An Interview...

[ladychi]

wiffleclaw interviewed me about book censorship for his AP Government class. I wanted to save it for posterity, since I know some of you are librarians, and all of you are readers, and... well. I love being interviewed.

Comments

[plaid_slytherin]

I think I agree with everything you say here. I know my parents didn't do a good job of regulating what I was reading (neither of them are big readers, and I've been reading on an adult level since I was quite young) so I encountered a lot of things I probably shouldn't have.

Obviously none of it scarred me (or maybe it did), but I'm glad that no one else told me not to read something. I do think I would be more on top of what my kids are reading, though, but that's only because retrospectively, I think my parents were too lax.

[arclevel]

Some interesting stuff in here. I'm totally with you in terms of book banning. I have never understood people who think that it's not enough to decide what they and their children should read, they have to decide what everyone else is allowed to read, too. I think it gets particularly obvious in terms of books like Huck Finn, where Jim's status based on his race was one of the major *points* of the book. The book is *about* race, and yes, it would be much more comfortable to read if "the n-word" never appeared in it. But it's a book about race, and equality, and figuring out who you are and who you should be, and making up your own mind rather than just adopting everyone else's prejudices -- and you want to ban it because it's got an offensive word

[wickedgillie]

I look back at my childhood in the 70's, when I annually got to watch Gone with the Wind and they didn't censor out the N word which was both historically accurate as well as true to what Mitchell wrote. I understood even at ages 5 and 6 that slavery was morally abhorent and that calling people the N word was never something I'd want to do.

My oldest child is 5. I have no problems letting her read Huckleberry Finn or anything by Maya Angelou or Alice Walker when she's old enough to grok the context. Books pretty much made me who I am today and I want my kids to be able to challenge themselves and find their own truths the same way.

Anyhoo, back to the topic at hand, excellent interview! I am so glad you shared it with us.

[sheerpoetry]

This is an interesting interview and you have some wonderful thoughts!

I always love to hear what people have to say about censorship. It's clearly still an issue, but doesn't get as much recognition now that's it not happening as widely as it was when just about everything interesting was banned--and burned. (Farenheit 451 remains disturbing for that very reason.)