the country starting on September 18.
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