What Book Bans Take From Kids
This year, the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week arrived in the midst of a renewed push to limit the literature children can access. Schools and libraries around the country have dealt with attempts to ban and remove hundreds of titles, many of which grapple with issues of sex, race, and gender, in the name of protecting young people from supposedly sensitive subject matter. And while notoriety has the potential to boost a book’s public profile, in most cases, suppressed titles disappear without much fanfare, leaving authors with fewer sales.
The current panic around what kids was a political novelfilled with references to poverty, incompetent authority, the pressure to conform, and death (including, in its first version, the hanging of the puppet himself). And Zora Neale Hurston may not have been writing specifically for children, but the writer Ibram X. Kendi found that her stories—specifically, “Magnolia Flower,” —can still teach kids about the power and value in their existence, even in the face of persistent anti-Blacknessand injustice.
