SAWANT: Banning books should not be allowed
Column: Sincerely Rue
Across 32 states in the country, school libraries were forced to remove more than 1,600 books from their shelves. These titles included some all-time literary classics such as "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger, "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck and "Beloved" by Toni Morrison.
These banned books also include children’s book titles, such as "Drama" by Raina Telgemeier and "And Tango Makes Three" by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, all of which were banned for their LGBTQ+ positive storylines.
Book banning is one of the most unreasonable modes of censorship — private individuals make the decision to pull books from the shelves of bookstores and libraries based on their own personal conflicting opinions with the books’ content and themes.
No one has to agree with every character, every theme and every author’s belief they come across when they pick up a book. By the same token, no one has the right to take away the experience of reading that book from anyone else.
To ban books is to be so baselessly self-righteous enough to believe one’s own thoughts are superior and that other people should be subjected to them.
My English teacher in high school told my class, "to read all is to know all." Though she probably meant to inspire certain students to actually read "The Catcher in the Rye" rather than just use SparkNotes the night before the exam, the phrase is one of my favorite things that a teacher has ever said.
"To read all is to know all." And to know all is to have the privilege of freedom of thought.
Every book that was ever published was created and shared for a purpose. The world it creates, the characters it births and the messages the author tries to release from the pages and into the thoughts of the reader all have a purpose. Books teach us different ways of living and share the experiences of others without us having to move an inch.
We are invited into the homes of those across the globe, into the lives of those who lived long before us or will live long after us and are given seeds of information with which to nurture our minds. That is what makes books so special and so critical to the formation of our own unique opinions.
The banning of books stems from the fear that particularly children will be swayed or indoctrinated by assumed political, race-related, sexuality-related or otherwise culturally controversial themes. Oftentimes, parents or other individuals of authority are not ready to address the questions that children who consume certain books naturally begin to ponder.
Or, they would rather discourage such critical thinking altogether.
Such critical inquiry is an important piece of an individual’s ability to think for themselves and to form their own thoughts and opinions about our shared world and the issues that plague it. To not be able to experience these banned stories is to be denied the chance to broaden the reader’s mind.
Such censorship discourages free thinking, which is an even crueler disservice to children than never being able to read the book in the first place.
One of my favorite quotes about reading comes from Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." In the dystopian novel, books are outlawed out of fear that reading them and being able to form individual opinions with new knowledge will make members of society unhappy.
Any homes containing books would be burned to the ground (ironically enough, "Fahrenheit 451" itself has been banned several times in the past). In the book, Captain Beatty contemplates: "A book is a loaded gun in the house next door ... Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?"
Such a quote perfectly sums up the conversation on banning books today. Since when, and in what world, have books and their knowledge become so dangerous that they must be banned? Since when was a well-read person a more dangerous thing to be than someone who knows nothing at all?
The literary world should be anyone’s oyster because there truly is nothing you cannot learn that is not in a book.
Whether it is new words, new ideas, new cultures, new ways of thought, new lifestyles or new experiences that you learn about, you do not have to agree or resonate with all of it. In fact, experiencing that doubt and questioning is a good sign that you are actually absorbing what a book is teaching you and critically thinking about it.
Whether you agree or don't agree with a book's themes is your choice, but at least you have that knowledge, which in my opinion, makes you a little smarter and more worldly than you were prior to reading.
Rujuta Sawant is a Rutgers Business School junior majoring in business analytics and information technology and minoring in political science. Her column, "Sincerely Rue," runs on alternate Mondays.
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