“I received threats to my job and my safety, some over email, some over the phone, including one that mentioned my wife by name,” writes high school librarian Gavin Downing about protecting challenged books in his school library. “My home address was released to the challenger. But I never regretted what I did.”
Does this seem extreme? Threatening lives over books that one person, or a small group of people feel are objectionable? It’s just a book, right?
“I grew up with very few books that included LGBTQ+ characters, and I know what a difference it can make to see yourself reflected in the media,” writes author Ray Stoeve. “The people who ban my books are telling kids that who they are, who their friends are, is wrong and bad, and that’s profoundly damaging.”
The answer would be yes. Banning books is incredibly harmful not just in threats, but in censoring stories that could give voice to minority authors and stories. Why then does one group of people feel the need to take books away from everyone who would like access to them?
Downing recounts such an instance he went to bat for books in his library. “There was an attempt a few years ago at a middle school in the district where I was serving as the librarian at that time. This effort began with efforts from my then- principal to remove multiple books she disagreed with from the shelves and eventually led to a formal challenge from someone who didn’t even have students at the school. Books that are primarily targeted are those that deal with LGBTQ+ experiences, as well as experiences of the BIPOC community. All three books that I protected during the book challenge were books by and about the LGBTQ perspective, with the third also being about the BIPOC perspective.”
Author Brian Kimmel discussed a more insidious side to banning and censorship in the author and publishing community, the erasure of stories from #OwnVoices.
“While my books haven’t faced a formal challenge in a school or library that I know of as a publisher in the way we often think of ‘banned books,’ my work has faced a different, more insidious kind of silencing that many authors from marginalized communities know intimately. For my grandmother’s memoir, “Blue Skies, Troubled Waters: An American Twin’s WWII Odyssey in Minahasa, Indonesia,” the silencing came from the historical record itself. The stories of the millions of civilians, particularly in Southeast Asia, who suffered and died during the Japanese occupation in WWII are largely absent from mainstream American narratives. The ‘reasoning’ for this silencing is a systemic one: a publishing industry that has historically prioritized a very narrow, white, male-centric view of world events.”
For Banned Books Week this year (Oct. 5-11) we implore you to examine why certain groups in our society are so terrified of these writers. We challenge you to read a banned book.
Jess Hernandez
Authors Against Book Bans
Washington State Chapter
