Project 4: E-Portfolio

It seems I've always been a fairly good writer since I've started getting graded for its quality, which makes reflections like these difficult, since my grades don't reflect any growth I've had over the course of the term. I can't say what it is that makes the words flow and the ideas connect so easily for me, but I can't blame an English course for falling behind in psychology. I got 100's on Projects 1 and 2 (excluding early submission credit), and on my personal review, there's nothing global I could revise without weeks of additional research. I chose to attach Project 1, as I feel like that paper better aligns with my discourse community and the topics I know personally (as Project 2 verged into law and politics). I do feel like my projects may have hit pitfalls in understanding that could only be caught by an expert in the field rather than an English professor, and I'm less afraid of that in Project 1.

I chose my artifacts by their date of creation, one from the start of the class and one from the end. The first artifact is something I have saved as 'Project 1 drabbles', but I believe it to be an annotated bibliography. While it's not too prominent an example of this, it does show the one problem with my writing I know this course somewhat fixed: long sentences. I'd argue they're not run-ons, since I punctuate them properly and the ideas are connected, but when they breach 100 words, I'm still doing something wrong. There's not much fluff here, even for a lighter assignment. It's not too focused or planned, but as an annotated bibliography, it's not really meant to be. The main purpose here is gathering my thoughts and connecting some ideas early on, and the artifact does it well. While I do think I've improved at noticing where my gaps are, I was still alright with doing that here, usually adding a sentence or two about what a source doesn't have at the end.

Artifact 2 is SRQ #15, on reflections. I can say that by the end of the term, I got burnt out by these SRQ's, but it was mainly my fault for not checking the syllabus as much as I should and having to cram them in in the last few hours of the night. My SRQ's from the start of the term were easily twice the size of this one. This course certainly helped giving words to ideas I already had a passing familiarity of, some of which can be seen here (dropping in 'rationale' and 'exigence'--I quite like the latter). Both of these artifacts blend together a familiar tone with based fact, though I believe the SRQ ties the two more tightly than the bibliography. Funny thing with the SRQ's that's similar to the class as a whole: I usually understood most everything I read, and so didn't have questions I felt worth asking by the end as per the assignment. The one here shows my understanding well enough, but it even says itself that it's not too relevant to the assignment. I'm still balancing my own curiosity with the needs of the class, as at this point in my life, the two are starting to diverge.

What parts of both the modern political climate and the background processing of book bannings/challengings may have caused their massive surge in the past few years?

"Book Ban Data", American Library Association, March 20, 2023. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/book-ban-data (Accessed January 25, 2024)

This website is the ALA’s main page for the popular dissemination of the data it collects on book challenges and bans nationwide. While I’d prefer a paper over an infographic, the variety of interpretations is helpful for establishing the problem: about three times as many challenges were made in 2022 than the average of the prior decade, about 90% of all challenged books were challenged in groups, about 40% of those books were in groups of 100 or more, and one of the case studies mentioned tried to ban books the library in question didn’t even have. The ALA is the premiere organization for American libraries, and this data is collected directly from local reportings (though, notably, other sources mention that upwards of 80% of challenges are never in the news).

United States, Supreme Court. Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26 v. Pico by Pico. 25 Jun 1982. Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/cases/1981/80-2043

This Supreme Court case is the most recent still applicable to book bans in public schools. The 5-4 ruling upheld student’s First Amendment rights by preventing bans of books solely on ground of the school board’s opinions (see the board’s reasoning that the books in question were ‘just plain filthy’). However, due to school’s place as central to community values, book banning was still allowed overall so long as it doesn’t tread on the First Amendment. Other sources refer to Pico, of course, but getting all the details of this case will be useful for framing the surge, and it’ll be especially interesting to see how that line is drawn on free speech (given that many banned books are on grounds of race, sexuality, or religion).

Price, Richard S. "Contesting Obscenity: Book Challengers and Criminalizing Literature." Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, vol. 7, no. 4, 2022, pp. 34-45. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/contesting-obscenity-book-challengers/docview/2859448562/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/jifp.v7i4.7747.

