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Books just shouldn’t be banned. Fullstop.
“But you hate-” so?
“But it sends terrible messages-” yes. That’s why media criticism is important. It doesn’t mean a book should be banned.
“But this classic contains truly despicable things” correct! Now use your brain to consider whether it is condoning, encouraging, or commenting upon them, and then use those skills in your day to day interactions with people! Is it outdated? Could that be why your grandparent has some Truly Weird Ideas that you might have more context to understand and/or discuss? Or are the ideas of your family member not even Of Their Time and they’re just bigots? You now have some tools to figure it out.
Bad books are bad, but sometimes they are important to learn from. And sometimes they’re outdated, but it gives you food for thought. And sometimes somebody else gets something important from a book that you don’t need, hut you never know the difference.
But also and probably most importantly, as utah learned by fucking around and finding out, if you ban one kind of media it becomes incredibly easy to ban another.
I’d also add “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.
If we let the absolutely atrocious books fade into distant memory and no longer have them as primary sources to point to, we’ll lose so much important knowledge both about the horrific events of the past and how to prevent them in the future and stop them as they’re occurring in the present.
If we destroy the writings of people responsible for genocides, for example, we lose a vital perspective in how to recognize and deradicalize those people before they come into massive amounts of power.
All I can think of when people say we should ban the bigoted books by the bad people is the way a sugarcoated, massively sanitized version of world and especially american history is taught in most schools. I think about the story of the “first thanksgiving” and how conveniently the atrocities are left out.
And sure, we can keep accounts from the people that were hurt by these things, but the accounts of the oppressors are important, for the above reasons and more. And, as was said, banning one book makes it super easy to ban more. Do you really trust ANYONE to be able to make the distinction between “is intended to be racist” and “is intended to condemn racism”, especially in the context of fiction? At what point do books start getting banned because they make people uncomfortable.
Yeah.
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