The Inherent Limitations of Banned Books Week

It's Banned Books Week, which means that schools and libraries up and down the country will be festooned with displays, perhaps spruced up with some big yellow warning tape or decorated with handmade crafts of books with little tissue-paper flames coming out of them.

Banned Books Week began in the US in 1982, promoted by the American Library Association as a way to draw attention to attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, to challenge the presence of specific books in libraries, schools and bookshops. Its concurrent sister event, Banned Books Week UK, is led by the non-profit organisation Index on Censorship.

It's a noble project. Organised movements to remove particular books from shelves have long been an issue in the States, and are increasingly rearing their heads here in the UK as well. Institutional pushback against this - both to defend the authors who have their works challenged, and to defend the public's right to freely access information, including and perhaps especially that which intolerant reactionaries would rather keep restricted - is, as far as I'm concerned, an entirely good thing. In a world in which too many organisations seem all too eager to simply capitulate to the loud demands of the authoritarian-minded, it's heartening to see the various official associations for librarians and other related professionals take a firm stance on this, and express unapologetic support in favour of embattled library staff and against the armies of busybodies trying to tell them what they can and can't stock.

The mission at the heart of Banned Books Week is pure. It isn't in its concept, but rather in its yearly visual manifestations, that its limitations are often palpable. Displays and activities for BBW vary widely from one UK library to another, and it would of course be unfair to tar them all with the same brush. At their best, they're daringly provocative rallying cries against the most pressing censorship attempts of our day, genuine library activism geared towards getting frequently challenged books in front of the people who need them the most and often have the least access to them. But at their worst, they're frustratingly performative and aesthetic, and almost perfectly representative of one of our most damaging failings as a society: the ease with which we see the absurdity of the past, while being utterly blind to the absurdity of the present.

Perhaps it's best to start by pointing out the obvious: if a book is sitting proudly and openly on a BBW display... then it can't really be banned, can it?

Anyone working in a public institution and wanting to mark BBW finds themselves in a strange bind of contradictions - a situation that frequently neuters the potential and power of the event, regardless of the best intentions of those promoting it. If a book, or perhaps even a whole genre of books, is genuinely banned or restricted, right now and right here, then it can't really be made available on a big obvious display without staff risking their jobs and possibly even their institution's vital funding. And thus the books that are most frequently featured in displays tend to share one thing in common: they at some point were controversial, and did suffer bans and banning attempts decades ago, but are not exactly the targets of any kind of major, widespread challenges today.

Look at a random sampling of BBW displays and the same few titles are highly likely to crop up again and again. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley's Brave New World. Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Heller's Catch-22. When was the last time there was any kind of substantial effort, here in the UK, to get these books off the shelves? When was the last time anyone was particularly up in arms trying to censor George Orwell or Aldous Huxley? Hell, Animal Farm makes frequent appearances in the English Literature GCSE and even came top in a poll of people's favourite books from school; Orwell has gone fully mainstream and hasn't been a hot-button subject of challenge and controversy in decades. I'm sure there are still the odd time-wasters out there penning angry letters to school librarians about these books, but any 'debate' on whether they should be available has been well settled by now and largely belongs to a completely bygone era.

The reason for these books' ubiquitous presence in BBW displays all over the UK is obvious: they're the 'banned books' you can highlight without risking actually upsetting the apple cart or triggering the condemnation of your local right-wing mouthpieces. They're not in any way - in 2026 Britain - actually radical, and thus are completely safe. And therefore, one could say, completely toothless.

Even the official resources from Index on Censorship make disproportionate reference to books that are simply not major targets in a modern British context. While the American Library Association compiles detailed data each year on the books that face challenges, there is no equivalent for the UK - and when one looks to the official suggested reading list for BBW UK, one finds 'our list of the top 10 books that have been challenged or banned throughout history to read this year' (emphasis mine). That list of ten consists largely of books that either haven't been significantly controversial in the UK for a long time (such as A Clockwork Orange) or books that have faced serious recent challenge, but not in the UK (Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which they highlight is under attack in Russia; Mandanipour's Moon Brow, which has been heavily censored in Iran; Ma's Beijing Coma, banned in China; etc). It's important to support authors from around the world who face persecution and censure for their writing; of course it is - and I would be remiss not to mention that there are countries that are far, far more repressive than here, in which people still face extreme, life-altering penalties for what they write. But are these the books that most meet the moment in today's Britain?

