I appreciated the March 31 Herald article about the Office of Diversity and Inclusion-hosted conversation featuring Edwidge Danticat MFA‘93 and Lauren Groff, two authors I admire and whose conversation on “Banned Books and Troublesome Texts” I was sorry to have missed. When Danticat’s lovely book, “Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation,” was removed from a Connecticut school library following a parent’s complaint, she said, she felt both pride and alarm. I can understand both of those emotions. But I disagree that what that school did was “banning” the book, and I think misusing this word is a mistake we need to avoid.
I don’t sympathize with those who want to remove books they don’t like from schools, especially books that offer valuable, sometimes life-saving stories to immigrants, transgender or gender-questioning kids and others who need them. However, all libraries are curated, and books are added, removed or replaced. A central controversy around what we call book bans in public schools is whether the curators should be educators and librarians, or opinionated outsiders, such as right-wing parents. I support the educators, but in a democratic public school system, parents should also have a say in school decisions.
When they get pulled from the school library, Danticat’s and other “banned” books are still on the shelves of many public libraries; if your local library doesn’t have it, you can usually get it through interlibrary loan, often at the click of a mouse; and you can always find it on Amazon. There are countries where you can go to jail for writing, selling or owning a banned book. Describing school library removals as book bans trivializes the real thing.
In our current political landscape, we still have the freedom to read and write unpopular books. While post-liberals, including our country’s president and vice president, would like to change that, calling a school library’s bad curation choice a book ban doesn’t help defend liberal freedoms. On the contrary, it will make it harder to register the worsening reality if and when our government descends into true authoritarianism.
Jeremy Mumford is an associate professor of history. He can be reached at jeremy_mumford@brown.edu. Please send responses to this letter to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
