Category: Reading Responses

After working hard to get our website draft up and running, then annotating Telena’s site, I went back to explore some of our readings from earlier in the semester with newer, wiser eyes. I landed on Chris Crutcher’s short piece, “How They Do It,” and found many spots of relevance for our Ellen Hopkins case. Crutcher does a great job articulating many of the same themes I wanted to point out in the “significance” section of our site. Because he, like Hopkins, writes mostly for teenagers, the case where his novel Whale Talk was challenged in Fowlerville, Michigan shares some common attributes with the censorship of Glass.

“The damage had been done”

Like the case at Whittier Middle School, Whale Talk was not successfully banned from the high school in Fowlerville, but it was taken out of the school-wide curriculum whereby it was being taught. The incident even inspired some students to reach out to Crutcher and tell him how meaningful his novel was for them. Regardless, however, Crutcher maintains that censorship still occurred, despite its undramatic outcome:

The damage had been done. The flow of the project was interrupted, various teachers and administrators intimidated, and what had been a successful, innovative project, crashed. I was informed through back-channels that many teachers simply told their students to finish the book with no further discussion.

Chris Crutcher, “How they do it”

As was the case with Glass, poor administrative handling of the situation cause disruption that in itself should qualify as censorship. This case has shown me that it is important to remember that even unsuccessful censorship still limits the intellectual and creative freedom of an entire community and creates an environment that is skeptical of educators and “controversial” material of all kinds.

Philosophy over Humanity

Crutcher moves on the highlight a key, contradictory element of those who censor and challenge literature for teens: they usually don’t at all care how kids feel about it. “These people embrace their philosophy over their humanity,” he says, stressing that the massive number of young gay teens who have found meaning and comfort through his books means nothing to these parents who somehow claim they want “the best” for their children. “These folks cling to some obscure holy pronouncement that allows them the illusion of control,” writes Crutcher; these parents are so convinced that the public education system is an indoctrinating, malevolent force that they are willing to entirely disregard the wishes and intellectual needs of their own children in order to feel like they hold the power.

Ellen Hopkins expressed a similarly frustrated sentiment in one of her blog posts about the Whittier challenge. By writing about drug addiction, she asserts, she is “allowing them to live vicariously through my characters, so they don’t actually have to experience those things; literally saving their lives.” The substantial crowd Hopkins drew when she finally spoke at a church in Moore is a testament to her popularity and impact with young readers.

The key to resolving these tenuous censorship interactions between controlling parents and the institution of education, according to Crutcher, is for administrators to “stand up for their teachers before they stand up for non-educators with squeaky wheels.” I couldn’t have expressed so succinctly my main takeaway from the Ellen Hopkins case any better than this. This is what must happen to stop the ability of one parent to dictate the intellectual experiences of an entire student body.

It’s finally spring break! This means I finally have enough breathing room to sit down and actually read the book Baylee and I have been discussing for the last few months. I’m only about a third of the way through, but reading it made me think a lot more about the Grace Enriquez article we encountered earlier in the course, “The Reader Speaks Out.”

Adolescent Responses

I’m shocked by how much I actually, on some level, agree with the Whittier Middle School parent complainant about some elements of Glass. There is an awful lot of explicit language, which I don’t usually think of as bad, but some of it seems unnecessary. There is quite a bit of sexual language and innuendo, though some of it may slip past its younger readers, but I understand why it’s there. An interesting part of the Whittier parent’s complaint is that she only objected to its exposure to middle-schoolers, not to all adolescents; the book itself issues an “ages 14+” warning, so I’m tempted to agree with her on that.

I decided to take a look back at Enriquez’s study to see exactly what kinds of responses a book like this would get from young readers, and it doesn’t appear that they would be entirely positive. A lot of the students interviewed expressed distaste for sexual or drug-related content in the books they read, partially because they felt like they weren’t supposed to be reading it, but sometimes because they just didn’t care for it. They disagreed with the prioritization of censoring sex over violence, though, which I found to be a very mature and warranted observation of the hypocrisy of the adult world.

Controversy and Literary Merit

Students in Enriquez’s study were careful to point out that a “good plot” made controversial material like sexual content and explicit language excusable or even inconsequential. This is an area that I think Hopkins excels in; I found myself lost in Glass even though I know its entire plot already, because the writing is engaging. This was something the Norman Public Schools Reconsideration Committee brought up in defense of the book when they refused to pull it from the shelves. “The quality of the writing is outstanding,” they wrote, “and motivating to reluctant readers.”

As an English student, a lot of what Glass has made me think about so far is the advantages it could present in introducing literary style and devices to its young readers. This is something I wish Enriquez would have touched more in her article: the role of literary quality and merit in the way young readers feel about texts. Glass would not only be useful as a cautionary tale about addiction but also as an instrument by which to teach the advantages of a free-verse poetry format to express the inner thoughts and perspectives of a struggling addict. I think with an increased emphasis on this aspect of young adult fiction, students could gain a knowledge and appreciation of the ways different styles and narrative choices foster empathy and interest in different ways. That way, students will be able to acknowledge that it is not just a “good plot” that makes something controversial worth reading, but also its contributions to literature and writing as a whole.

