Beacon Press has published a pamphlet about banned books. You can download a PDF here. I picked up a hard copy at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. — presumably when bookstores buy books from Beacon, they receive some hard copies of the pamphlet.
The best thing about this pamphlet is not the infographics or text — it’s the QR code that links to some Beacon Press ebooks. These ebooks are free for people who have any difficulty obtaining them, which presumably means schoolkids.
If you’re not familiar with Beacon Press, it started as a Unitarian Universalist (UU) publishing house, got spun off as an independent publisher, but still retains its UU connections.
While banning books may have been “long been used as a tool in the white supremacist war against marginalized communities”, to lead with that claim is illegitimate. Book banning goes back to before the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, with French edicts controlling publication of Protestant ideas and Britain’s control of the press was first used against white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and political dissidents. Our First Amendment came directly from those attempts at the control of ideas, which had affected the majority of colonists, most severely the Huguenots, but also the wide variety of Anabaptists, the Quakers, and even the Anglicans, who had been prohibited from attending services in other than their own parishes, for example. And today, as they were in the 70s when I first became a librarian, book bans are almost solely about religious and ethical ideas and values that we disagree on and feel are being promoted by publicly funded schools and libraries. (The left is not immune from doing that, too.) I think we need to be presenting the problem (and many other problems0 from a place of free discussion of ideas and respect for everyone, and not from a place of which ideas and groups are being most harmed at the moment.
I am surprised that nobody (of whom I am aware) has pointed out that the UUA itself banned Todd Eklof’s little book, “The Gadfly Papers,” from the 2019 General Assembly. As often happens in book banning, the UUA and affiliated organizations, including the Ministerial Fellowship Committee, then attacked the author and defellowshiped him from UU ministry. Subsequently, the MFC falsified its reason for illegitimately defellowshipping Eklof by claiming it was for “bullying.” This would be risible if the consequences were not so serious. The MFC and the current UUA hierarchy have some enormous violations to answer for — not just of our self-proclaimed values and principles, but of common human decency and integrity.
Robert Beekman — The American Library Association says: “Challenges [to books] do not simply involve people expressing their point of view, but rather are an attempt to remove materials from curricula or libraries, thereby curtailing the ability of others to access information, views, ideas, expressions, and stories.” The UUA did many things wrong in the way it handled Todd Eklof. But they didn’t ban his book; The Gadfly Papers remains just as accessible to UUs now as it did before the UUA took action against Eklof.
To state that the UUA “bans books” is a distraction for at least two reasons. First, such statements are distractions from the real and very serious problem of books being banned by governmental bodies.
Second, such statements are distractions from what the UUA actually did wrong. While I, too, believe that the UUA did many things wrong in the way it handled Todd Eklof, what they did wasn’t book banning, or reverse racism, or political correctness, etc. It was, in fact, a continuation of a systemic problems going back to the American Unitarian Association (AUA). Under Samuel Atkins Eliot II (president from 1898-1927), the AUA exerted top-down control in many unsavory ways: it actively disfellowshipped pacifist ministers during the First World War, it actively worked to force women ministers out of congregational ministry, and so on. Under Frederick May Eliot (president from 1937-1958), the AUA actively worked against suspected Communist ministers (Stephen Fritchman most famously, but also minor figures like Leila Lasley Thompson, etc.), discouraged non-white ministers from serving congregations, and so on. This pattern of top-down control imposed by persons in positions of power continued in more subtle ways after 1961 when the AUA merged with the Universalists; most notably from my perspective in the resistance to dealing with clergy sexual misconduct, but also during the Black Empowerment debacle, and perhaps also in the way the governance of the UUA is strongly skewed to upper and upper middle class people who can afford to attend General Assembly (which I suspect is partially a legacy of the upper class status of S. A. Eliot and F. M. Eliot). — In short, we definitely need to critique the systemic problems that still exist in the UUA, yet talking about book banning will only be a distraction from the real problems.
In any case, I hope you can move on from the notion that the UUA “bans books.” By the American Library Association’s standards, the UUA is not guilty of book banning. Instead, let’s focus on what the UUA actually does wrong — then we have a chance of fixing things.