By Cate Meister
This year, Banned Books Week was from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3; but what is it, and why should students care?
What is Banned Books Week?
Banned Books Week is the yearly celebration of books that have been banned or challenged.
When a book is challenged, someone has attempted to remove it from schools, libraries or other places where you might access that book. If the person succeeds, the book becomes banned.
Banned Books Week aims to bring attention to the censorship of books, especially in the context of libraries and schools, by honoring the freedom of expression and right to knowledge as it commemorates historically and currently banned books.
Schools and libraries across the nation typically celebrate Banned Books Week during the last week of September. The week-long celebration receives sponsorship and support from a variety of groups dedicated to protecting freedom of expression, ranging from the National Coalition Against Censorship to the Library of Congress. Anti-censorship organizations work together to form the Banned Books Week Coalition, which aims to raise awareness and support for banned books and authors.
Banned Books Week also receives immense support from the American Library Association (ALA), which has recorded the banning and challenging of books since 1990. The ALA has published annual lists of the top ten most challenged books each year starting in 2001 and recently released a list of the 100 most frequently banned and challenged books of the past decade.
Social media platforms have also helped shape Banned Books Week in recent years as information becomes more readily available.
The history behind Banned Books Week
Banned Books Week started as an initiative of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) in the 1980s. Judith Krug, OIF director, was inspired by a display of banned books at a trade show in Anaheim, Calif. Krug and OIF, the American Booksellers Association and the National Association of College Stores collaborated to create a new platform to recognize banned books. The joint efforts of all three groups resulted in the success of the first Banned Books Week in 1982.
From there, the Banned Books movement grew. Libraries and bookstores quickly embraced Banned Books Week, which continued to garner media attention over the past four decades.
Groups across the nation host yearly banned book events as more and more people grew aware of Banned Books Week. Nearly 2.8 billion people read about Banned Books Week through news platforms every year. The ALA continues to promote Banned Books Week with yearly events, themes and speeches from banned and challenged authors.
Banned books in HBUHSD
According to district librarian Elizabeth Taireh, no schools in the Huntington Beach Union High School District (HBUHSD) ban books.
“When you’re looking at school curriculum books, like novels that you read in schools, that’s up for challenge a little bit more because it’s required reading,” Taireh said. “You don’t always have a choice within your junior-level books, your senior-level books.”
Banned books are an integral part of the curriculum at Fountain Valley High School. Within junior English classes alone, nearly every core work has been banned or challenged at some point.
“It’s not curriculum, so it’s a little bit different. So people do complain about curricular books sometimes,” Taireh said. “In this particular area, it’s just not culture for that to happen.”
HBUHSD libraries carry a wide selection of books so that students can develop informed viewpoints. The district and its sites generally do not receive many complaints regarding the availability of books in libraries largely because of local understanding of students’ right to read.
Still, it is important that students are aware of the issue.
“Knowing that [banning books] is a problem is half of the battle,” Taireh said.
Why does Banned Books Week matter?
Books are banned and challenged for hundreds of reasons that prevent people, especially youth, from having access to valuable resources and knowledge. Any book, ranging from Judy Blume to the Bible can be banned or challenged. Picture books, comic books, graphic novels, young adult books, fiction and nonfiction all face bans and challenges every year. No book is immune.
The three most common reasons that books are banned are sexual content, explicit or derogatory language, and unsuitability for the target age group of a book.
In recent years, frequent censorship of honest portrayals of race in the United States and Black, Indigenous and people of color narratives has become common. In 2018, Angie Thomas’s “The Hate U Give” ranked fourth on the ALA’s list of most banned and challenged books, and the most banned book of the past decade is Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian.”
LGBTQ+ authors and books make up a disproportionate percentage of banned and challenged books, and many challenges cite LGBTQ+ content as a direct reason to ban a book.
In 2020 alone, eight out of ten of the most banned and challenged books featured LGBTQ+ characters or content and faced censorship because of it. Alex Gino’s “George,” a middle school grade level book that tells the story of a fourth-grade transgender girl, was the most frequently banned book of 2020.
“What’s so important is that we make sure we exercise the ability to share these materials,” Taireh said. “When you know that they’re not that offensive, you… realize that, while you can understand that it’s offensive to somebody else, you can also understand why it isn’t. And it also gives you the most informed point of view. Most people love these books.”
Books allow readers to empathize with perspectives different than their own. Banned Books Week celebrates the diversity of ideas and literature. In protecting the freedom of expression, Banned Books Week also protects the ability of young people to see themselves and people like them in the media they consume.
