Summer Reading

If you are thinking about a book to read this summer, consider Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

The book primarily focuses on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. 

In the story, the main character is a firefighter named Montag who lives in a world where books have lost popularity due to the growth of TV and films.  Montag steals a book from a book burning and is warned about the dangers from his chief.  The chief tells how in the past, groups protested books for their controversial content which led to books no longer being published.  Authors, teachers, and critics are now seen as enemies in an increasingly anti-intellectual world.  The chief warns Montag to burn the book so trouble will befall him.  Of course, I am not going to tell you any more about the story....read the book to find out what happens to Montag.

Many readers feel this book carries of theme of anti-censorship but in an interview with Ray Bradburn in 1970, he explained that the book explores the effects of television and mas media on the reading of literature.

Read this classic book and share with us your thoughts and insights.

Cultural Sensitivity or Censorship?

Librarian Susanne Caro writes about her encounter with cultural sensitivity and censorship in the book True Stories of Censorship Battles in American Libraries.

While working with the Museum Resources Department of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, Susanne became involved with a project to put the historic magazine, El Palacio, online.  El Palacio dates back to 1913 and contains articles about archaeological sites in New Mexico and around the world.  The magazine also contains articles on Native American culture, art, and poetry.  The goal for digitalizing the magazine was to preserve the old brittle pages and to make the content more widely available. 

Susanne encounters several problems with this project.  The first is the detailed articles about archaeological sites.  State law protects these sites and prohibits information that could put sites at risk.  Although the magazine provides very detailed articles for locating these sites, it was published before the law come into effect.  The worry is that if the information is made widely available online, the sites will be looted.  Susanne has to consider which articles in the magazine violate the law.  The other problem is the photographs of native ceremonies and burials.  There are no laws protecting these images – just good intentions.  Susanne contacted other libraries and archives who have digital images pertaining to indigenous people.  Some of the institutions had policies which they shared with Susanne while others had no policies about what they put on the internet.  Susanne was advised to meet with tribal advisors that could help decide if materials should be digitized and which ones could be accessible to place online. 

Susanne had this to say about picking and choosing pieces of the magazine to put online:

“When images or text are redacted, the document is changed.  What does redaction do to the integrity of the material?  You are changing a historic artifact and the experience of the reader by blacking out sections.”

The big question that arises is: When does respect for cultural cross over to censorship?

In the ALA Guidelines – Librarianship and Traditional Cultural Expressions: Nurturing Understanding and Respect – there is a suggestion to create separate user policies for documents containing cultural expressions.  Putting the information online can led to misuse of information and libraries need to “ensure appropriate use.” 

This suggestion is at odds with ALA’s Freedom to Read statement:

“Freedom is no Freedom if it is accorded only to the accepted and the inoffensive.  Further democratic societies are more safe, free, and creative when the free flow of public information is not restricted by governmental prerogative or self-censorship.”

Restricting access to El Palacio is censorship.

Removing images is censorship.

Susanne raises the question: if we do this for one group, will we do it for all?  Are we willing do this for any other segment of the population, and if not, why make any exceptions?  What about Masons?  They have secrets and rites that only the initiated are supposed to know, but books that expose their secret societies stay on the shelves of libraries, as do books on Scientology that have information Scientologists object to being public.  What are the requirements for a culture or group to have this kind of special status in libraries? Why make the exception for Native American cultures?

The argument for cultural sensitivity is that Native Americans have their own governments that are recognized by the U.S and these sovereign nations have laws about cultural heritage.  NAGPRA is effective in protection artifacts but not images.  Susanne raises more questions: Should librarians restrict access to culturally sensitive materials?  Should they question patrons who request to use the materials, why do they need the information and how will it be used?  Susanne says, “At what point is it better to hide information and allow only certain people to view materials than to make that information available to the world?

The Department of Cultural Affairs and the Office of Archaeological Studies advised Susanne to stop the project or there might be legal complications including a lawsuit.  Their opinion was that certain information should not go online.  The state librarian also wanted to scrap the project to avoid problems.  At the time True Stories of Censorship Battles was published (2012) the El Palacio project was being evaluated to protect archaeological sites in accordance with the law.  Since there is no law about images and articles with information about ceremonies and burials, there will be no redactions related to issues of cultural sensitivity.

Susanne finishes by saying:

“On one hand, I love the idea of collaborating with tribal representatives to help education the public about the vibrant and varied cultures of Native Americans past and present.  I think the culture of New Mexico’s native people should be protected.  On the other hand, putting public knowledge under lock and key is not the way.  It puts us as librarians on that slippery slope toward censorship.”

Cultural Property and Censorship

How Do We Balance Cultural Property and Open Access?

The ideas behind cultural property ownership are being debated and defended between indigenous communities and the library and information world. Native communities maintain many reasons to keep their cultural, societal, and religious identities and artifacts secret. Information organizations, on the other hand, sometimes hold the opposite view and are concerned about censorship, access, and cultural preservation.

