Happy Banned Books Week! If you’re anything like the many dudebros I recently found in my TikTok comment section you’re already rolling your eyes and preparing a response about how America doesn’t actually ban books. I can practically smell the axe body spray wafting through my phone. This is all because one of my recent TikToks went a wee bit viral.

To give you an idea – a good TikTok view day for me is 1,000 with most of my content garnering a couple hundred views at best. I’m not made for content creation. So when the eight second video I shot at my local library earned 81,000 views I was, needless to say, stunned. What could I have possibly accomplished in eight seconds that led to that kind of response? It’s pretty simple – I shared that my local library was giving out free copies of Animal Farm by George Orwell for Banned Books Week. (They gave them out early so folks could come back to the library after reading them and have a book discussion. Isn’t that great?!) That’s it.

What followed was a wild barrage of everything: folks like me who loved the idea, in depth discussions of capitalism versus communism even conspiracy theories about the CIA. Cutting through all that, however, were a bunch of comments about how this book is freely and widely available, or required reading in school, so is OBVIOUSLY not banned.

Listen, I know that most of the folks repeating this are pretending to not understand what the term banned books means. Likely because they share political values with the type of folks who are marching into school board meetings making challenges. I’m not likely to change those minds but I what I can do is correct the misinformation, so here we go!

No, America does not make a habit of banning books from the public. We are a democracy after all and with freedom comes the right to read what you like! (For now – vote Harris/Walz in November.) The term “banned books” is one of those unfortunate colloquial phrases that had great intentions but can easily be purposely misunderstood, like “Defund the Police.” Banned books are really books that have been previously challenged and banned in some places. We can agree though, that phrasing isn’t nearly as sexy right?

Imagine this: you’re a person with a very particular point of view that’s drenched in racism, sexism, homophobia, adherence to capitalism or religious ideals you feel everyone must share. What better way to attempt to stamp out opposing viewpoints than to halt the reading about such ideas? What are you going to do though? Write a letter to congress asking them to officially ban a book from the American public? Of course not. We already said, America does not ban books.

That’s why most of these challenges begin in school districts at the local level. Sometimes one person notices a certain title that their kid brings home from the school library and shows up at next month’s school board meeting to raise hell. It’s not enough for them to tell their child they can’t read it. They need to be sure that no one else’s kids have the option of reading it either! A lot of the original challenges to books started this way.

It’s different now. Challenging books has become an organized, insidious practice taken on by groups and religious organizations. With tools like the internet at their disposal these groups research books published in categories they dislike and create lists of titles they plan to challenge. They distribute these lists to their censorship warriors who then march off to local schools and libraries hunting for books they don’t even know are there. Have they read them? Usually not.

And they will make up all manner of nonsense about a book to keep it from being read. A book featuring two gay dads is often described as “too sexual” for kids to read when there is nothing sexual about it. Why make up a lie? Why describe a book as inappropriate when it’s clearly not? Think bigger. How does one effectively ban a population from reading a book if they can’t “ban” it? If enough of these books are challenged in enough school districts across the United States preventing them from being read during the time of life when a child might have picked up that book then the book, and more importantly its ideas, have effectively been banned.

Banned Books Week is a celebration of those books that have been challenged, and often banned, in schools, libraries and other places at one time or another. To those dudebros in my comments sharing about these being required reading when they were in school, why do you think that is? Because as a nation we recognize the importance of sharing ideas that people fear. Why celebrate them? Or, and this question really speaks to the Aries in me (IYKYK), why make it a point to read them?

Because they don’t want you to.

Challenges to books increased 65% in 2023. To learn more about banned books check out http://www.ala.org/bbooks.