It had its own list of banned books that it wouldn't accept, The Turner Diaries and stuff like that.
The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
Yes, but that was already a given, and is the entire topic of this thread. Librarians in many cases became involved in the struggle for access to information even if "the community" didn't agree. I was raised in an extremely backwards, religiously zealous, racist, totalitarian-supporting Deep South state and never once have I thought, "I better do what the community thinks".
> The real banned books are the ones that don't even show up at a sanctioned "banned book week." That list of books is long.
Pat yourself on the back, you've discovered that librarians have to make compromises in order to continually push the envelope and not undo all of the progress that has been made. This is called politics.
Just because they're a-okay now doesn't mean they weren't once controversial. It doesn't take a genius to deduce that something like To Kill a Mockingbird was probably wildly controversial before integration.
In TKAM's particular case, a lot of the complaints came from across the spectrum because of the use of racial slurs, so it was often not even controversial for the reason you might think. Frankly the book is not even good outside of its propaganda value for fighting racism. At any rate, even then it wasn't meaningfully a "banned book", even in the south.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/to-kill-a-mockingbird...
Sometimes "banned" is a complete misnomer, as when back in 2017 it was simply removed from the required reading list in one Mississippi school district because people complained about reading racial slurs out loud. But the reporting, as you can see from Google, almost all says "banned."
Reading racial slurs and understanding how the character felt and feeling bad about it is the entire point. If your only exposure is casual racism on the worst parts of the internet then you just normalize that way of thinking.
> The Mukilteo School Board voted unanimously to remove the book from the required reading list on Monday evening, The Everett Herald reported.
> Michael Simmons, the board's president and an African American, told Newsweek that he and other board members made their decision after "seriously considering" the information provided
You can find story after story like this. I don’t think people like Michael Simmons are secretly for racism. I think your mental model may need adjustment.
The biggest thing is probably that in 2025 there are a lot of people who are genuinely not comfortable with anyone reading certain racial slurs, even when though they’re quoting. A lot of style guides and editorial policies also reflect this. The second most common complaint is probably that it is an example of “white savior” literature.
You and I can agree this is silly if you like, but the model of TKAM censorship as usually told is just false in every direction - almost never “banned” and almost never complained about for the reasons people assume.
Unironically is Justine by Marquis de Sade that much different?
And Lolita is a tragedy, a story about flawed characters. Supporting access to the novel and supporting child abuse are two wildly orthogonal stances.
Teaching Lolita is child abuse because for anyone who actually went through that experience, they have to not only relive it, but see a quasi justification for it through the fact that this book is considered “great”.
It’s just like that movie hard candy. It’s all pedophilic and shouldn’t be taught.
As I have already stated elsewhere in this thread, this is in argument about restriction, not compulsion. You can not make something compulsory while also not restricting access to it.
The downvotes on my original post are gaslighters who want to act like the education system is what it should be. It isn’t.