Freedom of speech is for everyone, and includes the freedom to say “I don’t think this belongs in the library,” just as it also includes the freedom to say “sorry, but the library is for everyone in the community, including people who find this book useful” or “I can understand that you wouldn’t want your child reading books on that subject, and I can respect your opinion, but some parents do want their children reading books on that subject.”
The ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom collects reports for challenged books and materials. You can even report them anonymously, but the important thing is to let them know!
http://www.ala.org/challengereporting
This is a useful distinction that should be expressed more often.
I wonder if the book ‘Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian’ will also be a part of Arizona’s nefarious oppressed ethnicity book ban.
I randomly picked just one of those links to follow and found hair-tearing material right off the bat. It seems that the alternate selection for Dade County, Ga., students whose parents didn’t want them to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was … The Education of Little Tree.
Parents found Little Tree(albeit boring) to be “inoffensive” — even though the author, Forrest “Asa” Carter, was a “virulent segregationist, former Klansman, speechwriter for George Wallace and professional racist”* who posed as a “Cherokee cowboy, self-taught writer and spokesman for Native Americans” to write a (now known to be fictitious) “gentle memoir of his Native American childhood.”**
So … they’d rather have their kids read a made-up memoir by a white supremacist than an acclaimed novel about life as a Native American teenager, written by someone who isn’t just posing as a Native American?
I’m not going to read any further. I don’t want to spend the rest of my evening with a headache after slamming my skull on my desk.
* http://www.salon.com/2001/12/20/carter_6/
**http://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/04/opinion/the-transformation-of-a-klansman.html