Category Archives: Censorship

Banned Books 101: Teaching Toddlers, Preschoolers, and Early Elementary Grades about the Right to Read

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Back in the trenches this week to review some recent picture books introducing younger readers to the concept of censorship.  Liberal values and a clever concept will get the project off and running, but good intentions may not be enough to avoid the potholes, such as explaining why it can happen, what is at stake, and how it might affect them.

All these ideas are great topics. but probably not age appropriate in a  board book modeled on the Baby Lit series.  “In this colorful celebration of groundbreaking books that have appeared on ‘banned’ book lists, little readers get a glimpse into the books’ important themes,” gurgles the blurb.  In Baby’s First Book of Banned Books, the little rebel-in-the-making is supposed to engaged with the six- to seven- word restatements of the book’s themes illustrationed by Laura Korzon. “ I have gifts that are special” sums up Lois Lowry’s chapter book The Giver (1993) versus “My friends can help when I’m sad or scared” for YA novel Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wall Flower  (1999).  Compare with “We’re not so different you and me” for Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner (2003) and “I am beautiful” for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970).  The glossary provides parents with scripts and talking points so that they can deftly avoid telling their preliterate children all about the subjects that got the books banned in the first place such as rape, heavy recreational drug use, trauma, mental illness, and the oppression of minorities.  Hopelessly idealistic? Tone deaf? Or cynical?

In 2018, Raj Haldar, aka Philadelphia rapper Lushlife, hit the jackpot as the coauthor of  P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Ever, showing why it’s easier to learn to read than spell in English.  With 26 letters, 45 sounds and over 250 ways to put them together, there are too many choices and too many rules.   An exasperating subject that lends itself to humor, but is the same true for book banning?

Haldar and illustrator Julia Patton in This Book is Banned (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks eXplore, 2023) fool around with a silly narrator and cook up squirrelly reasons for chopping things out of a book.  The cover, end papers, and title page warn the reader to keep it closed up tight. The narrator, when confronted with the prospective disobedient reader, says go ahead, turn the page and see how easy it is to cancel any subject—giraffes, dinosaurs, avocados and beds without monsters underneath.  For example, no can have the story of the Big Bad Wolf because somebody–not  you, dear  reader– was scared and so the big hairy beast was changed into a sweetie pie.  The last page announces that “we banned everything and there’s no ending left to read.”  The way Haldar and Patton break the fourth wall makes for a couple of fun read alouds,  but it won’t be much of a resource if as the adult who has to explain why book banners are turning up the pressure on the school librarian.  The presence of giraffes and avocados in children’s books aren’t as likely to be on the school board’s agenda as sex and drugs.

In The Great Banned-Books Bake Sale, Aya Khalil tries to make an attempt to ban books in an elementary school library real for children that age.  The protagonist is Kanzi, the Egyptian immigrant girl in Khalil’s first book The Arabic Quilt (2020). Kanzi and her class go to the library where they are told the diverse books have been removed on the order of the school board over the objection of the school librarian who acquired them. The children don’t understand what could possibly be wrong with the beautiful books they like because they show “people of many identities, backgrounds, and walks of life.”  The principal and librarian urge them to fight for their right to read and the children hit on the idea to hold a bake sale of goodies mentioned in banned books within a few days.  The proceeds will go towards the purchase of replacement copies of books about families like theirs.  When the treats have been sold, the TV cameras arrive in time to film the peaceful demonstration urging the reversal of the ban. Kanzi finds the courage to read aloud her poem “Books are for everyone.  Am I not important?  Am I invisible?”   The school board backs down a week later and the diverse books are reinstated in the classroom.

An Arab Muslim-American mother, Khalil strongly advocates that black, brown, Asian, Native American, and immigrant (but not LGBTQUIA) children have access to “affirming, inclusive books” in this optimistic story where the characters agree wholeheartedly on what is right (and puffs Khalil’s Arabic Quilt in several places).  Without the opposition coming on stage to voice alternative values, the nature of social conflict and resolution was presented standing up for a set of beliefs without having discussions and negotiations with those holding alternative views. Khalil and her illustrator Anait Semirdzhyan chose in The Great Banned-Books Bake Sale to light the spark of democratic participation by showing the children triumphing over authority on the first try.  Their goal in writing this story was a worthy one, but it underscores why 32-page picture books may not be the best vehicles for explanations of political processes.

There is nothing sunny or optimistic about the treatment of censorship in Banned Book by Jonah Winter, a noted author of non-fiction picture books.    Few of the Amazon reviewers disliked the book, saying it was relevant and important because of its subject.  Winter’s text is redacted : words, phrases, and sentences have been blacked out supposedly to protect the reader from dangerous content. Almost everyone with a comment about the graphic design seemed to agree that as an visualization of the process of censorship, it was better suited for older children, who probably still would have difficult questions with an adult.