Given that the various books most commonly sighted on these displays don't generally face major censorship attempts here and now, one would be forgiven for concluding that the freedom to read in this country isn't currently under any threat from reactionary challenges to books - that book bans are a 'some other time, some other place' problem. But the opposite is the case, and in fact increasingly so.

This year has seen stories of attempts to clamp down on libraries emerge from multiple Reform-run English councils. Staff at all of Norfolk's libraries were informed that they would not be permitted to, to quote the BBC, 'exhibit any material or stage presentations or events which promote political messaging', including Pride events. This was apparently necessary in order to make libraries a 'genuinely neutral safe space', though we know that when the populist far right talks about 'neutral safe spaces', they mean places that run no risk of making socially conservative and closed-minded straight white people feel even slightly alienated or challenged. (There's certainly a beautiful irony to the very same political camp that has spent years mocking progressives for our 'safe spaces' demanding safe spaces for themselves.) The same administration has also instituted a new policy against flying the Pride flag at County Hall. At the start of Pride Month this year, the new Reform council in Essex attempted to ban libraries from publicly marking events, including Pride but also, for example, LGBT History Month, Black History Month and International Women's Day, though they did appear to backtrack a few weeks later after significant backlash. In Warwickshire, the new Reform council leader attacked the 'promotion' - whatever that means - of books featuring transgender themes (sorry, 'contested gender ideology') in local libraries, and also specified that 'Black Lives Matters [sic] shouldn't have their own stand' in libraries.

But while this summer has seen a flurry of such diktats from Reform councils, they aren't the only battlegrounds. School librarians in the UK are increasingly facing demands to remove books from shelves, and once again, LGBTQ books - or even books that are merely perceived as having LGBTQ themes - are most directly in the crosshairs. Other frequently challenged titles include those pertaining to race and racial justice issues, as well as anything seen to be about 'social justice' more broadly.

Every one of these instances that gets reported also has a silencing effect much wider than any one county or any one school library. Spontaneous self-censorship is a real and pressing issue: library staff, both in schools and public libraries, deciding not to stock certain books, or to hide them away and not 'promote' them, in an attempt to head off in advance any complaints from parents or customers. This is the kind of subtle, silent, invisible suppression that flies under the radar, comprised of innumerable decisions that individually seem insignificant but that cumulatively indicate a notable social backsliding.

What the most recent surge in book challenges and library restrictions has in common with previous eras' censorious agitations is the existence of a fairly specific target - because these sorts of widespread attacks on books are never random or scattergun. They always aim themselves at a particular enemy or set of enemies. Books by Jewish authors. Books perceived as being sympathetic to communism. Books seen as 'anti-Christian' or as somehow promoting satanism or witchcraft. Books critical of a current ruling regime. Books that talk to kids and teens about sex and relationships in an age-appropriate way rather than insisting on ignorance and abstinence. And right now, more than anything else, books that feature LGBTQ characters and themes, and especially anything related to trans identity.

It is in this very specific environment, then, that Banned Books Week displays covered exclusively in the likes of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451 and that feature not a single supposedly 'controversial' (and therefore currently targeted) queer or trans title can't help but feel a little... inadequate. Well intentioned, but deeply limited.

