Censoring the Unsaid, OR, Damned If You Do, #%&*@ If You Don't

Semantics. Oh yeah! I said it!
Today we look at the strangest of trends I’ve encountered in a while, but one that is of infinite interest to me. It is not necessarily new, but I find it far more insidious than plain old-fashioned book banning. We are familiar with people censoring, removing, or otherwise restricting books because of what the books say. But from time to time you get the opposite case; people censoring removing, or otherwise restricting books because of what the books didn’t say. Only implied.
Our first case comes from Nick Bruel. Nick didn’t really know what he had wrought when he wrote a Facebook post on Monday chronicling an interaction he’d just had with a library aide. As of this post it has received 1.9K “Likes”, 252 comments, and 849 shares. With his permission I post it here for you now in its entirety:

October 1 at 10:07 PM

 
Okey dokey. Lots to pick apart here.
First off, he’s dead right about the Garden State Parkway. The one point that I’d like to clarify about that deathtrap masquerading as a road is the fact that if you get onto it and suddenly discover that you’re low on gas, God help your soul. There are no gas stations for a very long stretch of the dang thing.
Seriously. It’s not worth it.
But the more interesting point is that in this particular case a library aide has told an author that if he is using symbols to represent cuss words, he is doing something inherently wrong. Now as many in the comments to this post pointed out, this may be a far more common occurrence in our nation’s schools than many of us would like to acknowledge. As Lisa Gonzalez Newton put it so eloquently, “Most schools don’t have funding for professional librarians and are run by aides. Or they have one district librarian who oversees aides running libraries at several different sites. That means they often receive little to no training-especially in censorship issues.” Too true.
Just the same, I’m actually far more fascinated by the idea that the author is at fault for even suggesting that swearing exists. But reread the email from the aide. It appears that the real impetus for the question didn’t originate with her but with an uncomfortable parent who was asked to explain what the symbols meant.
Now there’s been a lot of talk about discomfort and children’s literature over the years. Heck, I just wrote a review of a book where I talked about my own discomfort talking to my children about death. Other parents might feel that way when discussing race, sexuality, gender norms, religion, etc. What emerges from all of this is a disinclination to engage our children with the aid of literature. A child learns about a truth in the world and naturally turns to their parent for help and an explanation. But that makes the parent feel weird so they blame the book and not their own inability to confront honest truths with their kids.
There’s a dark and sinister side to all of this that goes above and beyond mere Yosemite Sam-type swearing (which is what I, personally, hear when I read symbols like #%&*@). Taking a book to task over what it doesn’t say, rather than what it does say,  specifically when we’re talking about language and semantics, is the start of a slippery slope.
On the same day that Nick posted this story on Facebook, a blog post appeared on the Lerner site called Can I Touch Your Hair and the N-Bomb: What Is Appropriate For Children. At the start, we hear that an Amazon reviewer had concerns about the fact that in the book there is a poem called “The N-Bomb”. Now the poem (shown below) does not say the n-word specifically, but it references it. As author Charles Waters writes, “To have not written the poem ‘The N-Bomb’ in Can I Touch Your Hair? would have been the equivalent of erasing my existence as a person of color in this world.”

“I am reminded of an interview with Katherine Paterson, author of the Newbery Award-winning book Bridge to Terabithia, which includes the death of a child and has been criticized as being inappropriate for children. In an interview, she said, ‘I worry about children who still need a fairy tale. Is there a dividing line between children who need a fairy tale and children who need a book that reflects their life? It differs from child to child. And it’s [BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA] a book I really hope parents will read with their children. It gives you a safe place to talk about hard topics.’
I’m proud to have been part of creating a book that’s a safe place to talk about hard topics.”

In another similarity to Nick Bruel’s case, this was a person objecting to a children’s book even acknowledging that curse words exist in some form. Books are our safe spaces, but different people define “safe” differently. For some folks, children’s books exist outside of the real world and shouldn’t touch on complex issues. For others, when children’s books talk about unsafe topics, they give parents and educators guidance and a child-friendly method of exploring something that might otherwise go unsaid and unexplained between parent and child.

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