The author identifies the impetus of the 2021-onward surge in book challenging as an attempt 'to resurrect the notion of obscenity', taking a broad historical sweep to compare the surge to the fight over historical obscenity law. The paper begins with statistics regarding the surge, and spends much of its middle portion detailing specific instances of challenges in chronological order from the 1930's to the 2010's. The author is a professor of political science at Weber State University, and the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy is the official journal for the ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom. The paper covers nearly everything I'd want to talk about—historical context, overt politics, statistics and trends, even citing a precise event that coincided with the beginning of the surge, namely Representative Matt Krause's watch list. There are some gaps other sources fill, namely the shift to mass challenging (as many current challenges come by the hundreds) and a clear definition of the process of book challenging.

Schroeder, Ryan L. "How to Ban a Book and Get Away With It: Educational Suitability and School Board Motivations in Public School Library Book Removals." Iowa Law Review, vol. 107, no. 1, Nov. 2021, pp. 363+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A688069318/ITOF?u=tall85761&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=44756da9. Accessed 25 Jan. 2024.

The author, a J.D Candidate at the University of Iowa College of Law, explains how the Pico case created a ‘motivation test’ for book challenges in schools based on ‘educational suitability’, pinning the school library as somewhere between curricular, where the school board reigns supreme, and non-curricular, where students’ First Amendment rights supercede the school board’s wishes. My questions for where the line is drawn in Pico are largely answered here, as “the political stance of a book and the book’s content are often inextricably linked”, and Pico is overly vague even for a non-binding case. This source still doesn’t delve into the how of book bannings as much as I’d like to, but does give a good idea of the parties involved and the application of the law with its many examples. I worry that there’s been little discussion of challenges outside of public schools, but that lack of precedent (combined with the ALA’s statistic on what types of libraries get challenges) is a point in its own right. Of note is that this source largely predates the surge in question, which does show that this has been a contentious issue for much longer, but also lacks some context to the research question (that other sources will fill in).

Holley, Robert. "“If You Ask Me” Op-Ed: Censorship from the Left." Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy, vol. 7, no. 1, 2022, pp. 4-10. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/if-you-ask-me-op-ed-censorship-left/docview/2719643556/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/jifp.v7i1.7769.

The author, an emeritus professor for Wayne State University, argues that book challenges (and censorship as a whole) is also a tool used in some left-leaning agendas, making the issue of book challenges bipartisan to some extent. Of particular note in his argument is historical accuracy, with his best example being the known cases of trying to remove Huckleberry Finn from curriculums for its use of the N-word; while certain books are not palatable by today’s standards and morals, removing them from schools is ‘whitewashing history’. While this op-ed is very argumentative, and some points don’t seem to have much ground to stand on, other parts are based in entirely sound fact and make those facts clear enough to be used in a less argumentative paper. At the very least, reading this article is helping me not overgeneralize, as there are generalizations here that I know exist because of my familiarity with the left (no, not all liberal feminists think pornography is degrading). I’m getting antsy that Holley uses Wikipedia definitions for some of his points (no, cultural appropriation is different from multiculturalism, you’re arguing over semantics here), but fortunately the few I intend to use (see Huck Finn) don’t have anything of that sort. This article will likely be used as an aside in the ‘establishing the problem’ or ‘legal backing’ segments to clarify the politics of the issue, since I believe people’s impression from mass media is that only conservatives are banning books (the ALA stats suggest most of them are, and that will be made clear, but one can’t absolve themselves by sitting on the other side of the fence).

"Sample Reconsideration Form", American Library Association, December 26, 2017. http://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit/sampleforms (Accessed January 26, 2024)

While not giving a structural look into the full process of book challenging, the sample form gives a good idea of the part of the process the other sources are missing—how it starts. Of note is how challenges can be made by both individuals and organizations, there is an expectation for the challenger to have read all or part of the book they’re challenging (there was a case mentioned in Price where it was clear the challenger hadn’t), there is a distinction between school curriculum and library collection at this level, and there are possible actions other than a ban (judging by ‘What action are you requesting the committee consider?’--oh, and there’s committees deciding on these rather than, say, a school principal alone).

