| > Irregular bans are ideologically driven. > They are supplemental to and fall outside of the standard book exclusion process at schools and libraries. Standard exclusions prevent books that promote violent, hateful, or mature/17+” topics from being placed on school bookshelves while irregular bans do not have robust processes and can be influenced by interest groups or local officials. Seems like when the book is removed from library using an opaque, bureaucratic process, it’s called “standard exclusion”, and when it is removed using different, more public and democratic process, it’s called “banning”. Otherwise, there is no difference in the actual outcome: whether it is “standard exclusion” or “banning”, the end result is simply that book is removed from library (or prevented from being added) all the same. Therefore, I agree that the “bans” are “ideologically driven”, because the reason this democratic process of excluding books from libraries is called “banning” is indeed very much ideological. This might also be useful to non-Americans, who aren’t necessarily intimately familiar with US politics and language games: no book have actually been banned in US in the standard meaning of this word. Every single book on the banned list is completely legal and typically easy to obtain and possess. Even in the schools where these “banned” books were removed from libraries, I believe that the students are entirely free to possess and read these “banned” books: I never heard of schools actually treating these books as contraband. This whole “banning” narrative is simply describing removal of books from libraries through democratic instead of bureaucratic process, and the choice of the word is meant to invoke mental connotations of some sort of authoritarian/totalitarian state. |
Put another way, through a political versus administrative process. That's rightfully problematic. It's not a ban, but we purposely ring-fence libraries from politics.