Finally figured out I was banning the wrong books myself

I grew up in a small town in Ohio where my mom was on the school board and she always pushed to remove books with 'mature themes.' Last month, I was sorting through my old high school library's discard pile and found a copy of 'The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian' by Sherman Alexie. I read it in one night and realized we banned it because it talked about poverty and racism in a way that made us uncomfortable, not because of the 'bad language' we claimed. It totally flipped my view on why people push for bans. Has anyone else had a moment where they caught themselves gatekeeping a book for the wrong reason?

2 comments

2 Comments

lily_stone762d ago

Oh wow, that's a really honest realization to have. So do you think the people pushing for bans actually know they're hiding behind "protecting kids" or is it just a reflex they don't question? It seems like a lot of it is just fear of anything that doesn't fit their tidy version of the world.

diana_moore752d ago

Picked up on that same thing with a book my church group tried to ban back in high school. We claimed it was too mature for the youth group, but really it was about a kid dealing with his mom's mental illness and nobody wanted to admit that made us squirm. Once I actually read the whole thing as an adult, I saw it was just honest and raw, not inappropriate at all. It made me realize how often we use "protecting the kids" as a cover for protecting our own comfort zones.