SUMMARY

Even though you might be excited a project's over, you should reflect on what did and didn't go well during it to recognize your strengths and improve your own skills. A good way of doing this is through an author's/artist's statement, where you explain why you did what you did in your project. Such a statement can also accompany your original work, so readers better understand your rationale, as well as what you tried that didn't work. Not every reader is going to want that, but the ones that want to dive deeper into your work will. In a sense, an author's statement is a persuasive tool to get readers to align with your view of your own work.

RESPONSE

I'm used to taking literary analysis 'death of the author' style--I guarantee I'm misusing that turn of phrase, but oh well. Authorial intent is a thing that exists, but you're not supposed to rely on it at all, as whatever message the author actually got across means a lot more than what they meant to do. I think that second part still matters here, it's just that now that we're the authors, and we're good authors*, our intent should match our given message. It's never gonna perfectly line up, of course, everyone has their own lens of interpretation, but you've gotta have something to work off of. I never thought of declaring intent as being persuasive, but now that I've heard it, it totally is. I got persuaded, I guess.

QUESTION

The textbook mentions offhand that some reflections, like journalling, are meant for only oneself, and thus aren't in a social situation. How is personal journalling still impacted by exigence, if at all? (They didn't talk about it for good reason, but man, it felt like they were dangling bait. No social situation? Crazy!)

Where Did They Come From, Where Do They Go?: The Historical and Legal Context for the 2020’s Book Banning Surge

Since 2021, book challenges—attempts by an individual or organization to either remove or restrict a book from a library—have seen a massive surge, with the number of challenges reported in 2022 nearly tripling the average from 2003-2020, and an additional 20% or more increase in 2023 ("Book Ban Data"), not to mention over 80% of challenges never get reported on due to them being largely local issues (Price 34). While book challenges have received more media coverage during the surge, the popular knowledge of the issue is largely restricted to what books are being challenged and who may be challenging them, and a relative lack of information about the process of book challenging or its history. This paper seeks to close that knowledge gap by first discussing the legal standing of book challenges (as well as what few legal precedents there are), then recontextualizing the common knowledge of book challenges with both the aforementioned legal standing and what changes have occurred that may have caused the book challenging surge.

First, in order to have a founded discussion of book challenges, one must first understand their procedural and legal background. The American Library Association (ALA) provides a sample reconsideration form on its website for public, school, and academic libraries; the process of challenging a resource of any kind begins by an individual or organization filling out a form such as this and returning it to a high representative of the library. Though the preamble and the options for resources (books, movies, newspapers, games, etc.) are different across these three types of library, the other fields of the form are largely the same. Of particular note are the questions “Have you examined the entire resource? If not, what sections did you review?” and “What action are you requesting the committee consider?”. The former implies that the person challenging a resource should have firsthand knowledge of that resource’s contents, something this paper will reexamine with later examples. The latter gives indication that the removal of a resource is not the only result of a challenge, and may not be the desired outcome by the challenger (rather than restriction being solely a compromise between library and challenger). Since one of the most common arguments for challenging books is for protecting children (Price 37-38), it is reasonable to assume some challengers would seek out ways to restrict children in particular from checking out the material, be that moving it into an adult wing, requiring identification or an adult present, or something else. One other important detail is the webpage’s title: these forms are a sample rather than a mandate. While the exact details of the forms used may vary from library to library, due to the ALA being the preeminent organization for libraries in the nation, it is another reasonable assumption that similar questions will be asked on official library forms.

