Banned Books Week

Alyssa Roseberg and Greg Sargent have an excellent piece in the Washington Post called “It’s Banned Books Week. Here’s How To Fight for Libraries.”

Read it.

One huge takeaway–those who want books banned are a vocal but tiny minority. Sixty percent of all book challenges in the US in 2020-2021 were filed by 11 people.

Eleven people. Fewer than a dozen. Eleven people in a country of 335 million deciding who should can have access to Stamped and George and Genderqueer and The Hill We Climb and It’s Perfectly Normal. Eleven people who think they get to decide not what they are going to read, but what we all should get to read.

Folks, that is not majority rule. That is not democracy. That is not freedom of speech, knowledge, or information.

That is not right.