Book banners in Kentucky get to work distracting librarians, hurting democracy | Opinion

Erin Waller is the executive director of the Daviess County Public Library, and in ordinary times, she’d spend the last days of summer getting the library ready for school year programming.

Instead, she’s working her way through a list of 248 books that have been challenged by the Daviess County Citizens for Decency, which sounds like something out of Joe McCarthy’s fever dreams.

But it’s all too real for Waller, who must read each of the 248 books and make a recommendation about whether it should stay in its own section, be moved to another section or be removed altogether. She’s made it through about 90 so far.

“About 60 of them were very easy because they were children’s picture books,” Waller said. “The complaints are about a variety of things — conversations on race or gender, a child has two mothers, or a child is questioning something.”

Now I know that some parents don’t want their children to read about anything to do with gender or sexuality. That’s why they fully have the power to stop their children from checking out those books, or even going to a public library or doing anything that reflects the world we live in today.

The Decency group got started by Jerry Chapman because they objected to a drag show at the taxpayer funded RiverPark Center. Then they turned their attention to books, and when Waller didn’t act quickly enough, they tried to get her fired.

“We asked the library to permanently suspend any celebration of sexuality with children by discontinuing participation in ‘Pride’ month,” Chapman told me in an email. “We have made our mission clear. WE WILL PROTECT THIS COMMUNITY’S CHILDREN, AND THEIR PARENTS’ RIGHTS.”

But many of the books on the list are not about gender or sexuality. These people have decided that anything reflecting America’s horrific history of race should also be off limits.

Chapman and friends complained about books on Juneteenth or “The Undefeated,” a children’s books about heroes of Black history, such as Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin.

Waller pointed out that the Decency group seemed to have gotten their list from BookLooks.org, a book rating site put together by Florida mom Emily Maikisch, according to the Washington Post. (Psst, hey kids! If you want to skip ahead to all the dirty parts of these books, Mrs. Maikisch has helpfully compiled all the sex scenes here for you.)

Under the “The Undefeated,” citation, the summary of concerns is “contains racial commentary.” The actual content? Page 16, “because black lives matter.”

Here’s another one — “Ablaze with Color: The Story of Alma Thomas,” about an early Black painter in the U.S. Those citations, starting on page 11, are: “her family decided to move to the North. Away from the injustices of the South ... But even the nation’s capital, schools were segregated and access to art limited ... How nature made her sing and dance, even when life could be hard and unjust.”

Yes, apparently saying that life can be hard and unjust for anyone, much less a Black person during segregation, is now off-limits because according to people like this, it might make a white person somewhere feel bad about themselves. To misquote H.L. Mencken, book banners are really worried that someone somewhere might read a book that will teach them something and open their mind.

A book banning surge

Trying to ban real Black history in our libraries is far more indecent, disgusting and immoral than the nastiest sex scene from Harold Robbins or Judith Krantz. But these people keep trying, and not just in Owensboro. Requests to ban books at U.S. public schools and libraries surged to a 21-year record in 2022, according to data from the American Library Association.

In Paris, Bourbon County Public Library director Mark Adler is also grappling with 37 new challenges, most of them from one family.

“Ultimately, the library is charged to provide materials for everyone in our community and we take that very seriously,” he said. “The community is diverse and as taxpayers, everyone deserves to see themselves in the materials.”

Sadly, it could get worse. Thanks to a new state law, fiscal courts will have a say over who gets appointed to library boards. In Anderson County, for example, the court recently appointed a man who not only had not applied, but was known for protesting at the library.

The Clark County Library Board recently voted to remove the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read policy statement out of their bylaws. It says in part, “It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority.”

Tammy Blackwell is vice-chair of the Kentucky Public Library Association and director of the Marshall County library system, and said book challenges are increasing in Kentucky, just like the rest of the country.

“We just really stress that we’re in support of all those libraries working to support intellectual freedom,” Blackwell said. “Really we’re kind of a cheering section for our libraries. The preservation of intellectual freedom is important for democracy, it’s important for a free society, and we encourage libraries to keep on, keeping on.”

Blackwell said she’s been lucky in Marshall County with a public and a library board that is happy with what the library does in the community.

“I think it’s sad that less than 1% of the population is unhappy with less than 1% of our collection, and that’s overshadowing the amazing good that libraries do,” she said. “We lend books, but that’s so little of what we do these days — we’re helping people find jobs, we’re helping seniors, we’re promoting early literacy and getting kids ready for kindergarten, libraries are stepping up and taking on that role.”

These book challenges are about grabs for control by small-minded people who think they should determine what everyone else should see and think. It’s a pain in the neck for librarians, terrible for the community (which divides itself over a precious public resource), and an attack on our fragile democracy by attempting to hide the facts of our imperfect history.

People who want to ban books in the name of decency are indecent. But librarian Tammy Blackwell is far more magnanimous.

“I do not see book banners as an enemy,” she said. “These are people we haven’t done our job with — they are getting information from an unreliable source and taking it as a fact. People don’t have the information literacy they need. They are not our enemy, they are part of the community we are here to serve.”