A similar case of nonbinding precedent can be seen in national law surrounding book censorship; despite its strong relation to the First Amendment, there has been only one Supreme Court case pertaining to book challenges, that being Board of Education v. Pico from 1982. In the case, a committee formed of parents and staff at the Island Trees Union Free School District removed nine books from high school libraries for being “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy,” which was challenged by Steven Pico on behalf of several students there. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that school boards cannot remove books based solely on disagreement with their content. Still, books may be removed on grounds of “educational suitability”, and the school board still has full control over which books cannot be taught in curriculum. This halfway measure is sensible in theory, since the school library sits somewhere in between curricular and non-curricular, and First Amendment rights as applied to students are different in each of those contexts (Schroeder 365). However, not only is the term “educational suitability” vague, the politics of a book and its content are “inextricably linked, making it nearly impossible to parse a school board’s decision-making process…” (Schroeder 378). This case also only applies in public school libraries, leaving public libraries without a national guiding precedent; according to the ALA’s 2022 book ban data, around 41% of book challenges were within such public libraries, which is a notable proportion to have no such precedent in the law, even with something as weak as Pico.

While Pico was ostensibly ruled in favor of the students’ First Amendment rights, its resulting usage in book challenges has not noticeably changed the presumed motivations of them, only the language describing them. J.D. candidate Ryan L. Schroeder’s article in the Iowa Law Review, “How To Ban a Book and Get Away With It”, details the “Pico motivation test”, a legal test that examines the removing party’s motivations similar to the educational suitability argument in the Pico case (though, once again, only applying to public schools). On a surface reading, this test seems contradictory to the books that are most frequently challenged and banned, namely those that deal with race, queerness, or sex education (Price 34), topics that are politically charged, particularly in the modern climate. However, a school board’s motivation cannot be assessed objectively, and the politics and content of a book are linked as previously described. Because of this, viewpoint-based arguments against book challenges in public school libraries are either discarded entirely or rephrased to be more pedagogical. Schroeder exemplifies the former with district case Counts v. Cedarville School District, where the ruling in favor of retaining a Harry Potter book used disruption-based arguments akin to Tinker v. Des Moines rather than the Pico standard (376). The latter is exemplified in Schroeder’s paper with the circuit case ACLU v. Miami-Dade County School Board, where the book ¡Vamos a Cuba! was permitted to be removed despite the board’s personal motivation due to its alleged factual inaccuracies, further arguing its removal was not censorship because it did not prohibit anyone from owning or reading the book (376-7). Though many of these motivations are based around conservative values, and as stated prior the majority of the books challenged are those contentious among conservatives, the left wing is not entirely absolved, as similar cases have argued on terms of offensive speech, such as the use of the N-word in the works of Mark Twain (Holley 6). The problem with book challenges of this sort is not the contents of the motivation or its exact political leaning, but rather that personal opinion exists at all in the decision to remove information from a certain degree of public access.

While Pico shifted the language for book challenges in school libraries away from opinion to that of disruption, inaccuracy, or minuteness, challenges in public libraries have and still largely use moralistic arguments. Professor of Political Science Richard S. Price ties together book challenging arguments from the 1930’s to the 1970’s with a common thread of obscenity. Not only was obscenity law in this period vague and malleable, obscenity—the legal term for something that goes against community values—was seen as synonymous with pornography, which, while a more strongly defined term than obscenity itself, could be relatively easily extended to shun anything that mentions sex. Price juxtaposes several examples of book challenges involving depictions of sex from the 1930’s and 40’s: Smith’s Strange Fruit and Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre were deigned obscene, while Winsor’s Forever Amber and Cain’s Serenade were not obscene despite sexual content due to them not being “depraved or corrupting” (Price 35), a notion difficult to separate from the personal opinions of the court. Obscenity law was somewhat settled in 1973 with the Supreme Court case Miller v. California, which both legally tied together the concepts of obscenity and pornography and more firmly defined pornography as being “patently offensive” and having no “serious value” (Price 36). While this case did not absolve prose entirely, combined with the rise of visual pornography (via magazine, home video, etc.), books were no longer legally charged as obscene, and the distinction between content for minors and for adults was more legally recognized, something later reinforced with the position of the school library in cases like Pico. However, the base of many book challengers’ arguments remained unchanged, and the tactic of expanding the definition of pornography was only abetted by the rise of ‘hardcore’ pornography, with challengers now “invoking the defunct ‘X’ film rating” and imagery of books sold in brown paper bags at convenience stores (Price 37). Challenged books were less likely to be banned for a time, however, due to the Miller notion of serious value, as making a legal case against a book’s literary value proved to be difficult (Price 39-40).

