We have covered it before: school districts wideness the United States are increasingly censoring books that don’t uncurl with conservative, white-washed visions of the world. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, The Illustrated Diary of Anne Frank, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird–these are some of the many books getting pulled from library shelves in American schools. In response to this concerning trend, the Brooklyn Public Library has made a unvigilant move: For a limited time, the library will offer a self-ruling eCard to any person weather-beaten 13 to 21 wideness the United States, permitting them self-ruling wangle to 500,000 digital books, including many censored books. The Chief Librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library, Nick Higgins said:
A public library represents all of us in a pluralistic society we exist with other people, with other ideas, other viewpoints and perspectives and that’s what makes a healthy democracy — not shutting lanugo wangle to those points of view or silencing voices that we don’t stipulate with, but expanding wangle to those voices and having conversations and ideas that we stipulate with and ideas that we don’t stipulate with.
And he added:
This is an intellectual self-rule to read initiative by the Brooklyn Public Library. You know, we’ve been paying sustentation to a lot of the typesetting challenges and bans that have been taking place, particularly over the last year in many places wideness the country. We don’t necessarily wits a whole lot of that here in Brooklyn, but we know that there are library patrons and library staff who are facing these and we wanted to icon out a way to step in and help, particularly for young people who are seeing, some books in their library collections that may represent them, but they’re stuff taken off the shelves.
As for how to get the Brooklyn Public Library’s self-ruling eCard, their Books Unbanned website offers the pursuit instructions: “individuals month 13-21 can wield for a self-ruling BPL eCard, providing wangle to our full eBook hodgepodge as well as our learning databases. To apply, email bo***********@bk**********.org.” In short, send them an email.
You can find a list of America’s most commonly vetoed books at the website of the American Library Association.
Note: We first posted well-nigh this initiative during the dog days of last August. But it seemed worth mentioning this program while school’s in full swing. Hence why we’re flagging Books Unbanned again.
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