How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. –Toni Morrison, Peril (2008)
Yesterday was the start of Banned Books Week. First launched in 1982 in response to a rise in book bans in libraries and schools, Banned Books Week is a collectively observed barometer that measures the social tolerance for the circulation of divergent thoughts. It is a small chalkboard on which we “draw national attention to the harms of censorship” and celebrate our freedom to speak and read.
Our current media landscape looks a lot different than it did in 1980s when Banned Books Week began (though this year’s theme for Banned Books Week is “Censorship is so 1984″ in reference to the dystopian–and frequently banned–Orwell novel).
But books are still getting banned from schools and libraries in large numbers. Pen America reported on Oct 1st that more than 6,800 books were banned in public schools this year–check out their report that also includes more context on which and where materials are being banned. Imagine how many more books could be banned if libraries and public schools didn’t suffer the general censorial erosion of austerity.
It’s impossible to write about book bans without also addressing the broader censorship landscape / abyss and the general squishy reality that we all are suspended in. We used to talk about the right to speak (and speak out) or circulate information that is critical of dominant political ideologies. Increasingly, we talk less about our rights and more about the danger of saying or writing anything public and critical–if we’re privileged enough to do so.
These days you might lose a finger just for pointing at the abyss.
During Banned Book Week, librarians and educators across America typically write and speak out about censorship. But more and more of them cannot take that risk because they could be fired or even arrested.
The targeting of librarians, especially public and school librarians in Republican controlled states, has become so pervasive that there’s a new film about it. Having worked in libraries for 15 years, I am still caught off guard by the vast gulf that separates the subversive and abstractly grandiose idea of THE LIBRARY and the actual activities that regularly take place in most libraries (hanging out, studying, video games, naps between classes, refilling printer toner, trying to get on the wifi, advocating for new lightbulbs).
What am I risking by writing this? Will anyone even read it?
How about this: Four CUNY faculty members from Brooklyn College have already been fired for their speech in support of Palestine. Six others are under investigation.
It’s not all speech, some people say. Just speech about Palestine. Just speech about speech about Palestine. Just speech about the dead journalists in Palestine. Just speech about the University crack down on speech about Palestine.
And it’s not all books. Just books about “transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The bans are implemented in the national(ist) interest. They prevent public schools from “promoting un-American ideas” to children.
It’s getting bigger, the gulf where speech was. The categories of things that are unspeakable grow apace with the potential harms that might befall someone who speaks.
I take my time. I cite my sources.
If information is a reflection of reality, than our reality is chaotic. Fragmented. Irreconcilably dissonant. Maybe that’s the project of fascism–extreme simplification, the distillation of a mess into a pile of books collected and arranged into a pyre and set on fire in 1933 in Berlin by the Nazis.
Whether or not you think that the current political landscape in the United States is fascist or on the brink of fascist depends on what you read.
Maybe I should write about future of censorship and float somewhat beyond the orbit of the dangerous present. As a public employee it might be safer if I swim into the speculative sea. We’re just glimpsing the new dystopian possibilities for future censorship introduced by AI, according to a think piece in Time Magazine. (“Imagine a world where your word processor prevents you from analyzing, criticizing, lauding, or reporting on a topic deemed “harmful” by an AI programmed to only process ideas that are “respectful and appropriate for all.”)
Imagine this blog post was AI generated. Am I protected when I invoke the algorithm? What if these words were just an amalgamation of other words that already were written? The distillation of a mess.
Or maybe I should dig into the archive; librarians are always doing that. Historic sources are safer, tested. Censorship and fascism from the past are already neatly woven into the dominant ideological fabric.
Here’s a “novel theory”: what if censorship isn’t fascist but necessary to prevent fascism? …an argument made by a Russian Delegate to a U.N. subcommission on the Freedom of Information and the Press in 1947.
It’s nice to look back and know that in 1947 we were on the right side of the international consensus that “censorship destroys freedom.”
But then, in the same list of search results delivered from the New York Times Historical (available for free through the City Tech Library) when I type in “fascism and censorship,” I find another article from 1947. Academics and activists and writers were being blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The New York Times published an article about the dangers of targeting individuals rather than published works–a different and “fatal” form of censorship that prevents people from speaking.
And almost 80 years later we’re being “Un-American” again unless we ban some of these dangerous books. Unless subversive librarians and educators are expelled from the system. Unless we shut up.
Last week, a photographer who documented a protest that took place in July 2025 outside of the New York Times headquarters in Manhattan was charged with “aggravated harassment in the second degree as a hate crime” for taking this picture:
The protest was in response to censorship and repression of information about the famine in Gaza after the Times amended an article following an editorial request from the Israeli Consulate General.
The photographer took a picture. Shared it.
Where does the censorship start? Who reads the newspaper with power and a red pen? Who requests the editorial amendment and who delivers it? Who at the Times receives it? Who implements the editorial change? Who posts about it on the platform owned by the technocratic billionaire and former head of the Department of Government Efficiency? Which news outlets do and which don’t cover the protest organized by Pro-Palestinian activists / militant vandals (depending on your preferred source)? Which publish the photograph?
Who finds and arrests the photographer?
What would we do if people stopped writing? Stopped taking pictures?
In 2008, Toni Morrison (famous author of banned books like Beloved and activist) wrote an essay called Peril, about the entanglements of colonialism, racialized oppression, capitalism, and censorship. The risks of speaking up. The terrifying specter of a world without art.
Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers — journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights — can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.
That is their peril.