The selective blacking-out  of the text  creates intriguing patterns on the page without interrupting the flow of meaning because no text was actually been excised, as is quite clear on the last two pages.  In spite of the black lozenges marching across line after line, the message is unequivocal: “they claim that they only want to protect children when what they really want is power over everyone, because they don’t believe other people have the right to think for themselves.  What had been a book was not just garbage decomposing, turning into dirt.”   Would the same exercise driven the same point home more forcefully to young readers if the text had been a familiar fairy tale like “Cinderella” or “Red Riding Hood” where they could have puzzled out the missing bits of text and explain how their absence affected them?

Illustrator Gary Kelley’s grainy pictures are dominated by shades of blue-gray, slate blue, and grayish lavender, with occasional highlights of tans and pale oranges.  The palette is perhaps meant to communicate the idea that the battle has already been lost in the classroom and school library.  On the first page, a boy furtively looks into a book, as if he expects to be caught and a few pages later is a staring eye peering at a page through a magnifying glass looking for objectionable material.   Children sit mute in class, books open, their hands raised to answer a question to which there is only one answer. Hot red appears only in the two illustrations of the book banners and the devils on the cover.  The association of  the book banners with red sends mixed signals,  its contemporary associations with MAGA clashing with older left-wing ones such as Socialism and Communism.  Of this dystopian picture book, the one Amazon reviewer to give the book one star said, “A bit too stylized and dark for me. As for the text—I’m all for guiding kids to appropriate books and helping them process the difficult ones, but this book (as much as I was able to stomach) came across as bitter, didactic, and self-righteous.”

No denying how wonderful it is that Haldar, Khalil, and Winter all elevate librarians for standing up for children’s right to read in the face of challenges by administrators, parents, and outside organizations, even if  they perpetuated a tired old visual stereotype… From the perspective of a professional with the luxury of buying books capturing the contemporary moment for future readers to study, it is hard to gauge if they can be effective teaching tools with the support of a thoughtful adult or if their presence on the shelves will be more successful in pouring oil on the fire in the struggle for control over curriculum and supporting resources.

Cultural Skirmishes about Banned Books and Classics

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When my mother hinted that the books in the children’s section were too easy for me, it was time to find something in the adult section of the Manhattan Beach Public Library.  The authors’ names on the spines were unfamiliar, but “Wodehouse” on a top shelf looked interesting and I pulled down one of the misadventures of Bertie Wooster, complete with gaspers, cocktails, and morning-after cures.  I was allowed to check it out without incident. The next time I presented a book from the adult section to the checkout desk, Mrs. Brown was the supervisor and refused to let me have it until she cleared it with my mother, who coolly confirmed I had her permission. Mrs. Brown did not approve.  Now their  one-on-one confrontation over my reading selections sounds so quaint.

I am pretty sure that Mrs. Brown never had to implement a policy like the one now in effect at the Hamilton East Public Library in Indianapolis, where parents can ask that YA books they find sexually explicit be relocated in the adult section.   In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Lee looked at this “culture-war skirmish” in connection with the beloved Indianapolis writer John Green.  His acclaimed YA novels  Looking for Alaska and The Fault Is in Our Stars have been targeted for depicting teenagers struggling with class conflict, dysfunctional families, terminal illness, and chronic depression, who also chain-smoke, experiment with sex, binge-drink, and drive.  Green denounced  the move as “political theater of the lowest and most embarrassing order.”

Lee weighed in by comparing Green’s work with Penrod, the classic novel of Hoosier boyhood by Booth Tarkington.   Lee suggested that Penrod’s boyhood at the turn of the twentieth century was unmarked by any trauma more devastating than attendance at cotillions.  “He knew what bathroom to use, quips Lee, before continuing with:

Yes, some young people today are in terrible situations.  But it seems profoundly pessimistic—and ideologically loaded—to think most kids don’t live lives much like Penrod’s and worse, that they lack parents who are eager and competent to help when trouble comes.

Lee’s glib suggestions that yesterday’s classics still reflect the realities of young people’s lives did readers a disservice.  Yes, the characters in Penrod didn’t hook up, enjoy recreational chemicals in excess, or experience gender dysporia so superficially the novel looks more wholesome than Green’s Looking for Alaska.  Actually Penrod, a white middle-class eleven-year-old during the 1900s had something important in common with Green’s characters.  He was also left unsupervised to an extent unimaginable today and had no difficulty getting into serious trouble and with that freedom, he acted on ideas that made his mother worry that he was headed for the  penitentiary.   Certain families forbade their sons to associate with him. Adult tongues might wag at the Schofields’ inability to rein him in, but kids his age obviously took vicarious pleasure in his antics.  He could talk back to the teacher and manage temporarily to elude punishment with the claim he was exhausted from comforting his distraught aunt, staying with the Schofields to escape her drunken, abusive husband.  The tall tale was inspired by the silent film Penrod watched when he was supposed to be in Sunday school.

