There are some things you need to be asking your self proper about now.
Which means you college students who discover yourselves dwelling in locations the place self-appointed guardians of public morality have been busily banning books. This contains Texas, the place Gov. Greg Abbott desires to jail librarians who permit college students entry to novels he deems “pornographic.” And Tennessee, the place a preacher in suburban Nashville held an honest-to-Goebbels ebook burning to destroy such harmful texts as “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and techniques.”
It contains Pennsylvania, the place one faculty district now requires a residents panel to log out on each ebook faculty librarians buy, and Arizona, the place faculties are required to publish a listing of all newly bought library supplies. And naturally, it contains Florida, the place Palm Seashore County academics have been ordered to assessment books of their classroom libraries with a watch towards purging references to racism, sexism and different methods of oppression, beneath a brand new state regulation proscribing the instructing of these topics.
Not by the way, this — Sept. 18 to 24 — is the fortieth annual commentary of Banned Books Week. It comes at what Publishers Weekly has dubbed a time of “new urgency” within the wrestle over mental freedom. Final 12 months, it reviews, the American Library Affiliation tracked 1,597 particular person books challenged or faraway from public libraries, faculties and universities, probably the most within the 20 years it has been protecting tabs.
So, sure, it’s best to ask your self a number of issues.
Ask your self: What’s it these persons are making an attempt to maintain you from understanding or feeling? What do they suppose goes to occur if a ebook challenges you, confuses you, validates you or simply evokes you to see one thing from one other standpoint? Why are they so scared that you simply may suppose in another way?
Ask your self: Why is it that lots of the books being challenged or banned are by folks of coloration or LGBTQ authors or have themes of race or sexuality? What do the ebook banners and burners concern out of your being uncovered to such issues? Is it that you simply may begin asking questions that make them uncomfortable? In that case, isn’t that their drawback — not yours?
Ask your self: Why is it so lots of the individuals who wish to ban books from faculties are the identical ones who don’t have any drawback letting weapons in? They’re terrified {that a} ebook will put an concept in your head; why aren’t they terrified {that a} gun will put a bullet there?
Ask your self: Are you some fragile factor, some piece of human glass who wants the sharp edges and laborious surfaces of recent concepts bubble-wrapped so that you simply don’t shatter towards them? Or are you not sensible and succesful sufficient to deal with your self?
Ask your self: What’s the distinction between banning books in Iran, Russia, Cuba and different dictatorships, and doing it right here? Is it that we’re presupposed to be those who know higher?
In spite of everything, that is nonetheless — purportedly — a free nation. However that freedom is beneath siege, as vividly attested by new legal guidelines that muzzle academics, by the ransacking of ladies’s rights beneath the supremely illegitimate Courtroom, by schemes that maintain folks of coloration from voting, by the assault on the U.S. Capitol. And if voting and protesting are acts of resistance, this week affirms that merely studying a ebook is, too. In reality, one might argue that every of us has a patriotic responsibility to make a ebook banner mad.
As a result of right here’s the factor: If you happen to can’t learn freely, how will you ever stay freely?
Ask your self that, too, whilst you’re at it.
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a Miami Herald. ©2022 Miami Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
