“It’s heartening, though hardly surprising, to see librarians stand on the front lines of this fight defending free speech and diverse stories.”ĭeborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said the initiative is opening up access to materials for teens that deal with their experiences or reflect the experiences their friends might be going through. “This is an alarming trend and part of a broader effort to tell trans kids that their experiences and voices do not matter,” Branstetter told Motherboard. Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist for the ACLU, says there has been a particularly alarming spike in challenges to books by transgender authors or featuring transgender characters. Johnson, and “Beyond Magenta” by Susan Kuklin. Half of the books on that list contain LGBTQIA+ content, including titles like “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. “The removal of these stories and experiences from the shelves of a library will immediately signal to a young person of color or to LGBTQ teens that not only do their experiences not matter but that any evidence of their existence has no place in the community,” Higgins said.Įarlier this month, the American Library Association released its list of the top 10 banned books of 2021. Republicans have made a concerted effort over the last two years to criminalize, discourage, or ban the teaching of issues relating to systemic racism and LGBTQ+ issues in places like Texas, Florida, and other conservative strongholds. Most of the targeted books were for a teen audience and were written by or about Black or LGBTQ+ persons. Last year, the American Library Association (ALA) reported the highest number of challenges to libraries and individual book bans since the ALA began gathering this information two decades ago. “Any hope for civil discourse among people of a diverse community requires having access to multiple points of view, and it just makes us richer in the long run.” “Intellectual freedom, the right to read, is foundational to any functioning society,” Higgins told Motherboard. He says that teenagers should not have to walk into a library only to be told they don’t belong because they don’t see themselves reflected in the collections. And, of course, kids 12 and under also deserve access to diverse and inclusive literature in both their curricula and libraries.Nick Higgins, the chief librarian at BPL, says that in the first two days since the initiative was announced, around 200 teenagers have signed up, with over 700 applications received in total. It’s on all of us, though, to move the needle in our communities and make initiatives like this unnecessary, especially considering that the most vulnerable kids and teens will likely have the least access to reliable technology. I applaud Brooklyn Public Library for using their resources to address the wave of book bans in the most far-reaching way possible for just one institution. The Books UnBanned initiative is an excellent way for teens to temporarily get around censorship in their communities, but it’s not a replacement for having these books in schools and libraries - it especially can’t stand in for a diverse and inclusive curriculum that includes the stories and history of LGBTQ people, people of color, disabled people, and more. Not all teens have easy access to technology and reliable internet access, and it’s extremely important that these books be available physically in school libraries, not just on an individual basis through a work around. This is a great resource for teens to get digital access to titles they might otherwise be barred from, though of course it’s only one tool in our anti-censorship toolkit. These ebooks can be read on phones, computers, tablets, or ereaders. The BPL is also making a selection of frequently challenged books available with no wait times for all BPL cardholders, including The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. In response, Brooklyn Public Library, one of the largest library systems in the U.S., has launched the Books UnBanned initiative, which allows anyone across the country between the ages of 13 and 21 to get a free eCard from BPL, which will give them access to 350,000 ebooks and 200,000 audiobooks, as well as access to databases. The books targeted are primarily books by and about people of color (especially by Black authors), books with LGBTQ content, and any title that could be interpreted as promoting social justice. school districts, representing over 1,000 unique titles. In 2021, there were over 1,500 book bans in U.S. Danika spends most of her time talking about queer women books at the Lesbrary.
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