The New York Times: Ban Before Reading

The New York Times: Ban Before Reading

By David K. Shipler | November 6, 2015

Leon Edler

Friends and family congratulated me, book sales bounced a little and a 10-year-old title was suddenly under discussion by people who had never read it. I had been awarded literary recognition of a peculiar kind, one that brought me no euphoria. Along with six other books opposed by conservative parents in a wealthy school district near Dallas, my book “The Working Poor: Invisible in America,” a nonideological portrayal of lives near the bottom, was suspended from the English curriculum at Highland Park High School, where it had been used in advanced placement classes.

Joseph Conrad’s notion that you should judge someone “by his foes as well as by his friends” contributed to the unearned accolades from my side of polarized America. So did the caliber of the other suspensions, which included two novels by Nobel laureates: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” and “Siddhartha,” by Hermann Hesse. This was much better company than I deserved — the opposite of guilt by association — and perhaps I should have enjoyed it.

But I had a sense of what might be coming, because I had just finished writing about book “banning,” to use the conventional term of exaggeration, for a book of my own on freedom of speech. The American Library Association gets 300 to 500 reports of book challenges annually and estimates the actual volume at five times that number. If you picture citizens in towns across America parsing every line, however, you’ll be disappointed to learn that many passionate parents are not passionate about reading the books in question.

So it is with would-be censors everywhere. At Theater J, a Jewish theater in Washington, D.C., several conservative activists campaigned last year against an Israeli play they never went to see. And who thinks the Ayatollah Khomeini read past the title of “The Satanic Verses” before issuing his fatwa against Salman Rushdie?

The incuriosity can be observed with distressed detachment until your own book becomes a prop in the pageant. I had spent hours listening to concerned parents and charting the divides over religion, politics and the value of literature; the suspicions about public schools; and the frantic efforts to insulate children in a relentless digital age. The worries can be mesmerizing, carrying you along until you collide with misstatements about unread books. I had heard a father in a Detroit suburb pledge proudly not to read two novels he sought to have removed from A.P. English: “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison, and “Waterland,” by Graham Swift. The school superintendent admitted that he hadn’t read them either before pulling them. (They were later restored.)

Instead, juicy passages like truncated CliffsNotes are plucked from alarmist websites. They are quoted by those who haven’t read the books, at hearings held by school board members who haven’t read the books, attended by crowds who haven’t read the books, and reported by journalists who haven’t read the books. Falsehoods fly, and nobody is equipped to counter with facts, page numbers and paragraphs.

So it was in the Texas district. The suspension brought national ridicule directed against the Highland Park school system, and after two weeks, the superintendent reinstated the seven books. But parents still had a right to file formal challenges to any of them, and Meg Bakich did so in December against “The Working Poor.” For the ­college-level course she suggested as alternatives two books meant for 8- to 12-year-olds, in addition to two others by conservative authors: Ayn Rand and Ben Carson. She withdrew her complaint in February, but during weeks of turbulent debate, she offered many characterizations of my book, one of which was accurate — that it is “not a great work of literature.” I’ll give her that.

A poorly reasoned review rarely focuses an argument, but in the vacuum created by nonreading, Bakich’s errors distorted the community’s discussion of poverty and education. She objected to the inexplicit (which she called “explicit”) accounts by women of being sexually abused as children, which they had revealed as insights into their lasting trauma. She called the women in the book weak and pathetic, suggesting that she had not read how some pulled themselves out of the depths, worked long hours and sacrificed income for time with their children.

When Bakich called the book Marxist and socialist, I knew that she had read it carelessly, if at all. She didn’t follow my rejection of socialism using Winston Churchill’s circuitous wit, paraphrased on Page 88 with capitalism substituted for “democracy” in his famous line that democracy was the worst system — except for all the others. Marxism I dismissed as a misinterpretation of history that had been used to elevate the state above the people.

The two local reporters covering the story didn’t catch her mistakes, because they hadn’t opened the book to check, they both confessed.

We writers know that we have to let go of our work. Here is your baby, cherished when the first copy arrives, being badly misunderstood in the colder world. Granted, when you send a book out into life, people have every right to see it through their own lenses. If only they would read it.

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David K. Shipler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven books, most recently “Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 2015, on page BR49 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Ban Before Reading

From: The New York Times