The Burning of America's Library

amidst wide concern over the rise of the right wing "book ban," a reality check, an exploration of the activist librarian, and a question: have we lost america's neutral public spaces?

Few images capture the American imagination like the burning book. We’re a nation that loves freedom, and core to the concept of “freedom” is speech, itself instantiated in words. Over the last year, with battles across the country, the notion America’s right wing is obsessed with banning books has become a favored talking point among our press… which itself demands censorship of speech online. Problem? In the first place, the war on books is absolute, with both of our major political poles ferociously engaged. In the second, banning books is close to impossible in the age of the internet. So what are we really talking about?

In today’s Sunday feature, Kat Rosenfield explores the “ban saga,” with the suggestion this culture war drama is not about books at all, but rather where they live — the library. Americans aren’t arguing over any one or several texts, or even the value of speech. We’re arguing over the public space, which is supposed to be neutral.

-Solana

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Perhaps you have heard: the book banners are at it again. 

One of the biggest narratives of the summer, if not the entire year, goes something like this: all across America, and particularly in deplorable redneck enclaves like [checks notes] the entire state of Florida, precious books are being torn wholesale from the hands of innocent schoolchildren. The reporting makes clear that we should understand this as the literary equivalent of a hate crime — many of the targeted books contain either LGBT or racial themes (subtext: for exactly the reasons you think) — and the perpetrators as a cabal of puritanical bigots dressed up as PTA moms. Fascism is on its way to a library near you, buried in the belly of a Trojan horse known as the "parents' rights movement."

Alas, here our aspiring culture warrior encounters a problem, as the villain he's so desperate to battle doesn't actually exist. And the book banning epidemic gripping the country, which has spawned hundreds of headlines, thousands of tweets, and an open letter from former President Barack Obama? 

Yeah, also not real.

It's hard to overstate how bad the coverage of this issue has been, and how misleading. This article is an attempt to illuminate what's missing from the conversation, and how the fight about "banned books" acts as a smokescreen for the actual issue at hand: an existential power struggle to politicize the few remaining ideologically neutral spaces in the country.