Children and Banned Books

Throughout the semester, we have been reading many banned books and works by a number of authors, and these articles, “How Banning Books Marginalizes Children” and “Banned Books” on the literal nature of how banning books effects the larger society helped me to bring together some of these themes that we have been talking about. Specifically, in the article, “How Banning Books Marginalizes Children” Ringel talks a lot about what it means for a book to be “appropriate” for children and what the effect is of deeming a book inappropriate. When a librarian is asked why she has withheld from students Messner’s book which has a story involving a child struggling with an older sibling’s addiction Ringel writes that she responds, “‘For now,’ the librarian said, ‘I just need the 10 and 11-year-olds biggest worry to be about friendships, summer camps, and maybe their first pimple or two’” (Ringel 6). This ignorant statement from the librarian really shocked me, and I think the ultimate irony about this statement is that one thing I have gathered from studying these banned books is that they all exemplify the fact that children are far more emotionally and intellectually mature than we might realize, and we always tend to underestimate that fact. 

And secondly, these books reveal the truth that children go through some extremely challenging things. It reminds me of what Nikki Grimes said in her interview which was something along the fact that children and grief go together, and her whole book, Bronx Masquerade is seeking to show that fact through its characters, who are all struggling with the real and daily struggles of kids such as teen pregnancy, sexual assault, identity, and fitting in. Yet amongst these blatant facts that banned books are trying to show about children, this librarian is underestimating them again. If she truly thinks a child’s biggest worry is about a pimple she is dearly wrong, and these books we have read show that reality. 

 

In The Hate U Give Starr’s biggest worry was not a pimple, but it was both of her best friends being murdered in front of her eyes as she tried to navigate her own world of whiteness and blackness. In Bronx Masquerade every student struggled with something vastly different and personal, but all much more serious than a pimple. And these books were banned because of the weight and gravity of what these kids were dealing with. But in Drama, honestly Callie’s biggest struggle was finding someone to like her and navigating her friendships, which is so something universal and quite relatable for the entirety of youth, but it was still banned simply because of the presence of two LGBTQ+ characters. 

 

For me, it all comes back to the idea that we have been talking about which is the fact that these books are simply real and portray a reality and that reality is feared by the rest of society, not matter the differentiating subject matter. But banning these books for children is wildly underestimating a child’s ability for compassion and love at such a crucial age. We are invalidating the fact that some children experience extremely difficult things such as in The Hate U Give and Bronx Masquerade and others experience less explicitly difficult hardship such as Callie in Drama, but whatever children may be experiencing, we should be giving them the chance to identify with one of these characters on the page and learn that they are not alone. You cannot force a child’s biggest worry to be about their first pimple, and that is overly idealistic and simplified for the truth of the situations that children experience.