Dem
47
GOP
53
Censorship, on the whole, does not work very well. OK, maybe it is effective in a place where the government is all-in on suppressing "troublesome" ideas, and has near-unlimited power, like China or North Korea. But in the U.S., it primarily serves to make things that might otherwise be uninteresting into "forbidden fruit." Don't these adults who engage in thought policing remember when they were kids? We 100% guarantee that a bunch of the people who are now geriatric U.S. Senators once plotted, planned, and schemed—with success—to lay hands on dad's Playboy magazines, or a copy of Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex, or maybe some wrongthink book like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or 1984.
We've already written about some of the books that have been banned as a result of the Trump administration's new guidelines for federally operated public schools (mostly, schools on military bases). A lot of them have to do with LGBTQ issues, either directly, or through symbolism and allegory. Others are anti-racist, or are (very) vaguely pro-feminist. The general point is to get rid of anything that is within a country mile of DEI.
The thing is, the instructions that have been issued to school librarians are very, very broad. Further, while those instructions make specific reference to "gender ideology," they also say that books on "discriminatory equity ideology topics" should be removed. That is a pretty broad description, and could apply to books about race and racism, but could also apply to books about class and classism.
For example, there is a book that was purchased by many base-school libraries about a youngster who, although white, was born very poor, and who grew up in poverty. He did work hard, and he did get an education, so he managed to escape his humble roots. Still, the book features some not-too-pleasant vignettes. Further, the purpose of the censorship appears to be an effort to avoid hurting the feelings of people who were born white, male and economically stable. So, a book like this could be read as a criticism of those individuals who are not poor, and could make them sad.
Of course, not every librarian interprets the guidelines in the same way, so not all of them are yanking books about poor, white folks. But a number of them are, just to be safe (although some of them might well be engaging in malicious compliance). In any event, the book described in the previous paragraph, which is no longer available to students at some military-base schools, is Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by one J.D. Vance. Hmmmm, now that we think about it, maybe censorship isn't so bad, after all. (Z)