Book Banning Happens on Both Sides
Book Banning Happens on Both Sides
Censorship is Censorship whether from the right or the left
*I was planning to write this as a lengthy Substack “Note” but it simply became too long so I figured I’d just post it here. I’m going to do something unusual and turn comments “off” because I don’t want to spend five days doing lengthy, boring thread arguments with people. This is my view. You’re entitled to your view. We’re all complex human beings with ideas and values. I have mine. You have yours. We can all agree and disagree and that doesn’t make me or you “bad” or “good.” It makes us citizens of a free Democracy.
**As always: if you appreciate my work please consider a paid subsciption for only $35/year (less than $3/month). Consider also recommending my Substack. It helps :)
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Book Banning. A reality-check for people on the political-left. Let’s get our contemporary history correct here. I keep seeing a lot of charts showing conservative book banning. This is accurate. And it’s bad. I am not a Republican and I do NOT support book banning on the political-right. And the book banning from the right has become out of control. I denounce it. Hard stop.
However.
The idea seems to be that those “fascist Republicans” suddenly, out of nowhere, for no reason, started banning books. They’re just awful, terrible no-good people.
No.
The long arc of publishing history in general shows that book banning has tended to come from the conservative end; this is true. Look at Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1955) for instance. The 1990s and the first decade of the 00s, as Sherman Alexie can attest to, had their share of conservative banning.
Yet something changed around 2012, 2013. A new illiberalism started occurring on the Left. Jonathan Haidt writes about this succinctly and eloquently in his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. We started seeing book banning stemming from the Left. First it was To Kill a Mockingbird, then Huckleberry Finn, then Of Mice and Men, and then Theodore Taylor's The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. The justification was always the same: These books were “racist” and/or catered to “stereotypes.” (Huckleberry Finn! The most antiracist book probably ever written, and in the 19th century!!!)
From ABC News re some of the above titles being pulled: “Amid the U.S. racial reckoning in 2020, the Burbank Unified School District in California removed several titles from required reading lists in several schools for their use of the n-word after complaints from local parents and a review by administrators.”
The Burbank Superintendent Matt Hill said (2020), "This is not about censorship or banning books outright, this is about determining which books are mandatory and which books are optional.” Yeah. Right. Hmmm.
“The BUSD administration has not responded to ABC News' request for comment.”
Also over the past decade we’ve seen books pulled from publication after pre-pub copies were distributed and leftist activists banded together on Twitter to attempt to force a publishing house to pull the title. A great example is “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” by the journalist Abigail Shrier. (Link included below.)
About the above mentioned title, Irreversible Damage (from ABC News):
“Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a law professor at the New York Law School, said she hasn’t read Shrier’s book, but “it doesn’t matter” to her what the book says — she thinks it should continue to be published and sold as a matter of free speech.
“She said she recently tried to persuade a publisher to keep publishing “Mien Kampf,” Hitler’s autobiography, “and it's not despite the fact that my father barely survived the Holocaust — it's because of that fact,” Strossen said, adding that she believes free speech is “the most effective way to expand rights and safety and dignity for any individual or group, but, in particular, those who have traditionally been marginalized and oppressed.”
I remember being a sophomore in high school at a liberal college-prep school in the year 2000 in Southern California and the teacher pulled The Catcher in the Rye mid-read due to some liberal parents’ complaints.
The point of all this is: Whether censorship and book banning are coming from the Right vis a vis the “state,” or whether it’s coming from the Left vis a vis private institutions, academia, Twitter, young leftist activists, etc: Both are anti-Democratic impulses. Both cater to totalitarian instincts and tribalism of the worst kind. The Right is REACTING to something, people, and that something is the new decade-long Woke culture of censorship. I’m not saying all of this is the “fault” of the Left. It’s the fault of BOTH sides. But for the love of all that is holy and right, let’s stop pretending that the Left is pure (it’s not, by a long-shot), that the left has no part in any of this (it has a massive role) and that the Right just suddenly decided to start ramping up their book banning.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Things like book banning don’t suddenly come out of nowhere. Leftist identity politics has been becoming increasingly extreme and intolerant of differing views (regardless of race/class/gender) over the past decade, both in its content and in its censoriousness.
This is the cold, tough reality. You may not like it. But here it is. If you’re on the far left, you may want to kick and scream. You may not want to take any responsibility. You may want to finger-point and say that all the issues are from “them,” those terrible, evil Republicans. You may want to point to the overwhelmingly higher numbers of banned books from the Right. But you sit in your ignorance at your own peril. Democracy dies in darkness? Maybe. If so: The knife is being plunged in from both sides’ extremes.
Let’s not forget the Harper’s Letter in 2020, wherein 150 famous writers criticized censoriousness stemming from the Left (writers included Noam Chomsky, JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood and many others). From the letter: “They say they applaud a recent ‘needed reckoning’ on racial justice, but argue it has fueled [the] stifling of open debate. The letter denounces ‘a vogue for public shaming and ostracism’ and ‘a blinding moral certainty.’” (BBC)
“That includes Harry Potter author JK Rowling who was fiercely criticized this month for comments about transgender people.” (BBC.)
“The letter suggests: "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.’”
Don’t tell me this isn’t a culture of censoriousness. Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. Don’t tell me it isn’t happening. It is wrong. It’s happening. It’s a big part of the problem. Want to help change culture and politics for the better? Fix your OWN side of the problem first. That’s the only way change can happen.
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Sources:
1. https://www.newsweek.com/when-it-comes-banning-books-both-right-left-are-guilty-opinion-1696045
3. https://abcnews.go.com/US/conservative-liberal-book-bans-differ-amid-rise-literary/story?id=96267846
4. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/opinions/york-pennsylvania-school-district-book-ban-parini/index.html