Children’s books that are banned in the US

British author Philip Pullman’s popular fantasy novel Northern Lights was voted sixth on BBC Culture’s list of the 100 best children’s books of all time. Pullman also ranks first among living authors.

However, when the novel was first published in the US in 1996 under the title The Golden Compass, the first book in the Dark Matter trilogy, has been banned in some parts of the country and by 2008 it was already the second most difficult book in the US.

Northern Lights received the Carnegie Medal for Children’s Fiction in the UK in 1995, and in 2019 Pullman was knighted and awarded the J. M. Barry Award (in memory of author Peter Pan) for “a lifetime of achievement that delights children” .

But the worldview represented by Northern Lights and the rest of the trilogy, which some see as atheistic in spirit, has proved too much for some vocal minorities in the US.

The 2008 American Library Association (ALA) list of banned books lists this work as second most popular book in the countrywith objections from the Catholic Church.

Actually, The entire trilogy caused outrage in some American circles.while in the UK columnist Peter Hitchens declared Pullman “the anti-Lewis (C. S. Lewis, British pro-Christian writer) to whom atheists would pray if they prayed at all.”

(Among other works, C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is in the top ten on the BBC Culture list.)

The ban on the Northern Lights can be seen as a harbinger of censorship of books on “moral”, ideological or religious grounds. Now bans and objections to books in the US have intensified to an unprecedented level.

drowning voices

The ALA has documented an unprecedented number of objections filed in 2022, over 2,500 unique copies.the highest number of blocking attempts since the ALA began collecting censorship data over 20 years ago.

Books for young readers dealing with issues such as race, gender, and sexuality include Maya Kobade’s Gender Queer, George M. Johnson’s Not All Boys Are Blue, Toni Morrison’s Blue Eyes, and Jonathan Evison’s The Lawn. Boy.”

“After all, attempts to ban books are attempts to silence authors who muster up the courage to tell their stories.s,” ALA President Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada told BBC Culture.

“Most of the books they dispute are written by or about LGBTQ+ people or people of color.. These books are on library shelves because someone in the community wants to read them. The job of librarians is to provide access to these authors and stories, whether they reflect the reader’s experience or shed light on an unknown perspective,” he says.

“Americans enjoy freedom of expression and the freedom to express their opinions to others. We reach for the books and ideas we need, but we don’t have the right to decide what our neighbors can read and think. We have no right to suppress stories we don’t like,” he adds.

“The book ban movement is being driven by a vocal minority demanding censorship,” Casey Meehan, director of PEN America, the USA-based Freedom to Read project, tells BBC Culture.

“New laws came into effect this school year that censor ideas and materials in public schools., a continuation of the book ban movement started in 2021 by local residents and activist groups. This freeze-of-speech effort is part of an ongoing wider national campaign to stir up unrest and anger to stifle free speech in public education.”

Bans have been implemented in 32 states and have affected more than 32 million children and young people.. The increase in banned books includes more works dealing with violence and abuse, health and wellness, and cases or topics of emotional pain and death.

Reasons for objections include “promoting a gender ideology”, “transgender materials”, “embracing a trans ideology that is an attack on girls/women”, “sexual misconduct”, “drug/alcohol use”, “LGBTQ content”, “violence” . ”, “anti-police”, “racism”, “obscenity”, “pedophilia”, “harassment”.

“In the last 10 to 13 years, LGBTQ books have become graphically very sexual,” Jennifer Pippin, a Florida mother, book refuser and founder of Mothers for Freedom, told The Washington Post. According to him, the concern about LGBTQ books is not homophobic, but the “overtly sexual” nature of the text.

Censorship and sensitivity

“While those who veto books are a minority of the population, they are a vocal minority … and they are well organized, determined to impose their will on all levels of government,” says author Jonathan Evison in an interview with BBC Culture.

Evison’s novel The Boy on the Lawn, about a young Mexican-American gardener struggling to carve out a job in working-class Seattle, ranks seventh on the ALA’s list of the most banned books.

“Therefore, it is very important that our efforts are diligent and organized to protect freedom of speech,” the author says.

90% of objections in 2022, according to ALA research, were from lists compiled by censorship groups (40% were from lists of 100 or more books).

“Book banners have evolved into textbook style, a list of flagged books and offensive passages in every book,” Dave Eggers, author of the recently released all-ages book Eyes and the Impossible, told BBC Culture. impossible”).

Eggers visited Rapid City, South Dakota after his novel The Circle was banned from schools and all copies of the school district were destroyed.

Another author, George M. Johnson, whose autobiographical book All Boys Ain’t Gay chronicles a gay black boy’s journey from childhood to adolescence, joined PEN America, Penguin Random House, several other authors, and parents of two at the school. area for file a lawsuit in Florida against a county that seized books in violation of the 1st and 14th amendmentsand demanding that the books be returned to the library shelves where they were.

“What gives me hope,” Johnson tells BBC Culture, “is that the majority in the country is against a book ban. The fact is that vetoes activate students to fight for the right to have books. AND we win in many counties and keep books on the shelves“.

“We are united, organized and ready to continue this fight as long as it lasts. What’s more, the book ban didn’t stop publishers from allowing more books to be written. In the end, there will be so many stories that it will not be possible to ban them all,” he adds.

Blue Eyes by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a coming-of-age story that explores the impact of grouping on a young woman’s psyche, ranks third on the ALA’s list of most objectionable books.

Morrison once explained that the title of the book was inspired by a black childhood friend who, at the age of 11, told him that she had been praying for blue eyes for two years. “That kind of racism hurts,” Morrison said. “It’s not a lynching, it’s not a murder, it’s not a drowning. It’s an inner pain.”

Now that BBC Culture has named the 100 best children’s books of all time, it’s time to imagine all the children’s books yet to be written (and illustrated), the myriad of voices yet to be heard, the stories yet to be told.

And consider Morrison’s eloquent argument against book bans in Burn This Book, an anthology she edited for PEN America:

“An idea that makes me think with fear of eradicating voices, unwritten novels, poems that are whispered or suffocated for fear of being heard by the wrong people, illegal languages ​​living underground, essayist questions that defy authority, never answered, they pose , never staged plays, made films; this idea is a nightmare. As if the whole universe was written in invisible ink“.

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