When I was a sophomore in high school, one of the books we were supposed to read for English Lit class was, of course, Of Mice and Men.  We had chugged (at a high school class pace) through several chapters before we were ordered to return every copy dog-eared paperback copy, borrowed from the school library, to the teacher.  Without any explanation from the faculty, the books were then completely removed from the library, never to be seen again.  We couldn’t finish reading the novel if we wanted to, at least, not on the school’s dime.  A few students voiced their happiness over this on the day the books were taken from us.  That’s when a certain boy spoke up, proud to finally be able to admit to us all that he’d complained about having to read the book to his mother, who had taken a look through it and decided it was inappropriate for a high school sophomore.  She had then spoken up at a school board meeting, and the books were ordered to be banned forever from the high school library.  The boy all but beat his chest in satisfaction as he owned up to the fact that it had been his doing that had freed us from Steinbeck’s tyranny.

I think I’ll remember that day for a long, long time, because an amazing thing happened, right there in my run-down, small minded, Southern Illinois high school classroom.  There actually began a quite lengthy and heated discussion about the censorship that was going on in our school.  I remember being surprised that my classmates had been enjoying Steinbeck, and then sad that we’d had to get rid of the one thing I was able to relate to in that class, one of the only things I, a nerdy, journal-obsessed teenager, could speak to confidently.  They surprised me that day when they spoke up, and I think it’s safe to say that the teacher was surprised when a few of them actually jumped out of the first-floor classroom window and vowed to stand in the courtyard for the rest of the school day unless the book was returned.  (Expulsion was threatened, and everyone came back inside and got detention, but hey...Something Happened, which was kind of a big deal at our school.)

Book banning is something that is now a gigantic issue with me.  People don’t often think of all of the ways and means there are to banning books.  For instance, I searched all over a Borders bookstore once for a Dorothy Allison novel I needed for a class.  I couldn’t find the title anywhere, but I had been told it was definitely in stock.  So I used the store’s computer location system to find out where it was shelved, and discovered it under “Lesbian & Gay” titles.  It seems that, in chain bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble, books are sometimes shelved based on the author’s lifestyle, regardless of whether the book is fiction or a self-help guide.  I did a little research on this, and found that most people who raise a stink over a book in libraries are all for this type of system.  A lot of the time, it’s not about making the book completely unavailable, but about making the book unavailable to children.  I’m pretty thrilled when libraries refuse to change the age-old archiving system and continue to shelve books where they should be shelved, but damn, I still get irritated when they have to continually deal with that issue.

While towering literary masterpieces are the most well known of the banned books of the past (S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye), a majority of the books that have come under fire in recent years are those intended for children.  Harry Potter titles can’t be found in a lot of school libraries and children’s sections across the country, the reason being that the series is “too dark” and deals with witchcraft.  This is the kind of thing we see on the news.  However, did you know that The Diary of Anne Frank is banned from many school libraries because Anne Frank didn’t survive the Holocaust?  Did you know that Judy Blume’s classic Blubber is hard to find because the mean girls aren’t punished in the end?  And Shel Silverstein’s poetry collection A Light in the Attic is often banned because of an illustration of children breaking plates so they don’t have to wash them.  This, many fear, would incite a riot among dish-washing children everywhere, and therefore is not safe literature for our libraries.

That’s where As If! comes in.  The acronym stands for Authors Support Intellectual Freedom.  They’re a relatively new organization that champions the first amendment right for minors.  Their blog is chock full of cases of censorship involving minors that are going on in this country as we speak.  If a book is being yanked from a small town school library, As If! knows about it.  They provide the full story, as well as any links you may need in order to get involved.  Keep an eye out.  It could happen in your kid’s school.

I’m glad the school librarian turned a blind eye when I was in school.  I’m not sure where I’d be without Judy Blume.