All Ideas Are Dangerous

Banning Fahrenheit 451 is <chef’s kiss> https://t.co/kqXZ1j228M

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) January 30, 2022

Some are just more dangerous than others.

 This is usually what happens when a book is banned:

In York, Pa., last month [e.g., September 2021], a group of high school students got together to save “anti-racism” books that parents of other kids in the Central York School District had protested. These were “children’s tomes that celebrate the lives of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, as well as an autobiography of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, a ‘Sesame Street’ town hall on racism, and a few dozen other books, many written by Black and brown authors,” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch wrote last month (“In Central York, kids rose up to save books on MLK, Rosa Parks from their parents,” Sept. 21).

The district’s action to remove these books from school libraries and curriculums was called a book “freeze,” not a ban, and aimed to protect students from “dangerous ideas.”

Christina Ellis, a Central York student, said to Lancaster, Pa.-based WGAL at the time: “We believe this is wrong. We believe that this shows discrimination, in a way, for banning 80% to 90% of books that are from BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) authors,” she said.

The students’ protest led to adults joining their ranks and resulted in many Little Free Libraries around the city of York to stock and make widely available, for free, the books that were on the school’s restricted list.

Students and “pro-book” parents protested the list outside a September school board meeting. And they won.

The school board reversed the book ban and made a statement that included the following, “The Board embraces diversity in its many forms, including diversity of thought. We have always welcomed myriad quality diversity materials embracing differences and fostering equality, tolerance, inclusiveness, communication and kindness.”

Fahrenheit 451 has been banned for language, depiction of firemen, and for depicting the burning of a Bible.  Odd because the book Montag memorizes and so preserves in the novel is Ecclesiastes (although actually Bradbury has him quoting Luke; but anyway....)  How often a book is banned is a little hard to pin down, since it usually occurs in some small school district or other (almost never in the largest school districts).  Best I can tell, 451 has been banned four times.  Some accounts indicate it has been far more often than that.  Go figure.

One of the all-time winners for book banning is To Kill a Mockingbird.  Maus is not the only book about the Holocaust to be anned.  Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, made the ALA list for most banned or challenged books of 2010-2019.  So, ironically, did the Holy Bible.

Book banning is as American as apple pie and barring school children from learning about Marxism.  It's a stupid action that usually backfires on the people doing it, does nothing to stop the book from being read, and often sparks greater interest in it than there might have been.

"Maus" is #2 and #3 on Amazon right now.

— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) January 30, 2022

I guess I'm just bemused by the people who are shocked!  shocked! to discover there is book banning in America!  The federal government pretty much gave it up after Ulysses was allowed into the country.  School boards are, again, usually where the action is on this stuff.  But even they don't really have the power to ban books; or to keep kids from being curious as to what all the fuss is about.  Personally I hope more people are reading Maus; or To Kill A Mockingbird; or Fahrenheit 451, because of all this. 

It’s what happened in Bradbury’s novel, even after they burned Montag’s Bible.