I'm not a book banner, YOU'RE the book banner! Lessons from Mississauga, Ontario (or lack thereof, in the absence of books)

 I like books, and I don't care who knows it!  I even own a t-shirt which proudly proclaims, "I read banned books," with a devil icon on it.  Yet, banned by whom?  I teach at the collegiate level, and while I have had certain Deans get, I believe the phrase is, "up in my business," about my syllabi, I have been pleasantly surprised that I have not had anyone hassle me about even highly controversial texts on my syllabi, placed there precisely because they are controversial, and because I believe in reading and discussing controversial material.  Of all the shit I have seen, that is not shit I have seen.  What do we mean by "book banning?"  The nazis had book burnings, which is not merely reserved for Beatles records.  I mean, come on, we all know their later works were better, but did you have to burn them?  Regardless, what does it mean to "ban" a book in modern, Western civilization?  Whatever it takes to call you a book-banner, but exclude me from any such epithet.

Let us consider the latest events from Mississauga, Ontario.  That would be in Canada, eh.  I will try not to append every sentence or clause, eh, with "eh," OK, eh?  So what's this all aboot?  The Peel District School Board in Mississauga decided, basically, to scrap every book published before 2008.  The result is that they pretty much emptied the libraries.  There were a variety of considerations, and within those considerations were the diversity of the authors and the inclusion of materials that focus on political identity from the 2020's perspective, meaning the 2020's views on race/gender/etc.  So Jack and Jill get unceremoniously booted from Boot Hill, along with Anne Bloody Frank, who isn't diverse enough, because Jews don't count, never having been subject to any oppression, and just being rich, white oppressors, ask any critical race theorist.  Or better yet, don't.

All this to make room for Ibram X. Kendi's anti-racist babytalk.  If I seem snarkier than usual, it is because two minutes ago, the left was saying that the right was the side emptying out libraries, pointing their pointy bits at the boogiest of boogeymen, Meatball Ron.  Now true, this particular story comes to us from Canada-Eh, but ideologically speaking, Mississauga is carrying out the mission of a movement that doesn't stop at the US-Canada-Eh border.

Eh.

A significant part of the decision, after all, is curating student access, such as it is in school libraries, based on a particular set of political views derived from an ideology that is not unique to either country.

What, then, is "book banning?"

Read any book about a totalitarian state, and possession of certain books will be an actual, literal crime.  As in, there is subversive literature, and if you buy, sell or own it, off to prison for you.  Like it was behind the Iron Curtain, for real-sies.  Or in the Third Reich.  Read about it in Anne Frank's diary.  But not in Mississauga!

We don't do that.  No, kiddie-creep-shit doesn't count, and if you participate in that, I kinda want capital punishment, at least by sending you to prison and telling the prisoners what you did.  They'll do the right thing.

But while Karl Marx wrote the wrongest and most destructive works in the history of humanity, putting the blood of Stalin and Mao on his hands, making him the worst person in all of human history, you should be able to read his works.  I have his books on my shelf.  Freedom of Motherfuckin' Speech.  Just not kiddie-diddlin' speech.

Easy to say in theory, harder to support in practice.

And hence, it is always the other side that wants to ban books.  Meatball Ron, or Missi...whatever.

What is "book-banning," when we don't actually send people to prison for buying, selling, or owning books?

We can consider pressure campaigns on retailers in order to stop them from selling books.  Where does this occur?  It is mostly the left that does this, and mostly the trans activists.  The highest profile examples were attempts to keep retailers like Amazon and Target from selling books by Abigail Shrier and Debra Soh.  That, however, is not where most of the political debate is right now.  Mostly, the political debate is over school curricula and what gets stocked in libraries.

Mississauga wants to "ban" everything from before 2008.  Conservatives want to "ban" books like Gender Queer.  Note the quotes.  They are doing a lot of the work.

Can we consider either to be a ban, in any real sense?  Compared to what happens in an actual, totalitarian state?

Or is it just an organ (uh... uh huh huh huh) of the state making a policy decision about what the state deems to be official curriculum?

Consider Gender Queer.  The book includes explicit discussion and explicit, graphic images of sex.  The book is available in school libraries.  When conservatives challenge the LGBTQ activists who demand its inclusion in school curricula and libraries, the retort almost invariably includes the observation that the book itself, along with similar and higher levels of graphic content are easily available elsewhere.  Like this place called "the interwebs."

Yet if that is true, which it is, then its removal from a school library is hardly a ban, and symmetrically, when Mississauga removes everything from before 2008, these books too are available elsewhere.

Ban my ass.

I think I meant to put a comma in there.  See, kids?  Punctuation matters, and reading is about my fundament.

Where was I?  Oh, right.

Is it a "ban" if the kids can get whatever reading materials they want-- stop laughing!-- on the intertubes?

Least effective ban ever, either by Meatball Ron or the wokies who think natural hair color will get your ass up against the wall when the revolution comes.

We all want to change the world...

Ban?  My ass.  (That's better.)

Does that mean the school libraries in Florida or One-Mississ-fuckit are right?  Wrong?

In either case, neither.

Schools have finite space in libraries and finite time.  As organs [uh... uh huh huh huh huh] of the state making constrained choices, the constraint is the choice, not as a ban, but as a choice of a limited subset to advance.

That's just a policy question.  What are the right criteria for that policy decision?

Each side has a cultural agenda.  The left is advancing the agenda of queer theory.  The right is advancing a kind of cultural conservatism intertwined with literary conservatism and canon.

In any realistic sense of the word, "ban," neither is "banning" books in this context.  I write that as the closest thing to a free speech absolutist you are likely to find.

This is about curriculum design.  That's it.  We are debating curriculum design.  What is appropriate, and what is educationally best suited for kids.  That's it.

Can kids get creepy, vile shit on the internet?  Yes.  They can get damn-near anything.  So nothing is "banned."  You can't ban anything unless you go the way of China or even more repressive states.

There are important discussions to be had about the operation of social media platforms, de-platforming, and some real issues of speech at a conceptual and legal level in the US right now.

But let's understand that this isn't about banning books.  The left isn't banning books just because they won't put Matt Walsh's kids book in their library, and the right isn't banning books because they don't want Gender Queer in libraries.  This is about curriculum.  Approach the question as what it is.

And of course, if they had told me when I was a kid that a book was "banned," and I had the capacity to find it on the internet, I damned-sure would have done so, read it, and probably put up commentary in some form.

Yeah, like there are kids out there saying, "whoa is me, I so want to read a book, but it is not in my school library!  I cannot read, because this has been hidden from me in a world of secrets!  Whoa unto me behind my blindfold, won't someone remove my blindfold so that I may read!"

Yeah, that's not happening.  Call it a banner year for bullshit.  [Ducks flying, rotten fruit.]

Sons of Kemet, "The Book of Disquiet," from Burn.