It’s Banned Books Week, the annual event celebrating the freedom to read! LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books are among those most frequently banned, along with books that have themes of race and racial justice. Here are five things you can do now to celebrate and support banned books.
- Buy and read a banned book! Below are all the books with LGBTQ content that were on the American Library Association’s (ALA’s) decennial list of the Top 100 Most Banned and Challenged Books: 2010-2019. (Here’s the full list of 100, if you want something other than LGBTQ-inclusive ones.) These are unfortunately only a small number of the LGBTQ-inclusive books that have been challenged or banned. Check my posts tagged “censorship” for more. And LGBTQ books are so frequently banned or challenged that buying almost any LGBTQ-inclusive children’s book means you’ll likely be supporting an author that could likely be banned if they haven’t been already, so hop on over to my database and see what’s new. In another area, check out this list of several hundred books by or about people of color that the York School District in Pennsylvania had banned for nearly a year, although the ban has now been reversed after students and others mobilized for change.
- If you can’t or don’t want to buy books, check them out from your local library—or recommend that the library add them to their collection.
- Attend a virtual event this week with authors including Laurin Mayeno and Robert Liu-Trujillo (One of a Kind, Like Me/Único Como Yo, about a gender-creative boy), who are doing a Facebook Live event in conversation with Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard, authors of Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice (Bookshop; Amazon), Monday, September 27, 2:30 – 3:30 p.m. ET; and Alex Gino (Melissa’s Story, about a transgender girl), who is doing a #BannedBooksChat on Twitter, Thursday, September 30, 7:00 – 8:00 p.m. ET.
- Attend a Drag Queen Story Hour, online or in person (or work to bring one to your community). The ALA’s most recent State of America’s Libraries Report noted that in 2018, there was “a surge of interest in drag queen story hours, all-ages storytime programs where performance artists read stories with messages of love and acceptance, but at the same time, most challenges to library resources that year focused on LGBTQ-inclusive materials and programs, “most notably drag queen story hours and books affirming transgender youth.”
- Check out the resources from the National Coalition Against Censorship for parents, teachers, students, librarians, activists, and others on how to prevent and respond to censorship. Librarians may also want to check out the ALA’s resources, and teachers (particularly but not exclusively English teachers) may want to browse those from the National Council of Teachers of English.
Censorship hurts us all, particularly young people who are looking for representation of others like themselves or the people in their lives. Yes, we parents should use our judgements about what’s appropriate for our own children and their stages of development, but we should have access to books and media with a wide variety of representation, topics, and styles from which to choose.
(As an Amazon Associate and a Bookshop Affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)
