A couple of weeks ago, a friend in Facebook who is interested in social injustices posted an article, “Book bannings on the rise in US schools”, which at first I read with disinterest. The article is about an increased number of banned books are about race or sex and/or written by minority authors and are taken down from school libraries. This got me thinking: Who is so interested in in banning such books if we live in moderately “liberal” society? Who exactly are the censors?
LA is segregated, due to historical and economical reasons, so I grew up in a community mostly made up of Mexicans. Most parents wouldn't really complain what books we read because they were immigrants and/or undocumented, didn't speak English, didn't care or didn't have the time. Most parents who were concerned would not bother to complain because they would not be heard. The most likely to complain - that would be religious or moral persons especially mothers or grandmothers- would gather and complain to the school. But the school would find a way to explain to parents or ignore parents. At the end nothing really happened.
Thus from this experience the people who challenged books had to be prudes, conservative, with power, religious, and had spare time. In my mind censors were white women, specifically fanatic Christian women. After reading the article I let my prejudices take over and thought that maybe it was white women, but being in Cal, I knew had to be more than that.
A anti-pornography feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote in “Against the Male Flood” that the first censors where Roman magistrates who took the census and prepared taxes. Because Censors could tax they could also make laws like, if a man was a bachelor he would be taxed more. So censorship was regulating an act. Historically books were censored because writing is an act, a social and/or political act which could endanger the state. The state was worried what people did, thus police could go after writers punish them and burn their books. In the US, the bourgeois police society and writing is not an act but more abstract and personal, writing is just ideas. And because in the US is spoiled and privileged the most educated think censorship is a way to control ideas, to control unpleasant things, or things that are socially unacceptable or that insult or bother them. In short censors are the educated and privileged who police books that offend them.
Then the people who are most likely to be censors are educated people with money and power. The fact that books about race and minority authors are banned might mean that conservative whites are the censors, so I was not so wrong to pin point white women as censor. The article says that mostly parents, library patrons and government officials were the people who complained. So censors don't necessarily have to be white, they could be of any race, gender and religion. Also, our society is so privileged and spoiled, democratic although unequal, and we have too many bitter people, thus a censor can be anyone just as long as an idea bother bothers they will complain about it and do anything to get rid of that nasty book which offended their irritable sensibilities.
Article Cited:
Dworkin, Andrea. “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography and Equality”. Feminism and Pornography. (Reader).
Liliana Vazquez
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with u; we are all censors. I am a censor by not permiting my son to read materials that I think are not going to help him with his intellectual growth. The difference between me and the powerful censors is that they have the power to make a difference in our society by deciding what we can see, hear, watch, and learn. Everything depends in their cultural view. It is not fair that this small percentage of our population decide what we can see, learn, and know.
L. Guerrero, you have provided an excellent example that I draw many parallel examples to support your argument. You emphasize how the power to censor books to be distributed to the schools or policies that govern the society resides to the "educated people with money and power", aka the white people. The idea of power plays an important role in understanding how policy and social norms are controlled by the people in position of authority and power. So we can see the formation of the powerful individuals as a centralized entity that utilizes their human capital and status alter certain policies. To apply the concept of power to our reading, Stone and Travis introduced the idea of "New Professionalism" that highlights a policing force with the ability to execute a "centralized and top-down management (Sklansky, 4)". According to the concept, there is a powerful group of qualified individuals who are, as you stated: conservative, powerful, religious, among other qualities, exercise their centralized power to bar/change social policies.
ReplyDelete-Jiajun (Michael) Huang
I’m not sure that the ability to censor books is completely dependent on a higher education level—I guess it depends on the country in question—but I do agree that power has an important role in this matter. Spain during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco from 1939-1975 is an example of how a high education level is not a necessary component in being able to censor books, but power definitely does matter. During this dictatorship, every book that somehow criticized Franco, his government, the military and the Catholic Church was banned. However, the people in Franco’s cabinet in charge of censorship were for the most part not that educated. Writers had to find alternative ways of writing criticisms against the government that would be able to get past these censors successfully, yet be clear enough that the society would be able to understand the message, which was difficult because they couldn't be explicit. This example shows that the amount of power held by one man had the ability to completely control every aspect of individuals’ lives. Like the U.S., censorship is to control ideas, unpleasant things, or that which is socially unacceptable. It seems that the difference between the U.S. and Spain is how much power the people allow the government to get away with.
