This past week was the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week — the one week a year when librarians, authors, teachers and citizens band together to raise awareness about the attempts to censor books in schools and libraries across the country during the last year. The week is designed to foster a dialogue about banned and challenged books and to give the people who stand against censorship a larger community to rely on. Books on this year’s ALA list of banned books include everything from “The Kite Runner” to “Beloved” to “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
  Perhaps the most recent and ironic instance of censorship in America occurred in North Carolina when Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” was banned from school libraries in Randolph County after a parent brought it before the school board with complaints that the language and subject matter were too mature for high school juniors. After garnering national attention, the school board decided to revisit the issue Wednesday but not before school board members, who had been required to read the book, had said it was “a hard read” and lacked “literary value.”  While I’ll give the board chair the fact that Ellison’s novel about being black in twentieth century America is, indeed, difficult to read — both because of its literary mechanisms and its frank approach to racism, — it’s hard for me to think of a book with more value as a work of literature than “Invisible Man.” The fact that a book about ignoring the state of race in America can be silenced fifty years later is far more obscene than Ellison’s use of language in the novel.
  Another recent and highly-publicized book banning happened last month in Minnesota when two parents launched a campaign against Rainbow Rowell’s “Eleanor and Park.” I’m going to be up front with you. I read “Eleanor and Park” on a plane back to Starkville last spring break after reading John Green’s review of it in the New York Times, and I haven’t stopped talking about it since. I love this book, and I don’t think it deserves to be called obscene for using the language that young people use daily within its pages. I don’t think the few short references to sex in it deserve to be called pornography. But my book crush is not why this particular banning is so exceptional to me. It’s the fact that, in this case, not only did parents successfully censor “Eleanor and Park” from students, they also canceled a visit by its author to the local high school. The opportunity to have a published author, much less one as acclaimed as Rowell, speak to young readers doesn’t happen very often. I can only imagine the disappointment felt by the students who were required to participate in the summer reading program to attend when that opportunity was taken away.  Being able to interact with Rowell and ask her questions is the type of thing that could change a life, inspiring a writing or publishing career or simply give a face to the woman who wrote a character who gives hope to the hopeless. But we will never know the impact that visit could have had.
  Here’s the thing about censorship: it’s always begun by a select few, but it affects an entire community of people who are not allowed to have a say in the matter. And the people it hurts the most are the very people who are already marginalized enough by society: those of low socioeconomic status who can’t afford to buy the book if their library bans it, minorities who are denied access to books like “Invisible Man” that expose the challenges they face, survivors of the “harsh realities” often cited as a reason to ban books who may never know the characters who have been through the same difficulties. The real world is hard, and books can educate young readers about what people are doing to combat that difficulty or provide a comfort in the form of characters and settings that let readers know they are not alone — but not if we allow a select few loud citizens to take them away.
   If you hear about a challenged or banned book in your community, report it to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom to get support from an entire network of people who work to target censorship. And in the meantime, support your local school and public library systems. You’ll never know what a difference you could make.