Since 2021 there have been over 30 book challenges in Rhode Island. In fighting these lawsuits, schools and libraries across the state are being forced to use precious financial resources that would normally be used to serve their communities and curate their collections. New State House and Senate legislation would protect schools and libraries from litigation that seeks to ban and censor specific books.
Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke about the Freedom to Read Act with Ed Garcia, Director of the Cranston Public Library; Skip Dye, Senior Vice President at Penguin Random House; and Rhode Island children’s author Padma Venkatraman, whose work has been a target for book banning and censorship.
TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: Ed, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about the Freedom to Read bill. Specifically, what is it going to do?
Ed Garcia: The Freedom to Read Act is legislation that would codify policy that would be approved by a library’s governing authority, such as a Board of Trustees for a public library or a school committee for a school library, for libraries, both school and public, to build their library collections. It details the process by which an invested person can register a concern about library materials, and it adds protections for librarians and educators to build our collections without fear of legal action. It also upholds book creators’ rights to communicate their ideas freely and defend the freedom to read as a human right under both the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article 1, Section 21 of the Rhode Island State Constitution.
Hernandez: Look, people have been going after authors and books for a long time. This is not new, but we could agree that what’s been going on over the last 10 years, things have intensified. Skip, being in the book business, what do you see happening now compared to in the past?
Skip Dye: So what’s different now is the huge attacks that are on teachers and librarians, questioning their ability to make choices and to be a part of good selection, and curation of titles. These are people who have gone to school, who are licensed in many states, (and) are now under attack, and that’s what we see that is different.
Hernandez: You know, Skip, I’m wondering, why do you think these legal challenges are so prevalent, especially when you look at the polls, and it shows that a vast majority of Americans oppose book bans?
Dye: I think that most people that I talk to in various states are not aware of the extent to which books are being banned. They look and think of it as certain types of books, but they don’t understand it’s also books like “The Color Purple,” “As I Lay Dying,” or “The Outsiders.” These are titles that we all grew up with, many of us. I know I read, when I was in high school, some of these titles. I mean, they have been banning even works of Shakespeare because of the topics that they cover.
Hernandez: Padma, you are one of the authors whose work has been targeted. Tell me a little bit about your story and what’s going on.
Padma Venkatraman: Of course. So I grew up in India, and I must say that when I was seven years old in India, there was a time when books were being censored. My best friend’s father was actually put in jail just for expressing his freedom of speech.
When I swore to become a citizen of Rhode Island, I never thought that the books I write for children, like “Safe Harbor,” which has a pink and turquoise cover, it has a googly-eyed seal on the cover, and it is about two kids with immigrant backgrounds like mine, who save a stranded seal on a beach in Rhode Island. Now this book has preemptively been censored just because the kids portrayed here are brown-skinned immigrants like me. I have received threats from people who I don’t think are reading these books but are being told that somehow these books are going to do something horrific to their kids.
I never expected that in our nation, which is founded on freedom of speech, we would then be censoring people like me, who are immigrants, people who are Black authors, people who are Indigenous authors and LGBTQ+ authors. I cannot believe that that is happening right now and that we are facing these threats and hate mail.
Luis Hernandez: I’m curious, Padma, have you ever confronted someone who has wanted to censor your book? I wanted to know what that experience was like.
Venkatraman: I have, and it has ranged from people who are very angry with me and who escalate the threats to people who actually listen. Because when we start to speak about what we need in our country, what I also say is this: I’m not just an author, I’m also a mom. I am a parent. I absolutely believe that I have every right to raise my child the way that I want to raise my child, right? Nothing is more important to me than protecting my daughter. I have every right to decide what goes on our shelf at home, but I have absolutely no right in a democracy to take books off the shelves of any library or any school, any university. I do not have that right.
Hernandez: If the bill goes through, specifically what happens next?
Garcia: If these bills pass, the bills will protect libraries and book creators by prohibiting the censorship of library collections. There are a few legal protections that are in place in the law. There’s an affirmative defense protection that would be placed in our state’s obscenity laws for a librarian or an educator or a museum worker acting in the realm of their position.
This actually isn’t a new thing. Six, all the other New England states have this protection. Over 40 states in the country have it and have had it for decades. In that particular case, Rhode Island has just been slow to the party. More importantly, I think that the law will codify the process by which librarians build our collections. As Skip mentioned, we all have master’s degrees. We’re educated in doing this. It codifies that process based on a policy – a collection development policy – that all the governing bodies have to pass and then they delegate that authority to the librarians to do that work.
That is something that I think people don’t understand, generally, that there actually is a process for this. We actually have an educated, thought-out process in how we build collections, and also how we reconsider materials if someone actually has a reason that they don’t think the material should be in the library. It tends to be more than it may be, they feel it might be age-inappropriate, and we’re always willing as librarians to have those conversations in a civil way.
There could certainly be cases where something gets put in a part of the library that maybe it needs to be in a different part of the library for whatever reason. Again, as Padma said earlier, we want to make sure that you have the right to decide what your children and your family read, but not what everyone else’s family and children read.
Hernandez: Padma, what would you like to add?
Venkatraman: I would like to underline that all of us who are in the kid lit industry, especially those of ours who are of dark skin, who are LGBTQ+, we have not heard our stories told usually, and we have not seen people like us honored in books. It is so important for young people to have that, to have that affirmation of whoever they are, to have that celebration of whoever they are. So as much as authors are being hurt and are on the front lines being threatened, as much as educators and librarians and all of these other adults are being threatened, ultimately one of the most important populations in our country is being affected – and they are the young people from whom these books are being taken away.
This interview was reported by The Public’s Radio.
