Remix clone Hacker News

> I thought it was clear that the point is that "banned book week" is not about exposing people to fringe materials. It's about exposing people to the things that the librarian/teacher approve of but the community doesn't/didn't agree.

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.

▲

pclmulqdq 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The whole idea that "banned book week" is a time when students learn to think for themselves is silly, then. It's merely a time when one authority figure who doesn't like another authority figure grabs the reigns. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

▲

tbrownaw 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Get exposed to enough different authority figures' different favored ideas and there might not be that much left that you haven't been exposed to yet.

	▲	pclmulqdq 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is a good point, but in US public schools, you only get two. The librarians and teachers are pretty much a monoculture.

▲

soulofmischief 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That a cool opinion, but my own experience completely invalidates it. I always looked forward to banned book week as a chance to expand my horizons, and generally sought out texts that I felt the State and its supporters would rather me not have.

▲

Amezarak 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I've yet to see a "banned book" week display that wasn't almost entirely books that were required reading in high school.

▲

const_cast 7 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of those books were actually banned.

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.

▲

Amezarak 7 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of those books received a complaint by some parents or were maybe even possibly removed from a school library in one of the thousands of schools in the US. That's what they mean by "banned." It's just a way to market approved books to kids who have to read them anyway as if they were edgy.

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."

▲

Larrikin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you want to ban a book that deals with racism in a meaningful way because you are actually for the racism, this is the argument you would make in public.

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.

	▲	Amezarak 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://www.newsweek.com/schools-drop-kill-mockingbird-requi... > 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.

▲

treis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I will fight anyone that says To Kill A Mockingbird isn't good.