JALSA in CommonWealth Beacon Magazine on Combating Book Bans

Full op-ed column, co-written by Larry Bailis, JALSA Chair, and Cindy Rowe, JALSA President and CEO, at this link.

Book bans are bad for democracy
Massachusetts is not immune to the threat — and we must fight it

SOME MEMBERS OF a community south of Boston sought to ban a piece of literature because they found its content too controversial and disruptive to their belief systems. What’s so startling about this? That sentence applies to both the year 1637 and recent times.

The very first book ban in early colonial America occurred in 1637 in what is now Quincy. Author Thomas Morton’s work, New English Canaan, was critical of Puritan customs. Because he dared to challenge existing power structures, Morton was labeled “Lord of Misrule” by Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford, and New English Canaan was banned by the Puritan government.

Fast forward nearly 400 years and we see some members of the South Coast community of Mattapoisett seeking to ban the renowned and oft-targeted work Gender Queer: A Memoir, Maia Kobabe’s autobiographical recounting of their journey of understanding their gender and sexual identity as a nonbinary and asexual person. Troublingly, this is far from an isolated incident.

Indeed, many books targeted for challenges and bans center the stories of individuals representing already-marginalized communities, like LGBTQ+, Black, and Jewish characters. And while much of the national attention on book ban efforts have focused on more politically conservative states like Texas and Florida, such efforts to remove books have been occurring here in the Commonwealth with greater frequency. Shockingly, Massachusetts had the fourth highest number of attempts to remove books from shelves in the entire country in 2022.

We have seen what happens throughout history when such anti-free-speech, anti-education, anti-democracy efforts are permitted to flourish. Such efforts evoke in many of us recollections of the notorious Nazi book burning campaigns in May 1933 that included the destruction of works by everyone from Helen Keller to Albert Einstein.

There is a direct through-line from that authoritarian regime to ongoing efforts today. Ultimately, book bans not only suppress information and art from public access, they undermine democracy and corrode our very humanity.

Particularly as efforts to challenge and ban books overwhelmingly focus on works that center marginalized voices, we find two related outcomes in this area: Authors representing marginalized communities are more readily silenced, and all readers have fewer opportunities to hear about and learn from those with different life experiences. This diminishes a sense of representation among readers hungry to see themselves portrayed in the stories they read, and it reduces opportunities to develop empathy and understanding among readers whose minds can be broadened by such literature.

In aggregate, book bans are tactics designed to control what ideas people can be exposed to, warping our perception of the world around us. Further, book bans are attempts to control our understanding of history in order to whitewash it.

Topics like slavery and the Holocaust become subject to revisionist history at the whim of current political agendas. Efforts to combat book banning are how we stand up to authoritarians, white nationalists, and others who would use division as a political tactic to keep us from coming together in a thriving democracy rooted in equity, empathy, and opportunity for all.

One effort to combat book banning in Massachusetts is new legislation that would require libraries to create clear guidelines for how to approach a book challenge, establishing guardrails against insidious efforts to unduly remove books from public access and silence marginalized voices. It would require schools to keep materials on shelves until a challenge is adjudicated; librarians to select books without regard to personal or political views; and that those decisions only be overruled with a vote of the school committee after a public hearing.

In doing so, free speech and free expression, the underpinnings of a thriving democracy, would be defended. The legislation, An Act Regarding Free Expression (S.2528 / H.4229), has recently been heard by the Joint Committee on Education and is awaiting further action. Contacting legislative leaders, as well as your personal state legislators, to urge them to move the legislation to the floor for a vote is an effective way to express support.

Another method to combat book banning is to demonstrate support for and interest in the literary works being targeted. Buy them from your local bookstore or borrow them from your local library. And if your local bookstores and libraries don’t have them available, urge them to carry these books as a demonstration of opposition to book bans.

On that front, for example, the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action started a book ban action team to monitor book challenges, and recently held the inaugural meeting of a banned book club, where members select, read, and discuss banned books and relate the selected book’s themes to issues around which JALSA organizes.

As we await overall statistics for 2023, we know that requests to ban books in American schools and libraries in 2022 surged to a 21-year high. Those who employ the authoritarian tactics of book challenges and bans are relentless and vocal beyond their numbers. We must be just as tenacious in combating this scourge. We cannot take free speech and free expression for granted. Our multicultural, pluralistic democracy depends on it.

Larry Bailis is chair and Cindy Rowe is president and CEO of the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action, a Boston-based nonprofit focused on civil rights, civil liberties, and social, economic, environmental, and racial justice.