The accounts about the history of media censorship in the United States provided by Paul S. Boyer in “Gilded Age Consensus” and Donald A. Downs in “Government Censorship since 1945” were fascinating. It was enlightening to read about how complicated the issue of censorship has always been, and how interwoven it has always been with public stakeholders like publishers and keepers of morality. I was most struck by the relationship this history has with something we discussed in class the other day: that sex and sexuality in literature and other media (like film or television) are more likely to be censored or deemed inappropriate for children than violence or gore. I struggled to find examples in either article of a book being banned based on its violent content; just as it is now, it seems as though the main criteria were sexual content and explicit language. Both sex and violence are difficult subjects to approach, but they’re also things that happen every day. One is an expression of extreme love (or lust), the other of extreme hate. What does it say about our society that we are more concerned with banning love?

Parental Concern

In research conducted by the Parents Ratings Advisory Study, 80% of parents said they were concerned about their children seeing graphic sex scenes at the movies, while only 64% were concerned about them seeing graphic violence (Time).

Why this disparity? In a Time article entitled “Why Parents Care More About Sex than Violence in the Movies,” Belinda Luscombe suggests that parents are less concerned about representations of violence leading to violent urges or action than they are about sexual representation encouraging sexual desire or activity. The research on to what extent this is accurate is unclear.

I’m inclined to view this dilemma as an issue of public and private–most of us consider sex to be an inherently private thing, an intimate thing that should not be exposed to the public eye. On the other hand, there have been acclaimed and unchallenged books throughout all of American history about the most public display of violent action: war. It’s interesting to me that we can often justify representations of violence by assigning “good guys” and “bad guys,” but a sexual description or visualization of two people in love is controversial no matter who they are.

Sex (Non)-Education

These articles made me realize that Glass by Ellen Hopkins is in good historical company alongside the many, many books that have been challenged for their sexual content. The articles make it clear that sex has been a taboo topic for centuries and unavailable for any sort of discussion. While it is becoming somewhat less so now, the movement towards abstinence-only sex education, particularly here in the south, emphasizes reducing all information children and young adults are given about sex to “don’t do it.” This is a key component of the social milieu that brought about the 2009 challenge at Whittier Middle School.

The most destructive part of this is that work like Hopkins’s, which uses sexual content instructively so as to educate young readers about its complexity, potential riskiness, and consequences, is dismissed by parents as being graphic while hyper-sexualized advertisements and other media run the risk of being the only sex education these children get. Hopkins uses sexuality in her books for reasons, not just for erotic value, and her work has the potential to be more instructive and helpful to her young adult audience than any war novel could be.

Work Cited

Luscombe, Belinda. “Why Parents Care More About Sex than Violence in the Movies.” TIME, 4 December 2015. http://time.com/4135760/why-parents-worry-more-about-sex-than-violence-in-the-movies/

In the last year, I decided to pursue a degree in sociology as well as my original English major. While I initially thought of these programs as distinct schools of thought, the farther I advance in either, the more they blend together. I find that I am always reading for evidence of social context, ideology, and rhetorical motive; it is not a stretch for me to read any text as political, but this thankfully does not make reading less enjoyable. Belinda Louis’s article, “Politics in Children’s Literature: Colliding Forces to Shape Young Minds,” brought to mind a myriad of sociological theories that might help explain the power dynamics that drive issues of literature’s censorship and regulation.

Past Piety

Several facets of book censorship relate back to a central idea common among conservative ideologies: the Myth of Past Piety.

Essentially, this is the faulty belief in a “golden age,” at some point in the past, where society was more morally righteous and prosperous. In our sociopolitical context, we often point to the 1950s as the “golden years” of the United States; we worship its “traditional family values” and see it as a time of ease and nostalgic perfection. This is, of course, a political sentiment; for whom, exactly, were the 1950s a utopia? Certainly not for those of racial and sexual minorities.

When access to a book for children is limited, the censorship is often to preserve the ever-esteemed “canon” of older literature which has its roots in this Past Piety mentality. As Louis suggests:

Parents feel comfortable when their children read books that the parents read when they were in school. As a result, many district lists essentially consist of award-winning, nonprovocative books from a bygone era. New and exciting titles can hardly find a foothold on district-approved lists.

It is natural for parents and even teachers to feel admiration and nostalgia for the texts that shaped their young lives, but it becomes harmful when it discourages the critical thinking and modern-day relevance that comes with adopting new and interesting works.

The fallacy of Past Piety also informs attempts to maintain a gleaming, idealized version of the past when presented with contrary evidence. A parent who looks fondly upon decades past might be hesitant to let his/her child or teenager read a book like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which suggests that the past was not so pious.

Censorship and Social Class

Sociological theories about the intersection of social class and family structure have profound implications for how parents of different socioeconomic statuses approach the education of their children. A common explanation for why children of lower-income families have more difficulty in school is that unlike middle- and upper-class parents. many working-class and poor parents lack the time or the resources to assist their children at home. In many cases, these parents spend their afternoons and evenings working to make ends meet, rather than attending PTA meetings like their higher-SES counterparts. This does not mean lower-income parents do not care about their children’s educations, but that they do not have the means to invest as much. Issues of censorship, then, become mostly middle-class and upper-class issues. Low-income and low-education parents are most likely to trust the decisions of the teachers and school boards, rather than challenge them. To challenge the inclusion of a controversial book requires free time, privilege, and power.