The most genuinely radical thing a library could do to mark BBW in today's Britain is erect a gigantic, unmissable Pride display in their children's section, filled with all the youth-friendly queer and trans books that reactionaries love to kick up a fuss about - titles like Julián is a Mermaid, And Tango Makes Three, Grandad's Pride, Glitter Boy, Queer: The Ultimate LGBT Guide for Teens, How to be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual, The T in LGBT, Heartstopper, Athlete is Agender, Camp Damascus, and suchlike - and respond to any complaints with, 'Tough; it's Banned Books Week, and so we're taking a stance against censorship and promoting the freedom to read.' But I won't hold my breath for this. And therein lies the fundamental tension of BBW: whatever is the current most targeted kind of book is exactly what you are least likely to see on your average display, precisely as a result of that targeting. We end up with promotions of BBW that are extremely generic, in the face of censorship campaigns that are anything but. Schools and libraries are ultimately beholden to the whims and demands of political leadership, and as such, despite the often righteous intentions of staff, are inherently limited in their ability to genuinely push any buttons, unless those staff are possessed of a rare bolshy boldness. There isn't really a way to truly honour the spirit of BBW without inherently attracting the wrath of noisy reactionaries, and 'trying to avoid the wrath of noisy reactionaries' is unfortunately the stance that many such places find themselves being pushed to take. And so we have the ironic situation in which promotions for the very event designed to resist censorship and book bans must themselves tiptoe around the closed-minded sensitivities and bizarre neuroses peculiar to their day, keeping the focus strictly on safe 'banned' titles that no one is likely to object to - because any real, genuine marking of BBW is by its very nature likely to trigger an almighty ruckus.

The very contradiction at the heart of BBW on a practical level has created a situation in which what is most obviously highlighted is the censorship of the past, not the censorship of the present - and this is where I think the real problem lies: a problem not in any way unique to BBW but particularly well encapsulated by it.

It's easy to judge in hindsight. Where we so often fail is in judging without the distance and insulation of time: discerning which elements of our contemporary society are simply repeating the mistakes of the past, and are destined to be judged by those in the future just as harshly as we judge history now.

All reactionary fixations ultimately appear, frankly, bonkers when viewed with decades of hindsight - and every single one of them appeared to be 'legitimate' at the time, to be 'a real side of a valid debate'. The very ideas we laugh off now as obviously misguided, the very issues we look back on with bemusement and wonder how on earth anyone was ever seriously debating them, are matters that, in their day, were treated as being just as valid as we treat today's socially conservative 'concerns'. Whether women deserved the right to vote, whether certain types of people were just 'naturally' inclined to enslavement and servitude, whether people who weren't members of the Church of England should be able to study at university - at various points in British history, these were genuine debates that were being had, no matter how conclusively settled they sound to modern ears.

Don't get me wrong; issues like that were never debates that had multiple reasonable sides. Obviously women should be able to participate in politics on an equal footing to men. Obviously no human being belongs to some imaginary inherent slave class. Obviously whether or not you're an Anglican should have no bearing on your ability to gain a degree. The point is that treating these as 'questions' was, in reality, just as absurd then as it would seem today - and give it fifty, a hundred, two hundred years, and the 'legitimate concerns' expressed by today's reactionaries will be correctly understood as similarly absurd.

But this is a lesson we are exhaustingly terrible at learning (and every push to 'depoliticise history', to deliberately detach the past from the present, only makes this worse). It is much easier to believe the propaganda of one's own time than the propaganda of long ago, and much easier to poke at the obvious holes of past social conservatism than it is to recognise the absurd nonsense of modern conservatism. Things always seem so clear in hindsight, and it's our curse that we are collectively so unable to apply that same insight to our own time and place. 'I've no idea how people back then could be convinced to hate Jews so much; it just doesn't make any sense! Anyway, I've always had a bad feeling about Muslims, with their funny clothes and big beards. It's totally not the same thing though; my feelings are reasonable and proportionate, you see.' 'It's crazy that it used to be illegal to be gay, and people thought that being gay and being a child predator were the same thing! Anyway, I've no time for all this gender nonsense these days. I don't want any of this stuff about men turning into women near my kids. Bunch of perverts if you ask me. I'm not prejudiced; I just have reasonable concerns about the safety of children.'

