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> Irregular bans are ideologically driven. > They are supplemental to and fall outside of the standard book exclusion process at schools and libraries. Standar
by xyzzyz 3y ago
> Irregular bans are ideologically driven.
> They are supplemental to and fall outside of the standard book exclusion process at schools and libraries. Standard exclusions prevent books that promote violent, hateful, or mature/17+” topics from being placed on school bookshelves while irregular bans do not have robust processes and can be influenced by interest groups or local officials.
Seems like when the book is removed from library using an opaque, bureaucratic process, it’s called “standard exclusion”, and when it is removed using different, more public and democratic process, it’s called “banning”. Otherwise, there is no difference in the actual outcome: whether it is “standard exclusion” or “banning”, the end result is simply that book is removed from library (or prevented from being added) all the same.
Therefore, I agree that the “bans” are “ideologically driven”, because the reason this democratic process of excluding books from libraries is called “banning” is indeed very much ideological.
This might also be useful to non-Americans, who aren’t necessarily intimately familiar with US politics and language games: no book have actually been banned in US in the standard meaning of this word. Every single book on the banned list is completely legal and typically easy to obtain and possess. Even in the schools where these “banned” books were removed from libraries, I believe that the students are entirely free to possess and read these “banned” books: I never heard of schools actually treating these books as contraband. This whole “banning” narrative is simply describing removal of books from libraries through democratic instead of bureaucratic process, and the choice of the word is meant to invoke mental connotations of some sort of authoritarian/totalitarian state.
- fwjlwo 3y ago[dead]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> whole “banning” narrative is simply describing removal of books from libraries through democratic instead of bureaucratic process Put another way, through a political versus administrative process. That's rightfully problematic. It's not a ban, but we purposely ring-fence libraries from politics.
- xyzzyz 3y agoI do not believe there is any sort of “ring fence” between schools and politics. The entire point of public school boards and elections thereto is to enable voters to exercise the political control over the branch of government that is providing public educational service. If your argument indeed is that the public schools should be fully and wholly independently ran by nonelected bureaucrats entirely as they please, with no input from voters whatsoever, while being publicly funded, then well, let me just say that I am adamantly opposed to that, and so is most everyone else. You cannot just claim that “we ring fence schools from politics” and expect people to acquiesce to relinquishing control of the public service they fund and make use of.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> point of public school boards and elections thereto is to enable voters to exercise the political control over the branch of government that is providing public education Fair enough. Perhaps the answer is school libraries are Constitutionally problematic–we can call them book bazaars and acknowledge that minors under state custody do not have the right to a library. Politicians removing books from libraries is a clear boundary. These aren't books being put in front of students as part of their curriculum. They aren't even in classrooms. They're in a library, and when we normalize plucking books from school libraries we normalize doing that at public libraries, where there are also nutters levying the same arguments to get books pulled.
- xyzzyz 3y agoI don’t think that non-school public (ie. government-ran) libraries here are any different from legal perspective: since I am funding my local public library, and since the library has a limited budget, I expect to have a say as a voter as to what books I want it to stock and take space on shelves. For example, I am very much opposed to it stocking books in foreign languages, because few people even can read these, and so I don’t consider it an effective use of public resources. This is no different than, say, having a say (through elected representatives) in where I want public infrastructure resources to be spent on. Point is, voters have every right to direct the government to buy or throw away any books from public libraries as they please. Having the legal argument out of the way, I think that there is very little interest in political action directed to remove books from non-school public libraries. People who can get their books from there, can also just buy them on Amazon, and these certainly are not and will not be banned by any sort of government in the United States. Thus, it would be pointless and ineffectual to exercise political power here. In any case, it is extremely hard for me to not be angry at activists, who, through language games, are trying to confuse people into supporting their goal, which is to force the people to buy and make easily available to children certain books that the people very much do not want to buy and make easily available to children.