Indigenous Populations and Traditional Cultural Expressions
Many indigenous groups believe that their communities are the owners of the ideas, information, and knowledge, or traditional cultural expressions (TCEs) that are created within that community, that they have the right to control these ideas. Some sacred stories, songs and teachings lose their sacredness when they are shared outside the community, written down, or expressed to people that do not have a right to hear them, as defined by the culture. Some indigenous communities would prefer to use their religious instruments until they wear out or are destroyed, rather than share them outside their community.

Many indigenous communities depend on privacy for the successful completion of important cultural activities. Secrecy generates social hierarchy between those who know and those who don’t. A breakdown of secrecy threatens traditional patterns of political and religious life. Cultural artifacts also create a heritage and unify ethnically diverse populations. Without these symbols, it would be difficult to mobilize citizens for national defense and other collective tasks.

Open Access and Cultural Conservation
On the other hand, many groups object to the censorship or limitations that some Native communities want to impose on TCEs. Some librarians and archivists believe that limiting access to these items interferes with public rights to information. They believe that restriction is contrary to the preservation of cultural heritage, that it prevents them from completing their missions of preservation. It is a discouraging prospect for curators who dedicate their working lives to the conservation of such objects.

Recent proposals have recommended that TCEs should have perpetual copyright protection as long as they are being maintained by their indigenous communities. This proposal would extend to other traditional and cultural communities, thereby including a great body of work that has always been considered public domain, such as American folk tales, labor and civil rights songs, fairy tales, holiday customs, and religious texts such as the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita.

How Do We Draw the Line?
The library community is concerned about other groups that might seek to claim protection under provisions for TCEs. Where would the laws stop? Would Catholics, Jews, or Christians be able to make claims about artifacts and property that would keep them from public access? Would political groups; non-religious, spiritual communities; and cult organizations be able to make the same claims?

Where do we draw the line. How can we make careful and thoughtful decisions while respecting both cultural heritage and open access? Can we go down the path of of mutual respect and openness? Asking questions and talking with leaders on both sides will at least keep a respectful line of communication open. But where do we go from there?

Words of Wisdom

Words of wisdom from a long-time Language Arts teacher:


"We reviewed the banned book lists each year and had lengthy and, often, heated discussions. It was some of the most rewarding moments in my teaching experience. Never underestimate the ability of students to cut through the veiled reasoning for censorship...I found students talked openly about values, consequences. They were never put off by language. Good grief, they heard worse on television. Many felt insulted that adults felt they had to "guard" them from evil. They saw right through that. We argued and laughed and the students learned that they were as capable at reviewing books as many published reviewers."

Top 10 of 2011

Top 10 Challenged Books of 2011

The American Library Association (ALA) just released their list of the top ten most challenged books of 2011.

1)      ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

2)      The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
Nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

3)      The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
Anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence

4)      My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
Nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

5)      The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
Offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

6)      Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint

7)      Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit

8)      What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones
Nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit

9)      Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
Drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit

10)    To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
Offensive language; racism


What do you think? What books have you heard about? What books have you actually read?

Powerful Forward

In the book True Stories of Censorship Battles in America’s Libraries,  author Ellen Hopkins wrote the forward about her own encounters with censorship and her opinion about the subject.

Ellen Hopkins is a New York Times best seller for her young adult books about addiction, suicide, rape and childhood sexual abuse. Ellen receives hundreds of letters (one of which she includes as part of the forward) from readers thanking her for saying their lives. Ellen writes, “They thank me for letting them know they’re not alone, they’re not crazy, they are okay.” 

Her books have been challenged, removed from library shelves, and she has been uninvited to several speaking events. Often times the people making these decisions haven’t even read her books. They skim several pages or use Internet rating sites to determine that her books are inappropriate for young adults.  

In response to these acts of censorship, this is what Ellen had to say:

“No book is right for every reader. So fine. Don’t read my books if they offend you or you hate poetry or need a fairy-tale ending. If you don’t want your own children to read them, tell them they can’t (and see what happens). But don’t make that decision without reading them first. Don’t scan for offenses. Read in context. You might decide the messages they carry are positive, if strong. You might even find a way to open communication with your kids. Words can’t damage them. But ignorance surely can.”

Ellen has written a poem, Manifesto, which is often included as part of displays during Banned Book Week. Check out Ellen Hopkins' website.

Here is her poem, Manifesto, which she also includes as part of the forward to True Stories of Censorship Battles in America’s Libraries:

Manifesto

To you zealots and bigots and false

patriots who live in fear of discourse.

You screamers and banners and burners

who would force books

off shelves in your brand name

of greater good.

You say you’re afraid for children,

innocents ripe for corruption

by perversion or sorcery on the page.

But sticks and stones do break

bones, and ignorance is no armor.

You do not speak for me,

and will not deny my kids magic

in favor of miracles.

You say you’re afraid for America,

the red, white and blue corroded

by terrorists, socialists, the sexually

confused. But we are a vast quilt

of patchwork cultures and multi-gendered

identities. You cannot speak for those

whose ancestors braved

different seas.

You say you’re afraid for God,

the living word eroded by Muhammed

and Darwin and Magdalene.

But the omnipotent sculptor of heaven

and earth designed intelligence.