We are so terribly long-sighted. Our ability to genuinely gain perspective from the past is endlessly hampered by our pervasive sense of superiority over those who lived in it: we assume that they did not understand themselves to have the very same justifications for doing and thinking what they did that we believe we have, and we tell ourselves that we have justifications that they simply mustn't have had. We think in terms of their primitive bigotry versus our brave acknowledgement of reality; their callous disregard for the vulnerable versus our sensible concerns about safety and decency; their mindless violence versus our legitimate defence of our community from invasive threat; their unscientific prejudices versus our simple biological truths; their inability to see the obvious versus our important debate. Whatever happens to be the prejudice du jour strikes us as legitimate, reasonable, fact-based, and common-sense - and even if we reject it ourselves, the force of being surrounded by it exerts significant pressure on us to concede that, well, there must be something to it; surely we must be able to understand how a reasonable person could come to that conclusion, even if we disagree. When certain ideas have simply become part of the air we breathe, we come to see them as normal. And how dare we compare them to some bigotry of the past; it's totally different this time!

I often find myself thinking back to a 2002 article in the Guardian by Anne Karpf, called "We've Been Here Before". She focuses in particular on shifting and hypocritical attitudes to refugees, writing:

Holocaust refugees and survivors have been sanctified and idealised after the event, on occasion by the very same publications that at the time demonised them and sought to impugn their authenticity.

She references Tony Kushner and Katharine Knox's book Refugees In An Age of Genocide, and quotes Kushner:

Adds Kushner, 'People feel that the country should maintain asylum for genuine asylum seekers, but they're always in the past, never today.' As the daughter of Polish Jewish postwar asylum seekers, I'm stupefied by how the collective memory can be so short, bigotry so unabashed, and how, with all the recent interest in the Holocaust, basic connections can fail to be made. [...] Must compassion only ever be extended after the event?

These connections fail to be made because judging the past, in isolation, doesn't cost us anything; it doesn't ask anything of us but to concur with the general consensus. Wow, weren't the Nazis bad. Wasn't the past crazy. Wasn't it terrible what we all did back then. Acknowledging that people decades and centuries ago were not some different species, were not idiotic automatons, and were no more or less susceptible to nonsense propaganda and baseless kneejerk biases than we are today means having to make a judgement on our own world, our own society. It means asking some difficult questions of ourselves and others, and it might even mean having to go distinctly against the grain. It's easy to say that people in the past should have done the right thing; it's much harder to do the right thing now.

It inevitably reminds me of the scathing definition some people on the left use for liberalism: a liberal is someone who supports every civil rights movement except the current one and who opposes every war except the current one. By some magical coincidence, wherever we are right now as a society apparently just so happens to be the Goldilocks position - any less social progress and we'd be in the horrible dark ages of the past, when we believed all sorts of crazy stuff because we simply weren't as enlightened as we are now; but any more and we'd be 'taking it too far'. And we'll be saying the exact same thing in twenty years' time.

Banned Books Week displays that are exclusively made up of books that used to be controversial but are no longer do nothing to challenge this; in fact, they can't help but feed into it, regardless of intention. They fail to challenge our all-too-common hypocrisy: the ability of many in our society to simultaneously feel outrage that these books were banned - 'It's crazy that anyone ever wanted to ban these! People deserve free access to books! Down with censorship!' - while also swallowing so unquestioningly the propaganda of today that they believe wholeheartedly that children must be 'protected' from being able to access queer books, and not for a moment seeing the contradiction there. In their most frustrating form, these displays are effectively larping at being super radical and anti-authoritarian, without having to do anything that would actually be considered radical in their own time and context. Viewing, or indeed making, a BBW display that is entirely Fahrenheit 451 and To Kill a Mockingbird and suchlike doesn't demand anything of you - certainly not anything akin to All Boys Aren't Blue and This Book Is Gay.

It also encourages an erroneous subconscious sense that the censoriousness of the past and that of the present belong to two fundamentally different categories: that the latter is not merely the continuation and adaptation of the former. If the only books highlighted in such a display are those which used to be banned, one can conclude that it must be because there isn't really anything like that going on now - it must be that the current controversies aren't anything like what used to happen. These books were banned, you see, for utterly spurious reasons, but what's happening today is simply people not wanting to have inappropriate content shoved down their throats - that's not book banning, don't be ridiculous! It's not at all dissimilar to pro-forced-birth advocates playing linguistic games about what does and doesn't supposedly count as 'an abortion': an abortion is when they disagree with it, but when it's a termination of a pregnancy that it would be baldly, self-evidently evil to force someone to carry to term (well, even more so than usual), well then, that can't be an abortion, because abortion is always bad. It turns out that it's only a book banning if it comes from the clockwork orange region of a brave new world; otherwise, it's just sparkling legitimate concerns.

