My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #38, May 29, 2000

AFRAID OF HARRY POTTER

For the past several years, parents and politicians alike have been outraged that our schools have not succeeded in teaching all our kids to read. It seems more than passing strange, then, that when books come along that kids read eagerly, and pass on to their friends, adults start trying to ban those books from schools and libraries.

It's a long and honorable list of books, including Catcher in the Rye; Slaughterhouse Five; Catch-22; The Color Purple; The Chocolate War; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; the Harry Potter books.

Of course, not all the books that kids adore and grownups find alarming are great literature. It's kind of hard to envision a teacher or librarian going to the mat over any kid's first amendment right to read the Goosebumps series, or Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, and other Judy Blume books, or even books by Stephen King (though I argue -- see Something Wicked This Way Comes) -- that King IS an important author).

But it doesn't matter if the books are great literature or not. The point is, books that speak this powerfully to kids' concerns and fears move them past their reading barriers, so that instead of reading one painful word after another, and forgetting by the end of the sentence what the sentence was about, they gulp down sentences and paragraphs and chapters whole.

You would think people who want their kids to read would view such books as their allies, would even thrust them into their sons' and daughters' hands. You would think parents would read the books themselves to try to understand the appeal. If they found their daughters were moved by Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, you'd think they would welcome this insight into their daughters' private fears, and use the book as a takeoff point for mother-daughter chats about religion, puberty, boys, and social acceptance.

Instead, many parents demand that these books be removed from schools and removed from libraries because of some threat they pose. What kind of threat? Often the complaint is about bad language, or portrayals of sexuality. Some books that deal with magic, like the Harry Potter stories, are condemned as satanic.

I'm inclined to think those stated reasons are the "good" reasons, not the real reasons. I suspect the real reasons have more to do with a pervasive sense of disquiet these books arouse, which the censors may not even understand themselves, a sense that these books threaten their entire system of beliefs and values.

In which case they are on to something, because many of these books are, in fact, deeply subversive. They look long and hard at the world grownups have made, and find it wanting.

Do you really censor Catch-22 because of its language, or because of its unsettling argument that the world makes no sense at all? Do you really censor Judy Blume because of language or sex, or because of her clear belief that young adults are real people with the right to make their own choices?

Do you really censor Harry Potter because of magic, or because the books reveal so many adults to be clueless, humorless muggles? Don't you really censor The Chocolate War because it reveals what ugly compromises adults must often make with their principles? Isn't what is really bothersome in Stephen King the fact that so often, his child heroes are forced to tackle the forces of darkness alone because adults won't do it themselves, won't even admit that evil exists, and thus totally fail in their obligation to protect their children?

I'm willing to believe the censors really do want their children to read. I'm less convinced they want their kids to think. I wonder if ultimately, it's a failure of trust -- they don't want their kids tempted by dangerous ideas because they're afraid that in a fair fight, their own values and beliefs wouldn't win their sons' and daughters' hearts and minds.

Librarians and civil libertarians are on the other side of a cultural divide from the censors, because we believe reason and goodness will triumph in a free marketplace of ideas; we believe the solution to dangerous speech is more speech to counteract it. We take Mark Twain's allegory, "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg," as a truthful statement: you cannot protect people from ideas forever, and the more you try, the more appealing you make the ideas you've forbidden.

That makes it hard for us to understand censors, let alone sympathize with their fears and reach out to them. At least until the ideas and beliefs WE hold dear are challenged. We find it easy to defend Harry Potter, harder to defend Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or Mein Kampf. We find it hard to defend the KuKluxKlan's right to have a regular program on a public access cable channel, hard to defend the right of the Man-Boy Love Association to try to convince society that children should be free to be victimized by them.

If you REALLY threaten us, we're less convinced our ideals will triumph in that free marketplace. The fact is, our assumption that good ideas will triumph IS a belief, no more capable of proof than the world view of the censors we stand against.

Realizing that should make it possible for us to understand the impulse to censor, have some fellow feeling for the people we confront in defense of the right to read and know. The issue is not the urge to protect our children -- we feel that as much as censors do. The issue is whether we have the right to prevent other people's children from having access to ideas we despise and fear.

If we don't start by acknowledging that people have a right to protect their children, and a right to fear books that undermine their world; and if we don't acknowledge that we ourselves share this impulse, we are forever condemned to stand in the trenches, one side armed with the First Amendment, the other with the Bible, eternally talking not with each other, but past each other. And our kids could be the losers, never learning to read well or eagerly because they've been forbidden to read books they'd love.

[This is an expanded version of an article I wrote for ExLibris]