Assuming We're Stupid

Banned Books week is September 26 through October 3 this year, and as it approaches, Wendy Kaminer lays out some of the statistics on censorship attempts in the United States on her Atlantic Correspondents blog. It's also worth sending some love in the direction of civil libertarian and critic Nat Hentoff's best argument against censorship, a Young Adult Novel called The Day They Came to Arrest the Book published in 1983. The novel is a lively romp through a school that becomes divided over an attempt to remove Huckleberry Finn from a high school curriculum on the grounds that the book is racist, sexist, and potentially sexually perverse. And it serves as a reminder of an important fact: underlying censorship is frequently an assumption that readers are too stupid to look at the nuances of a novel and understand what they are, and that teachers are too stupid to understand those nuances and explain them in an illuminating way. Book censorship, especially for children, isn't just an issue about moralism or religiosity: it's about capacity to learn, to think, and to decide, and as such it's even more dangerous than we imagine.