ReplyDeleteThis is an excellent example of policing that I personally had not considered before. I definitely agree that the ability to censor comes with power--books are a source of knowledge, and the production of knowledge is policed in order to ensure that ideas which are considered subversive to the establishment do not become mainstream. As you mentioned, this is certainly contrary to our supposedly liberal culture, but therefore is indicative of the varying conceptions of liberalism. We as citizens view the ability to read whatever we like as our right, but likely the government views censorship of such as legitimate legal paternalism, in order to protect us and the state. Again, great example of policing!
ReplyDeleteAyesha Ali
I generally only associate the banning of books with the early 50's or 60's or in other countries. I knew certain books were banned in public schools and for certain books I can understand why (maybe they would be considered inappropriate to youth, etc.) but when I heard of Arizona banning ethnic studies and chicano studies classes at Arizona public schools my first thought was similar to Liliana's attitudes about the censorship of books. This seemed like an openly racist ban on courses that focused on our country's rising minority population (possibly to protect the class that historically has remained in power?). It reminds me of Japan's ban of its involvement in World War 2 in school textbooks, not to protect its students, but to preserve the country's "integrity".
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear of censorship in schools, I thought it was a movement by certain parents to protect their children from reading "immoral" material that they thought they were not ready for, eg. sex, rape, slavery etc. But in the article that Liliana cites, one of the books banned was Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima. This was very shocking to me. This book was required reading when I was in high school and as far as I remember there were no overt "immoral" themes. The book dealt with mostly minority identity and Chicano culture. I took it for granted that censorship of books was for my "own good". But it's easy to lapse into apathy in regards to policing and assume its always beneficial to me. This class and this blog post remind me that it is necessary to continue to challenge policing, its methods and its motives in order to protect myself. It's important for the public to also police the police.
ReplyDeleteChia-Hui (Danielle) Sze
Your blog is truly relevant to our class, and it implicitly demonstrates our current actions when we are asked to sign terms and agreements online. When you mentioned about those parents who were immigrants and not fluent in speaking English, yet did not care and not have time to give their opinions about banned books, I believe that most young adults or adults who grew up during pre-modernized era are very comparable to this kind of parents. We may be literate and computer literate people, but when we are purchasing items online, joining social networking sites, applying loan, connecting to wifi, using cloud, opening online bank accounts or credit cards, we never spend time to read the terms of agreement and are unconscious that some of our privacy rights is being monitored and taken away by market surveillance. Most of the time, we assumed that we are safe, secured, and those online sites are trustworthy which is analogous to those schools who decide what books should be or not be banned. Furthermore, just like the other type of parents, we may file complain against market surveillance, but our concerns are always ignored. Unfortunately, we may just end up as “nothing really happened” due to the fact that we recognize the benefits that we receive by signing the agreements and our focus is about not the privacy but the service the we are getting online.
ReplyDelete-Vanessa Lei M. Escorpiso (Section 101)
I was familiar with the concept of censorship but I never considered the idea that everyone has the potential agency to be a censor. Your article was very illuminating in introducing this fact. The key difference between censorship as exercised by an average citizen and censorship exercised by a large corporation is the amount/scale of people that are being watched and controlled. So, what is the real issue at hand: censorship itself or the scale of censorship (ie how many people are affected)?
ReplyDeleteAnnie Choi
You presented a unique perspective. Those who have the ability to censor are those who have the time and resources to be heard. With large scale communication, anyone can now be a censor.
ReplyDeleteRemember when the Onion printed an article saying that Christian groups wanted to ban Harry Potter? This cause the news to wrongly pick up this piece of satire which eventually spread to real religious groups to ban Harry Potter.
However, for this scenario there was a huge backlash. People jumped to defend their beloved books. This goes to show that our increasing avenues of communications are helping break down censorship barriers. People who may have an unpopular idea in one town may have the whole other side of the nation have the same opinion. When a school makes a controversial decision, aggregated media and news websites leak phone numbers to schools who try to censor ideas to the mass public.
Censorship is now going both ways.
Tina Truong