Original illustration by Julia Turner ’23.
Did you know that the Harry Potter series was banned? Banned Books Week is a global event around the end of September every year, originating in 1982. In fact, this past week was Banned Books Week (September 18th-24th). Its significance lies in the celebration of intellectual freedom and raising awareness on the effect of censorship, starting with books. The chosen theme for this year is “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”
Banned Books Week was first founded by activist Judith Krug, in 1982. The goal was to bring to light the censorship of books to United States citizens. This was following the Island Tree School District v. Pico case, which resulted in the Supreme Court ruling on June 25th, 1982, that school officials do not have the permission to ban books from libraries solely due to their content.
The cause for the challenge/ban of these books through the last four decades were often due to their nature of containing profanity, sexual explicitness, abuse, and gender diversity.
The five most challenged books across the United States this year (in descending order), according to the American Library Association (ALA)’s Office for Intellectual Freedom are: Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe; Lawn Boy, by Jonathan Evison; All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson, Out of Darkness, by Ashley Hope Perez; and The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas.
Why is book banning and censorship important to Northwood? Banned Books Week raises awareness of censorship to the school, which has secluded itself as a private institution, according to Ms. Noel Carmichael, Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs.
“We’re a little bit sheltered from this issue [of censorship], in a way, because, as an independent school we have a lot of freedom,” Carmichael said. “Every one of our English teachers and other courses gets to choose what they want to include in their courses that we vet internally, but we don’t have to respond to any external source for our reading material. So, we have a lot of freedom. But what that means is that we are ignorant of these issues. We can read whatever we want, but there are some people who can’t, and therefore, we have that problem of not knowing it’s an issue because it’s not an issue for us.”
Back to the beloved Harry Potter books. According to the American Library Association, the popular children’s series, which has been made into wildly popular movies, are the most challenged books of this century. The most recent occurrence was in a Nashville Catholic school in 2019, according to The Tennessean newspaper.
