You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book

Interesting that it is Slate that has this article, Banned Books Week Is a Crock by Ruth Graham.

I have been mulling on this for a long time. I posted something a couple of years ago with the numbers. In a country of some 310 million. We only have a few hundred book "challenges" in a year.

The statistics certainly sound alarming. Since Banned Books Week was instituted in 1982, the event’s website informs us, 11,300 books have been challenged. In 2014 alone, 311 books were banned or challenged in schools and libraries in the United States, with many more cases unreported. It would be easy to assume that the literal banning of books is still a routine occurrence in the United States.

But take a closer look, and there’s much less for freedom-loving readers to be concerned with. The modifier “banned or challenged” contains a lot of wiggle room, for one. A “challenge,” in the ALA’s definition, is a “formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” By that definition, Sims’ one-woman freak-out in Tennessee qualifies as a “challenge,” despite the fact that it posed no real threat to Skloot’s book, let alone the “freedom to read.”

Once upon a time, book bans were a serious issue in the United States. The Comstock Law, passed by Congress in 1873, made it illegal to circulate “obscene literature.” Even classics like The Canterbury Tales fell under that description in the eyes of Victorian moralists, and in the middle of the last century, publishers and booksellers of forbidden novels including Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill were actually prosecuted in court. But in the years since, social and legal tolerance for censorship plummeted. A 1982 Supreme Court decision, Island Trees School District v. Pico, ruled that local school boards can’t remove books from their libraries simply because they’re offended by them.

So roughly, there was one book challenged for every million citizens. I'd say 1 in a million is pretty good except that there are always people who are eager advocates for suppressing free speech. You have to watch them like a hawk.

I think Graham is a little hard on the American Library Association, who run banned book week. Yes, to a certain extent they are making much ado about nothing, on the other hand, it is worthwhile reminding people in very visible ways that we cannot take any of our civil liberties for granted, you have to be constantly vigilant.

However, there is a tool in the advocacy toolkit that I particularly despise and I am afraid that it is used with some abandon in Banned Book Week, and that is the conscious debasement of language in order to arrive at a faith-based conviction rather than to elucidate an empirical reality.

In this case, as Graham points out, it is the idea that books are being banned. They are not being banned. Federal, State, County, City - no one is allowed to ban books. It simply doesn't happen. There are no banned books in the US.

What is being proffered as banned are two different categories. One category are those books which are being challenged for appropriateness. Usually these are being challenged on two grounds, one is that the content is inappropriate for the community norms. These challenges never, as far as I am aware, succeed. The other grounds are that the book is inappropriate by age. That is a lot more nuanced and reasonable minds can disagree. These challenges are usually in the context of school. Is it appropriate for 5th graders to be reading Go Ask Alice? Perhaps, perhaps not. Often the issue is not about banning the book per se, but moving it into a more age appropriate slot.

The other category are books which schools and libraries are being pressured by parents or residents to either 1) not buy, or 2) remove from the shelves/reading list. Again, neither of these constitute banning. No government entity has an implied obligation to make all books available. There are limits to budgets and bookshelves. So what is being counted as "banned" are really often citizen engagement with the governmental process, which is actually a good thing. We may be disappointed that XYZ school district does not want to teach Huckleberry Finn because of language, but that is not a ban. It is a bad educational choice on the part of that school district.

So ALA broadens the definition of "banned" absurdly and even with that overbroad definition, they are only able to rustle up 311 instances of "banning."

From that perspective, freedom of speech in America is in unassailably good shape. But that's not the case and here's where I think ALA is missing a trick. I understand why they shy away from it but it is actually their most important risk.

Freedom of speech is under undeniable assault in our schools and universities. 55% of our universities apply speech codes which seriously infringe on freedom of speech. Though not as well quantified, there is reason to believe the situation is even worse in high schools. Some universities, demonstrating a phenomenal tone deafness, even go to the lengths of designating free speech zones. Separate from speech codes, there is the emerging problem of heckler's vetoes which more and more universities seem to allow advocacy groups to exercise as evidenced by the number of graduation speaker invitations withdrawn and the number of campus presentations which have to be shut down, moved, or contained owing to people protesting simply because someone is saying something with which they disagree.

It used to be that the threat to freedom of speech and freedom to read what you want was most manifest from the low-browed masses. Now it is the pointy-headed elite who want to ban speech, or, at least, going along with the idea for someone else to ban it (heckler's veto.) Universities and schools still want to benefit from the positive brand image of education and higher education so it is natural that no one wants to talk about this thuggish repression that is being tolerated and cultivated. But ignoring a problem does not make it go away.

See IUPUI says sorry to janitor scolded over KKK book from FIRE for an account of an instance where a university's inclination to suppress freedom of speech leads to express actions to suppress reading.

Sampson’s troubles began last year when a co-worker complained after seeing him reading a book titled ”Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan.”

The book’s cover features white-robed Klansmen and burning crosses against a backdrop of Notre Dame’s campus. It recounts a 1924 riot between Notre Dame students and the Klan in which the students from the Catholic university prevailed.

Sampson, a 58-year-old white janitor and student majoring in communication studies, said he tried to explain that the book was a historical account.

”I have an interest in American history,” Sampson said. ”I was trying to educate myself.”

But Sampson says his union official likened the book to bringing pornography to work, and the school’s affirmative action officer in November told Sampson his conduct constituted racial harassment.

”You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers,” Lillian Charleston wrote in a letter to Sampson.

That last paragraph sends shivers up the spine, calling forth the totalitarian spirit of the minor bureaucrat finding a way to lord it over someone with even less power, a spirit so ably conjured by J.K. Rowling with her despicable character Dolores Umbridge. See this video of the IUPI incident here.

What ALA, or someone else, ought to be doing is focusing on banned speech. That's where the greatest threat lies. Banned Book Week is, fortunately, a shadow of an issue, more a remembrance of past intolerance than a fight against current banning. The enemies of freedom have moved on and are now focusing on speech itself. But once they suppress speech, books can't be far behind.