While the content books are challenged over has changed little from its earliest cases in the United States, the defining feature of the current surge has little to do with the individual books. Rather, the surge is characterized by a severe increase in mass challenges, or attempts to challenge more than one book simultaneously; the vast majority of challenges prior to the surge were individual books, yet in 2022 approximately 90% of books challenged were part of these mass challenges, with 40% of them in challenges with 100 or more books at once (“Book Ban Data”). While the exact cause of this shift is still uncertain, a leading candidate is the popularization of lists of ‘potentially dangerous titles’, a prominent example being Representative Matt Krause’s list of 850 books he demanded Texas school districts to report back on their ownership of (Price 34). There is also a notable contingent who have not properly researched the books in question, like the ALA’s sample form suggests as discussed previously, to where “...it seems that someone simply did broad searches for any mention of LGBTQ, race, or sex education…” (Price 34). One particularly egregious case reported in the ALA’s 2023 book ban data involved the Urbandale Community School District in Iowa flagging 374 books for removal, many of which were not owned by any school library in the district. Mass book challenges of this sort seem to then be a preemptive measure rather than a reactive one, which combined with the focus on the alleged protection of children, implies that book challengers wish to prevent future generations outright of learning about the experiences of racism or the existence of queer people, for example.

Another distinction between the current surge and book challenges of the recent past is the resurrection of aforementioned obscenity law. While the crux of book challengers’ arguments are similar, they now invoke obscenity outright, and, as before, extend the definition of pornography as they see fit to anything that could possibly be sexual, such as two boys kissing in Telegemeir’s graphic novel Drama (Price 39). The legal definition of obscenity as per Miller is still properly applied, and does result in works like Ginsburg’s Howl being deigned not obscene on the grounds of literary merit (Price 39-40). However, the term’s usage in challengers’ arguments is more as an appeal to like-minded people hearing about the case than as a legal argument, as many modern uses of obscenity in this way “[fail] to actually explain how [it] was so… [and are] just treated as an obvious fact,” (Price 40). The hypocrisy of obscenity’s application is not as evident as pre-Miller, as it exists within the challengers rather than the courts judging them, yet it can still be seen with how many challenged books today involve queer characters or issues, as mentioned previously in the ALA’s book ban data.

While book challengers do not have as firm of legal ground to stand on due to cases such as Miller and Pico, they are still supported in their mission both by the vague language of those cases and by conceptual grounds, like obscenity and pornography, in a sort of activism. Though these legal grounds paved the way for the modern book challenging surge, the motivations for challenging a book over nearly the past century have by and large remained unchanged, with the surge being defined by a shift in the mechanism to do so (namely distributed book lists a la Krause and mass challenges).

Works Cited

This is completely unnecessary for the assignment, I know, but I want to talk about it for my peace of mind. Yes, this site kinda looks like crap by modern web standards. I'm not good at web design, but I'm doing it by hand and I'm proud of it. It's my own URL and everything, this is my home on the web. I don't like sites having too many frills, anyway, or at least not ones that are glorified text documents like this one. That's what Web 1.0 was made for.

I should probably be better at this, since I did take a whole course in web design, but admittedly, I've never had to put full documents in like this before. I played with it a lot before submitting, I'll say that much. It's ugly as hell on the inside, but for the purposes of an English assignment, I knew I'd be the only one looking inside, so I didn't bother too much. Allocation of resources, eh? You can't say it's not too accessible, I did do section links in a fixed sidebar, and I've got a color palette going on. I'm just minimalist.

If I were taking this as a web design project, I'd have a seperate CSS file so I could give all the 'document' sections the same class instead of rewriting their styles every time. I'd probably work in some JS to make the top links sticky. I might even have seperate pages--oh, how fancy. This works fine for me, though.