January 25, 2022 by Amy
I Like Banned Books and I Cannot Lie
My home state is in the national news again, because of yet more spectacularly poor decision-making by the most closed-minded members of its citizenry.
The Wentzville School District, a community located about 30 miles northwest of me, started banning books yesterday. Tellingly, all the banned books are by writers of color and LGBTQ+ authors.
They banned Toni Morrison. They banned Kiese Laymon. They banned George M. Johnson and Alison Bechdel.
“It’s too racy for our children,” some parents screamed. (I imagine them foaming at the mouth, too, but feel free to impart any physical manifestation of madness you see fit.) Parents of young adults who are in high school and who have access to far more “racy” content on the phones they carry everywhere with them. More “racy” content on the channels streamed into their homes on televisions and computers. The parents make it sound like the Wentzville School District librarians are shoving hard core racy materials in front of kindergartners.
Please note: I’m using “racy” to denote a word they used that I don’t want to use here, because I don’t want to show up in “those” searches. It begins with P and ends with orn. Use your imagination.
I know librarians. I work with librarians. They take their role very seriously, and they work hard to ensure that the students in their schools have access to the types of materials that will help young adults grow and learn and become citizens capable of reasoned, rational thought. They teach them to read books with discernment. And kids learn that the world is not a happy-fun place for everyone. Terrible things happen. Hell, terrible things have happened to the children who are supposedly being “protected” by these bans. But, by all means, let’s make sure those children don’t find a common voice in the books they read. Let’s make sure they feel even more isolated, alone, and misunderstood. And let’s also make sure to whitewash everything for the children who are lucky enough to grow up without abuse and neglect and being targeted for the color of their skin, who they want to love, or how they feel in their bodies. By all means, let’s be sure to send those kids off into the world with no knowledge or understanding that other children are carrying horrific burdens that will color and shape how they interact with others for their lifetimes and, indeed, for generations to come. And let’s make sure they are taught that if people have different experiences, they should be judged, mocked, scorned, and banned for it.
Librarians, in my book (see what I did there?), are unsung heroes. Their profession goes largely unnoticed, except when people with pitchforks and torches start lighting up the fiction section. Librarians do a lot of heavy lifting so I don’t have to: they seek out and procure books that will help my child grow up to be an adult with a greater understanding of the world and her place in it. I love to read, devouring tens of books each year. But I don’t have the time to duly research, read, and discern everything that my child should read. I rely on experts for that. It’s what we all pay them for, whether it’s through our private school tuition or our public school tax dollars. Librarians, along with teachers, do so much that I, with my degree in journalism and masters in business administration and decades of experience in marketing, could never accomplish. Would you attempt open-heart surgery if you hadn’t gone to medical school? Would you butcher a cow if you hadn’t trained in meat handling? Would you fly a plane without a single hour of flight school? Then bugger off if you think you can tell librarians and teachers how to do their jobs when you don’t have a degree or a day’s worth of experience in either of those roles.
What is my role as a parent? I ask my daughter about the books she’s reading, what she’s learning, and what she thinks. I’ve recommended books to her and, to my great delight, she has recommended books to me. Books that I might never have read had it not been for the teachers and librarians at her school. We have vibrant discussions that center the book’s content within our world, and talk about how what we’ve read is influencing how we see and interact with others. We’ve talked about the hard stuff. That’s what parenting is, and I’m smart enough to recognize just how fortunate I am to have the strong foundation provided for my child from her school. You might even say we’re both students there.
My blood boils with book banning. I mean, I really get fired up. I think there’s no better way to brand yourself as an idiot than to start banning books. It’s an incredibly huge neon sign flashing, “I’m a lazy parent who relies entirely on my child’s school to instill the virtues and values I think they should have because I can’t be bothered to read their books and have the hard discussions.”
The only bad books, by the way, are the ones that are terribly written. Content has nothing to do with it. There’s something to learn from every story. But damn, if your grammar sucks and you rely heavily on tropes, if you mix metaphors and spray adjectives liberally and with abandon, and if you apply an adverb to every fucking dialogue tag, then yeah, you’re a bad writer and no one should read your shit. Well, unless you write something like Fifty Shades and suppressed housewives across America get their kicks off it and you become a best-selling author despite your horrible writing, which can happen but shouldn’t. (And which I bet a bunch of the mothers screaming in Wentzville devoured, by the way.)
I read Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon just a few weeks ago. It knocked me over. Was it hard to read? Yeah. Did it stretch my brain? Yes. Is it gorgeously rendered with prose that sings and makes me feel completely inadequate as a writer? One hundred percent. Am I adding it to my kid’s “you should read this over the summer when you aren’t buried in homework” list? It’s already there. It’ll go right next to The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, which she read last year. The only thing that pissed me off is that the little stinker stole my hardback and keeps it in her room. (Thomas, by the way, has had her fair share of bannings.) I can’t count the number of people I have recommended Heavy to since I finished it. It’s just that good. My heart breaks that narrow-minded parents who I guarantee haven’t even read it in full think it’s unsuitable for young people.
Maybe I should thank the book banners. They give me great lists of books to read. “You don’t like these? Well, then they must be freakin’ awesome.” Unfortunately, I’ve already read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (loved it) and Heavy, so I have only two new books to add to my list thanks to Wentzville. What I do giggle about is that, with all the hullabaloo, you know these Wentzville kids are absolutely gonna seek out these titles and devour them. And then say, “What’s the big deal? Shakespeare is just as bad. And that shit’s required.” So, great job, book banners. You look like idiots to the rest of the world and now especially to your own kids. Well done!
Ya’ll should check out these banned books. They are fantastic. If they’re banned, they must be good. The starred ones I’ve read. The others I want to read.
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison*
- Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon*
- All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
- Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas*
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker*
- I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou*
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck* (huge Steinbeck fan, so really, any of his works will do. But Of Mice and Men is the one that always gets banned.)
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee*
- 1984 by George Orwell*
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury* (which is, ironically, about banning books)
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi*
- A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley*
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov* (I read this the summer before junior year of high school, after I really listened to the words in Don’t Stand So Close To Me by The Police. My parents could not give one shit what I was reading, God bless ’em.)
Okay, so I’ve read all these except the third and fourth, which are now on my list thanks to Wentzville. Something to learn from them all, friends. Something to learn from them all.
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