Surely you dare not speak

for the father, who opens

his arms to all.

A word to the unwise.

Torch every book.

Char every page.

Burn every word to ash.

Ideas are incombustible.

And therein lies your real fear.

--- Ellen Hopkins

Recent Book Burning Hits Close to Home

It’s been about a year since tens of thousands of books were burned in northern Arizona as part of a hate crime. Book burning, either as an act of censorship or an act of protest against a person’s belief system, is not part of the distant past. We are all often shocked at the thought of books being burned for any reason and assume that those actions are part of a dark past. Clearly we are still living in these dark times.

What can we do as a society to prevent any future book burnings from occurring?

Here is the article about the Arizona book burning from last April:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705370981/Despite-book-burning-organizers-resolve-to-create-library-for-FLDS-communities.html?pg=1

Kurt Vonnegut and Book Burning

(from Letters of Note at http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html)

In 1973 an English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. A month later, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.

 Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.

(Source: Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage; Image: Kurt Vonnegut, via Everything was Vonnegut.)


November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

Middle School Librarian Interviewed

Censorship: Views from a Middle School Librarian

As part of this activism project, we will be posting interviews with people from different disciplines. As a start to our conversations, we chose to have interviewees read and discuss the children's book And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. The goal of the interviews is to get a variety of viewpoints about censorship from both library users and non-library users. We wanted to explore what people in our community think about censorship.

*Note: We will be referring to the interviewees by their initials and will provide generic information about them in order to protect their identity and privacy. Please remember to keep all comments respectful.

The first interview was conducted with a middle school librarian, AK. After asking AK to read the book And Tango Makes Three, we discovered that the book was already in her school collection.

Here is an overview of the interview:

“If a library does not have the book And Tango Makes Three, should it be included in the collection for students to access?” 
AK believes the book should be included in the library. She believes that in order to create a diverse offering about sexual orientation and what makes up different types of families such books should be included, along with books about ethnicity. However, if a library does not have the book in the collection, she points out that it might just be because the librarian does not know about the book.

When asked about censorship in schools, this is what AK had to say:
“It’s so tricky. Unfortunately, because we are attached to schools, we are also attached to money that comes from the state and federal government and local voters. So what happens is you have to say ‘no’ sometimes because of funding. As a librarian, I would never say no because of funding.  I would just find another way to get the funding. In a public library, you could fight and people would back you but in a school, the librarian will probably be the only fighter.”

 If money was not an issue and you had unlimited, uninfluenced funds, are there any books that you would not include in the library? Do you have any limits?” 
Like a lot of issues in our society, money is an influencing factor and AK recognizes this as affecting the books she is able to include in the library.“I kind-of went by what is already here. If I had a really conservative collection, I would be a little more careful about what I put in.” The community that the library services is a big factor when choosing what books to include. AK’s library collection is pretty liberal so she feels comfortable with adding different types of books to her collection, including books that might be controversial.

Is there ever a situation that would warrant censorship?
“I think there is probably a place for it in the school libraries, specifically in the elementary schools. You can’t put Forever by Judy Blume in an elementary library. But it’s such a blurry line between what’s age appropriate. I don’t always go by what they say on the back of the book, what the publisher thinks. You have to go with your environment and if the collection is conservative then I wouldn’t add some of the books. You have to work with the pace of your community and while some radicals would think that its censorship, it’s not. It’s respecting your community and if you go with their pace, eventually they will trust you and you can start to add things.”

AK often reads the books before she includes them into the collection and if the book has any sexually explicit content, she is a bit hesitant. She does work in a public school after all. AK often looks at the collections from other libraries to help her make a decision about a book. It is clear that great thought and consideration goes into what books are included in the collection, but not because of AK’s personal viewpoints, but what is appropriate for the age of the students she is serving.

AK’s collection already has books about homosexuality, so she has felt comfortable adding books with characters that are gay. These books are getting checked out without issue. In fact, AK has not had any issues with people challenging the books in her collection.

As a librarian, AK herself has experienced censorship this year. She wanted to do a project for Banned Books Week where her students would make videos for the school website featuring their favorite banned book, like a book trailer. Students would then vote for their favorite video. At first the principal thought the idea was “awesome” and supported the project. Then central administration became involved. Central administration made it clear: no Banned Books Week. AK doesn’t think the district is against having the books on the list, they just didn't want to draw attention to the fact that they have them in the school

 It seems that censorship often times can come from the ‘higher ups’ and often times individuals, like AK, are against censorship but are forced into it from others that are higher on the food chain.

AK feels strongly about anyone objecting to something they haven’t read all the way through, or if they haven't read the reviews. It’s important that we don’t let our initial look at a book control how we view the book as a whole piece. Don’t judge a book by a single page!

The important thing for AK is having good books in her library. These books are trendy, meet the student’s needs (reading level), and meet their interest levels. AK reads a lot of the books and then can promote these books to the students. Peer reviews matter, even if a book exists that is not one of AK’s favorites she will still include them in the collection if they received a good peer review. For AK it’s all about getting kids to read good books.