The following essay was written for Banned Books Week, September 2022 and reprinted in various North Carolina newspapers including: Greensboro News and Record, Triad City Beat, and The Charlotte Observer. Considering Alice Walker’s 1982 The Color Purple is seeing a revitalization via its 2005 musical debut on film, I figured it’s never too late to post an oldie. in joy! –kn

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I can’t imagine living in a world without Shug Avery teaching me that God is “[e]verything that is or ever was or ever will be”—or without Paul D assuring me I’m my own best thing, while Sethe insists “love is or it ain’t.” I can’t imagine living in a world where Maya Angelou isn’t revealing how caged birds sing and Janie Crawford fails to show me why we must keep our eyes on God. And pray tell: would we be posed with Billy Porter if James Baldwin had not first gone to the mountain? Could hip hop have known the creative genius of Biggie Smalls if Richard Wright had not given us Bigger Thomas—who is just as multitudinous as Shakespeare’s Aaron? “Is Black so base a hue?” he asks. Yet, here I am—nearing the first quarter of the 21^st century, promoting Banned Book Week in a democratic nation governed by politicians so threatened by the probability of a critically conscious dēmos, folks can’t even say “gay,” let alone read about it, without risking their freedom—(amplifies Childish Gambino’s “This is America”). Here we are.

Forty years in—still promoting Banned Book Week, organized after an abrupt flood in book censorship led librarian activist Judith Krug, along with the Association of American Publishers and the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, to pin the last week in  September as concentrated time to “celebrate the freedom to read,” says bannedbookweek.org, and to “draw attention to writers, editors, librarians, publishers and readers who suffer human rights violations because of their work” (amnestyusa.org). I am most interested in the latter devotion: the “drawing attention to writers . . . who suffer human rights violations,” for, inarguably, although (most all) Shakespeare, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird are among the most popularly banned books, more students than not have read these texts or are familiar with their plots—prior to any film adaptations of them.

As a matter of fact, during my high school teaching career, my English Language Arts students read the often-banned Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Kate Chopin’s Awakening. And so, while such books have been historically banned from America’s schools, libraries, and prisons, there ain’t been a dynamic curtailing of students’ acquisition of them. And I aim not to be flippant nor to dismiss the constitutional hypocrisy and human rights violation of America’s book banning practices; instead, I intend to consider the banned marginalized voices and the improbability of their being read at all—and to deliberate, too, the likelihood of banned marginalized voices remaining in print.

If Texas, California, and Florida—especially now during this neoliberalist-hyper conservative climate—determine the nation’s K-12 textbook adoptions, thus legitimating knowledge, what’s the likelihood of the banned Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou being anthologized in them—or still being offered to the few privileged advanced placement students who usually have access to them? If the “Big Five” Publishers, inherently white male heteronormative, despite their more colorful imprints, are concerned with the bottom line—publishing for profit—how likely will marginalized banned books see continued publication via multiple editions under a government that, in 2007, reversed Brown v. Board of Education, in 2022, reversed Roe v. Wade, and is fervently fighting to abolish critical race theory—which, essentially, is one’s ability to critically think about America’s failed democracy, its capitalism, essentialism, imperialism, and journey toward fascism via race and ethnicity? If the university—the supposed institution of higher learning—has jumped on the ban wagon, with Franciscan University banning Emmanuel Carrère’s, The Kingdom, and the state-funded public librarian is afraid of losing funding, what’s the probability of Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, the most frequently contested book in the nation, remaining in circulation? Undoubtedly, America’s book banning practice is a fishing expedition on works that queer the status quo—and, especially, on Black and LGBTQ folks. As such, book banning is a covert jim crowing practice.

Therefore, under this year’s banner: “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.” I propose a queer reading of Banned Book Week that invites students, librarians, teachers, and political co-conspirators to reimagine the banned book as the banned person writing and to intimately engage such marginalized voices. According to Michael Apple, in his 1999 essay, “Cultural Politics and the Text,” written 17 years after the first Banned Book Week celebration, the (text)book is an artifact that contributes to defining whose culture is taught. They are tangible embodiments of how people think about the relationship between knowledge and power—both of which the dominant culture claims ownership. (And the dominant culture, says bell hooks, is America’s “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”) “Books themselves, and one’s ability to read them, [are thus] inherently caught up in cultural politics,” says Apple, for the basic reading and writing activities we ask students to engage “can be at one and the same time forms of regulation and exploitation and potential modes of resistance, celebration, and solidarity.” In other words, if we dare to queerly read the banned person writing—to enter a me/we relationship with her or him and insist on developing a critically conscious literacy practice that enlarges our humanity—minoritized voices have a greater chance of moving from margin to center as their knowledge—and thus, their personhood—is valued and validated.

This is America, and we are here—Black, Queer, and “everything that is or ever was or ever will be”—writing ourselves into existence.