[On September 19th, 1985, Congress held hearings over the concept of parental advisory warnings for music. So this week, I’ve commemorated that complex anniversary by highlighting histories of censorship in America, leading up to this weekend post on how we can respond to the very fraught state of these issues in 2025.]
On three ways we can challenge the seemingly ubiquitous attempts to censor books, educators, and the truth itself here in 2025.
I’ve been writing about our moment’s attacks on teachers and librarians for a good while now, both in this blog and in other settings like my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. I can’t imagine that I need to tell any reader of this blog that those attacks have only gotten more frequent and worse here in the first year of Trump 2.0. So rather than dwell on that incredibly frustrating fact, I wanted in this weekend post to briefly highlight three ways we can challenge this trend.
- Community: I really love that hyperlinked June news story on how the residents of a Minnesota school district restricted and stopped the School Board’s attempts to remove certain books (in order to appease the MAGA types, natch). If we take the arguments for censorship at face value—and I do believe at least some of these folks do genuinely want to protect kids—then they are all about doing what’s best for their communities. So what better way could there be to challenge those efforts than by communities stepping up to make the opposite case?
- Creating: That’s not the only way we can do so, though, and I also love that hyperlinked piece from historian Averill Earls (excerpted from the Conclusion to her book Love in the Lav) on how 20th century Irish writer John Broderick kept writing through all attempts to censor his works. Too often the direct targets of our censorship efforts can’t fight back—they’re historical figures and communities, authors who are no longer with us, and so on. But one thing we can all do is continue creating, writing, sharing our voices and works, and you best believe I’m going to keep doing my part of that, here and everywhere.
- The Constitution: Creating in and of itself is a good bit of the battle, but of course the content of what we write and say and share is important to consider as well. This past Wednesday we celebrated our latest Constitution Day, an occasion on which I’ve had the chance to share my public scholarly thoughts multiple times in the past. The U.S. Constitution only directly addresses issues relevant to censorship in (to my knowledge) one spot, although it’s a very prominent one: the 1st Amendment and its protection of “the freedom of speech” from government laws and interference. But I also would argue that we can link that first amendment to the Constitution’s other first thing, its Preamble, and in so doing can make the case that nothing is more important to the Preamble’s many goals for “We the People”—and most of all “securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”—than our ability to learn, in all settings and forms, without our texts and truths being censored.
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Censorship histories or current events you’d highlight?
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