© 2024 WFAE
90.7 Charlotte 93.7 Southern Pines 90.3 Hickory 106.1 Laurinburg
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Each Monday, Tommy Tomlinson delivers thoughtful commentary on an important topic in the news. Through these perspectives, he seeks to find common ground that leads to deeper understanding of complex issues and that helps people relate to what others are feeling, even if they don’t agree.

Are you there, book banners? It's me, defender of open minds

A new wave of book banning is spreading throughout the country, and particularly in the South. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says the movement stems from fear.

This Friday, the movie version of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” opens in theaters. It was filmed right here in Charlotte and the surrounding area. It’s based on the 1970 Judy Blume novel — a classic that has helped millions of young people, especially young women, navigate their teen and preteen years.

It is also a book where young girls get their first periods, and a book where the title character at one point says she doesn’t need religion or God.

And so it is that this classic novel was a longtime target of folks who wanted to ban it from school libraries and classrooms.

That authoritarian twitch ebbs from time to time, but it never seems to go away. According to a new report by PEN America, a group dedicated to free speech, 37 states — including nearly all the Southern states—have had recent cases where books were banned from classrooms or school libraries.

The issue here is not banning a specific sentence or image. Every once in a while, a book that really is too graphic or violent for a child winds up in a school library. It’s fine to weed those out. The real problem is people who want to set aside whole ways of thinking, or whole categories of people. It’s no accident that the books on the most-banned list tend to center on either LGBTQ issues or race.

Let’s be clear on something here: Books are dangerous, if what you’re afraid of is an open mind. They are deadly weapons against bigotry and ignorance. They are also essential to an education that doesn’t tell young people what to think, but how to think.

Every author from Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss has more than entertainment in mind. They’re trying to expose us to new ideas, push our boundaries, make us uncomfortable. Their most daring trick is that they promote empathy — helping us understand how someone else feels, even if we think we’re nothing like them.

These are all principles of the Good Book, by the way — they’re exactly what Jesus taught about questioning authority and loving everybody. But the urge to ban books is the Old Testament way of division and punishment.

Sometimes authors’ ideas spark discomfort from multiple angles. J.K. Rowling’s "Harry Potter" books were targeted from the right because some thought her work promoted witchcraft. More recently, people on the left have criticized her for what they felt were anti-trans comments. But there is a difference. As far as I can tell, the critics on the left aren’t trying to get her books pulled from schools.

There’s a special intimacy about a book, a secret bond between the reader and the text. Google and Microsoft and Apple know exactly what you’re reading on the web. No one has to know the book you read under the covers at night. It’s a safe space to work out your thoughts and feelings.

Books are such powerful tools to help everyone — but especially young people — expand their world, learn new things, think in different ways. It is so sad that so many see that power and want to switch it off.


Tommy Tomlinson’s "On My Mind" column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org.It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.

Tommy Tomlinson has hosted the podcast SouthBound for WFAE since 2017. He also does a commentary, On My Mind, which airs every Monday.