The cotillion episode, which Lee considered inoffensive, is a typical caper where Penrod acts on impulse for purely selfish reasons.  The day of the cotillion he discovers a basket of expired medicines, dentifrices, hair oil, condiments gone off, etc.put out in the stable to be hauled away with the trash.  After he and his friend Sam set up a drug store to fill prescriptions, pharmacist Sam mixes up some “small pox medicine” with the contents of the basket and part of a bottle of licorice water to make it look palatable.  Tester dog Duke can’t keep it down and the boys dream of administering a dose to Professor Bartlett, so the cotillion would be cancelled due to poisoning.  Instead their frenemy Maurice Levy saunters by (Maurice’s family is wealthier than either Sam or Penrod’s and the last name suggests that he is Jewish.)  Penrod decides on a desperate measure to take out Maurice, so he can squire the adored Marjorie Jones at the cotillion.  He will graciously transfer his partner Baby Rennsdale to Sam, whose fair lady has had to send regrets due to illness in the family.  Maurice is invited to drink as much licorice water as he can in one pull and the bottle of small pox medicine is substituted for the real one when he isn’t looking.   Maurice takes a deep breath and glugs it all down.  After a leisurely smoke, he heads home without exhibiting any ill effects to change for the dance.

Tarkington says nothing about how Penrod’s reputation was affected by his friendship with the Black brothers, Herman and Verman, who live in the nearby alley.  What strikes us now are the ambiguities of the power dynamics between the white boy and two “darkies.”  Verman suffers from ankyloglossia and his words have to be translated by his older brother Herman.  Herman is missing a forefinger, because his little brother chopped it off with an axe when told to as a joke. The boys’ father is in jail term for stabbing a man with a pitchfork.  Penrod finds Herman and Verman so fascinating that he immediately suggests to Sam the brothers could be the star attractions of a show to which the impresarios will charge admission.

Equally troubling  is the Rupe Collins episode.  An older white boy from the wrong side of town comes around to play, which means he bullies and tortures Penrod and Sam.  Verman whacks Rupe with a board to make him stop and gets called the N-word.  Herman tells Rupe to lay off his brothers and his friends, setting off a terrific fight, in which the rules of fair play are suspended, while Penrod and Sam watch on the sidelines. Verman opens hostilities by striking Rupe with a rake because in “his simple, direct, African way, he wished to kill his enemy…and to kill him as soon as possible.”  The brawl comes to an end when Herman grabs a scythe and threatens to cut out Rupe’s gizzard and eat it.  It was probably trash talk, but Penrod and Sam are too shaken by the brothers’ “unctuous merriment” after their victory to say thank you.

Daniel Lee’s pronouncement that Tarkington’s Penrod is a book written back in the good old days when children were still children sounds as if he relied on a Wikipedia plot summary instead of reading it.  Classic books should have a place alongside contemporary problem YA novels, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are a retreat into nostalgia, especially ones like Penrod, which belong to the all-American genre of novels about bad boys.  Growing up I reread Penrod multiple times and nobody tried to fool me into it was an anodyne story.  My mother assumed I was more than capable of realizing that emulating the boys (or girly girly Marjorie) would be ridiculous because Tarkington’s Indiana was a different time and place.

Looking at Penrod now made me wonder if critics took down Tarkington for crossing a line in the scenes between the white and black boys…  Were they transgressive by the standards then?  Were some children made uncomfortable or angry reading about them?  Now the lines are drawn in the sand at different places. George M. Johnson’s manifesto-memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue is notorious as an account of a young Black’s search for a meaningful, fulfilled life as a gay man.  What the book’s critics  are quick to point out that it includes a chapter about Johnson’s coming of age sexually, they neglect to note that the memoir is also a  loving tribute to the Black family that had his back while he was growing up painfully conscious of being different and unsure where he belonged.  (Penrod certainly doesn’t express comparable feelings about his long-suffering mother and sister.)  All Boys is worth reading just for the portrait of his Nana, with whom he was very close, or his memories of jumping Double Dutch with the girls, to mention just two passages. How many would-be censors and commentators actually take the time to read carefully the books they write about instead of cherry-picking from the contents?  One problematic passage shouldn’t be enough to damn a book: all authors deserve a chance to make their case with readers.  Regardless of when a book was written, it is probably more complex (and mixed) than its reputation: when a cultural commentator brings books front and center of cultural skirmishes, he or she owes the author and readers a considered opinion, not glib characterizations.