Book Bannings Are A Show of Power

Those who bully are often the scared ones.

Conflict theorists view power as a struggle for control between social classes.

Those with power are wealthy and influential and impose their dominance over the oppressed.

They use many tactics to achieve this and one of the ways is to control what the oppress consume.

An example is book banning.

Book-banning policies have spread across America and in Alberta, Canada. The government wants to censor what kids can read by forcing public and school libraries to remove books from their shelves.

They claim these books contain sexual content that shouldn’t be read by kids. 

And though there is some sexual content in them, these books are not solely about sex; they’re not pornography. 

Rather, they tell stories about groups with little or no power. The stories are about what it’s like to come out as LGBTQ+ to your parents, or about what it would be like if your entire gender were disenfranchised, or what would happen if individuals had the tools to think for themselves and were critical of the institutions of power.

The government is banning these texts because they fear representation (because anything other than straight is sinful) and civil disobedience (because they fear their citizens will employ their rights to criticize the government and rally to enforce change).

As Stephen King says, “Censorship and the suppression of reading materials are rarely about family values and almost always about control; about who is snapping the whip, who is saying no, and who is saying go. Censorship's bottom line is this: if the novel Christine offends me, I don't want just to make sure it's kept from my kid; I want to make sure it's kept from your kid, as well, and all the kids. This bit of intellectual arrogance, undemocratic and as old as time, is best expressed this way: ‘If it's bad for me and my family, it's bad for everyone's family?’”

And this is why power -specifically maintaining power- is the root cause of book bannings.