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Online Forum: Nuances of Censorship
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PEN's Children's/Young Adult Book Authors Committee weighs in on the
many forms of censorship—be it from schools, libraries, and especially
self-censorship in the process of writing.
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| Home > A Fahrenheit 450 Story |
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| Robert Lipsyte: A Fahrenheit 450 Story |
This is a Fahrenheit 450 story, only hot enough to burn my butt, no
blazing tale of the censorship wars. While heroic writers speaking
truth to power face secret police and killer clerics, I bump up against
greedy coaches and intimidated teachers.
I had anticipated that my new Young Adult football novel, Raiders Night,
would run into trouble with librarians and English teachers because of
the sex, drugs, and realistic language. There was a male on male rape
during a hazing incident. It was a hard R for the genre. But I had some
points to make.
As it turned out, the book got starred reviews and the invitations
rolled in from librarians and English teachers. And rolled out.
Sheepish e-mails disinvited me because athletic directors and
principals read the book and decided that this Friday Night Darks
approach was counter-productive. One athletic director, in a leaked
e-mail, wondered if I could be asked to talk about the violence in
contemporary music.
Because previous censorships had seemed misinformed and silly, I didn’t take the disinvitations seriously. One Fat Summer
was taken off shelves in several school districts for a vague
masturbation scene I don’t even remember writing. Teachers and
librarians reshelved it.
There was a court case in Washington state over an alleged lack of middle-class African-American role models in The Contender. A Harvard educator flew out to lead the successful defense and point out that the censoring parents hadn’t read the book.
But the Raiders Night
situation was different; there was a logical reason to ban the book.
Over an excellent bistro lunch, a bright suburban Midwestern
superintendent told me how much he had enjoyed the book and how, as a
former coach, he thought it was dead on. While he would let the
occasional teacher slip it to the occasional reader, it would not be a
good mass buy because it could get in the way of his dream.
Someday, he said, Coke and Pepsi would be fighting for “pouring rights”
at his district’s sporting events, and he’d be playing off Reebok and
Nike. He had good teams, he said, and if the fifty state federations
could ever get their acts together and create national high school
tournaments in football and basketball for ESPN and Fox Sports to
televise, there would be money from pizza chains and cell phone
companies to fund libraries and arts programs and computer upgrades.
Who needs a book getting in the way by warning that coaches exploit boys who play hurt and shoot steroids and abuse girls?
Since he was buying, I had dessert. But I didn’t agree. I explained
that I was a genre writer, a closet teacher-librarian-preacher-coach
whose mission it is to tell useful, truthful stories to youngsters who
are willing to absorb them into their process of becoming. I told him
that the jocks with whom I had discussed the book-–some in his own high
school--thought it was like a documentary of their lives. What they
really wanted to talk about was their profound distrust for adults,
particularly coaches and school administrators.
He nodded ruefully. They have reason, he said.
For a moment, I wanted to clap him on the back, it’s okay, big fella,
censoring information for boys and girls is a tricky, nuanced game,
don’t beat yourself up. But I felt the Fahrenheit flicker and silently
thought, It gets easier, chief, censoring information for adults so you
can invade countries, poison the air and leave all those non-readers
behind.
© 2007 by Robert Lipsyte. All Rights Reserved.
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