Gesturing to the sins of the past without very explicitly linking them to the sins of the present is likely to elicit no more thoughtful a reaction than, 'Isn't it nuts how sensitive and censorious people were back then? Glad things aren't like that now!' Our society loves to talk about 'learning lessons', but it's functionally impossible to do so unless the knowledge of what we did wrong in the past is very directly pointed towards understanding what we're doing wrong today. This means, of course, 'getting political', the prospect of which strikes a lot of people as about as vulgar and distasteful as stripping naked on a train, and roughly as appealing as chopping off their own legs.

And this is where this all becomes reflective of a much broader issue: the way in which the very institutions - from news media giants all the way down to education curricula - that we would hope would rise to the task of elucidating the parallels between past and present, in order to very directly warn us in no uncertain terms when we risk repeating the mistakes of history, choose instead, at our moments of greatest need, to shy away from such explicit connections out of a desperate fear of or aversion to 'getting political'. They stop short - sometimes well short - of the line, having suddenly decided that their job is to, at best, 'let people draw their own conclusions' (and that's when they're not going out of their way to decry those pointing out historical parallels as hysterical). Sometimes this aversion to 'getting political' is deeply sympathetic and understandable; teachers would have an absolute tornado on their hands if, for instance, they started explicitly pointing out the similarities in rhetoric between the modern far right and the Nazi Party. A school in Reform MP Lee Anderson's Nottinghamshire constituency couldn't even put a photo of him on the far right side of a political diagram alongside the likes of Oswald Mosley and Benito Mussolini without it blowing up into a firestorm and being accused of '[insulting] millions of British people', despite such a categorisation being entirely accurate (sorry guys, but I assumed you understood that facts don't care about your feelings). The demands of 'political neutrality' in institutions like schools render it structurally impossible to make such connections explicit, and thus position certain lessons as out of bounds. Other times, in the cases of, say, media empires that are far more free to say what they like, this aversion to 'getting political' comes from simple cowardice, or a deep ideological commitment to 'being unbiased', or even from the fact that some lessons would be inconvenient to the financial interests of the owner. What counts as 'political', of course, entirely depends on time and place: 'Oh, I'm obviously against book banning; we all have a right to read what we want! But taking a stance on the whole gender thing? Oooh... I don't think we should be getting political...' And so the cycle rolls on, and we fail to learn again and again.

I have a lot of sympathy for the library and school staff caught in crosshairs they never asked for - the blame for these attempts to remove books from shelves does not, in almost all cases, lie with them. However, I do believe it is possible to work around the inherent institutional limitations explored earlier and promote BBW in ways that deliberately underscore parallels between the past censorship of the currently 'safe' books on a display and the most pressing issues of censorship right here, right now. Even if it is realistically infeasible to stage something guaranteed to provoke the most reactionary busybodies in the community, due to unsupportive management or risks to jobs or funding, it is still possible to point in the direction of these necessary connections, even if one has to be rather more subtle about it.

The question, then, for anyone doing promotions for BBW is: is this merely prompting us to think about how crazy and censorious the past was, and to think 'wow, I'm glad our modern society is so much more tolerant and that I'm allowed to read Nineteen Eighty-Four'? Or is it pushing us to consider and be mindful of the very real current threats to our collective freedom to read, and especially to the combinations of books and audiences that are most attacked? Is it reminding us that this is not a fight that is 'over', but rather a battleground whose terrain will shift with each passing generation? Is the pragmatic focus on historically banned books serving as contrast with our present, or as pointed complement?

I feel confident that, one day, a time will come when we all look back on our current baseless moral panic around 'indoctrinating children with LGBT ideology' with the same appalled bafflement that we have now for the idea of banning Animal Farm. But given that the targets of censorship attempts always change with the times, our responses need to keep up - otherwise they risk becoming purely and uselessly performative.

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