What do the book banners and burners fear? – The Virginian-Pilot

There are some things try to be asking your self proper about now.

That means you college students who discover yourselves residing in locations the place self-appointed guardians of public morality have been busily banning books. This contains Texas, the place Gov. Greg Abbott needs to jail librarians who enable college students entry to novels he deems “pornographic.” And Tennessee, the place a preacher in suburban Nashville held an honest-to-Goebbels ebook burning to destroy such harmful texts as “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and techniques.”

It contains Pennsylvania, the place one college district now requires a residents panel to log off on each ebook college librarians buy, and Arizona, the place faculties are required to publish an inventory of all newly bought library supplies. And naturally, it contains Florida, the place Palm Seaside County lecturers have been ordered to evaluate books of their classroom libraries with an eye fixed towards purging references to racism, sexism and different methods of oppression, below a brand new state legislation proscribing the educating of these topics.

Not by the way, this — Sept. 18 to 24 — is the fortieth annual commentary of Banned Books Week. It comes at what Publishers Weekly has dubbed a time of “new urgency” within the wrestle over mental freedom. Final 12 months, it studies, the American Library Affiliation tracked 1,597 particular person books challenged or faraway from public libraries, faculties and universities, essentially the most within the 20 years it has been conserving tabs.

So, sure, it’s best to ask your self a couple of issues.

Ask your self: What’s it these persons are making an attempt to maintain you from understanding or feeling? What do they suppose goes to occur if a ebook challenges you, confuses you, validates you or simply evokes you to see one thing from one other viewpoint? Why are they so scared that you simply would possibly suppose in another way?

Ask your self: Why is it that most of the books being challenged or banned are by folks of coloration or LGBTQ authors or have themes of race or sexuality? What do the ebook banners and burners worry out of your being uncovered to such issues? Is it that you simply would possibly begin asking questions that make them uncomfortable? In that case, isn’t that their downside — not yours?

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Ask your self: Why is it so most of the individuals who wish to ban books from faculties are the identical ones who don’t have any downside letting weapons in? They’re terrified {that a} ebook will put an thought in your head; why aren’t they terrified {that a} gun will put a bullet there?

Ask your self: Are you some fragile factor, some piece of human glass who wants the sharp edges and laborious surfaces of recent concepts bubble-wrapped so that you simply don’t shatter towards them? Or are you not sensible and succesful sufficient to deal with your self?

Ask your self: What’s the distinction between banning books in Iran, Russia, Cuba and different dictatorships, and doing it right here? Is it that we’re imagined to be those who know higher?

In any case, that is nonetheless — purportedly — a free nation. However that freedom is below siege, as vividly attested by new legal guidelines that muzzle lecturers, by the ransacking of ladies’s rights below the supremely illegitimate Courtroom, by schemes that maintain folks of coloration from voting, by the assault on the U.S. Capitol. And if voting and protesting are acts of resistance, this week affirms that merely studying a ebook is, too. The truth is, one may argue that every of us has a patriotic responsibility to make a ebook banner mad.

As a result of right here’s the factor: In case you can’t learn freely, how will you ever dwell freely?

Ask your self that, too, when you’re at it.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. E mail him at lpitts@miamiherald.com.