In a context of extreme political polarization, last year the received 1,269 requests for censorship of books in the United States, particularly works by or about the LGTBI community and people of coloralmost double that in 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) reported this Thursday.
In total, 2,571 titles were subject to censorship in 2022, compared to 713 the previous year and 156 in 2020.marking a new record since this association of libraries in the United States, created 140 years ago, began collecting this type of information 20 years ago.
58% of the complaints were directed against books in libraries and school curricula and the rest against titles in public libraries, said the organization, which will release the list of affected titles in late April during National Library Week in Washington.
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Some of the titles affected in previous years were classics like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” or “Blue Eyes”, by the Nobel Prize for Literature Toni Morrison.
Prior to 2021, most attempts to silence a book sought to remove or restrict access.
Now “we are seeing these challenges coming from organized censorship groups going to local library board meetings to demand the withdrawal of a long list of books” and “that no one can read them,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, says in a statement.
Its goal is to “suppress the voices of those traditionally excluded from our nation’s conversations, such as people in the LGTBQIA+ community or people of color,” he says.
The readers must be the ones who decide what to read and not “the self-proclaimed police of the
book,” he says.
Censorship does not attack only books. There are more and more threats against library workers, their employment, their security and in some cases direct threats for providing books to young people and their parents who want to read, remembers the president of ALA, Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada.
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The challenge of a book can be resolved in favor of keeping it in the collection, restricting its access or withdrawing it from the library, says the association, which only counts the complaints it receives directly.
AFP
