This week, Sept. 30 through Oct. 6, is Banned Books Week, a week dedicated to raising awareness to the ongoing fight against censorship. One would think a country like the U.S., which so often defends its right to do whatever it wants to other countries, would have defeated censorship by now. But censorship is like a Marvel villain: it pops up everywhere and is impossible to kill. In 2011, the American Library Association recorded 326 challenges to library materials, including books by Kurt Vonnegut, Suzanne Collins, Stephen Chbosky and Toni Morrison. And those are only the ones in which someone cared enough to at least try to do something about it. Librarians are constantly forced to move books to “secret shelves” or inaccessible sections because of community disapproval. Here’s the thing: No one person has the right to limit my access to any book, regardless of material. The First Amendment includes my right to consume what I want to, not what a PTA mom wants me to. But not everyone agrees. Last January, Arizona implemented a state law banning all books from classrooms that were taught in Arizona’s Mexican-American studies curriculum because they were “promoting racial resentment.” (And by the way, why does Mississippi get all the bad press? Have you seen Arizona lately?) In the new law, everything from Shakespeare to state-of-the-art textbooks to Sherman Alexie was banned from the curriculum. A laundry list of books in which Mexican-American students could see themselves, abruptly gone simply because the Arizona state government was afraid of the power they could give to the underrepresented. What Arizona did was unimaginably bigoted and cruel, but it won’t stop much of the good that was coming from that curriculum. Ideas often prove impossible to quench, and banned books have a way of finding themselves in students’ possession. Accessibility of all types of ideas and books is critical to our freedom. Books can change our very foundations. They can put us in others’ shoes, show us we’re not alone, give us a new way of looking at things. Books empower us to do what we thought we could not. By their very definition, books change us. Telling us which books we can read is telling us who we can be. And I, for one, am not okay with that. Banned Books Week is traditionally celebrated by reading a banned book. Personally, I’m challenging myself to read the entire list of banned books in Arizona’s ethnic studies program. So be a rebel and pick up a banned book this week. But more importantly, stand against censorship. Our First Amendment rights are only rights so long as we protect and defend them.
