The midyear numbers at PENAmerica indicate that the amount of challenged and banned books will be greater in 2023 that in previous years. I didn’t do my count of Black authored books for the year, so I can’t see if there’s been any growth in that area, but the number has always been low. Does a few hundred titles one way or another really make a difference? I mean, we’re still talking about stories produced by people writing outside their cultural norm and that calls us to consider control of the content as well as the quantity. Here’s how Matthew Salesses describes it.

The writer with different culture values has to learn more than the terms and sayings of literary craft. She has to learn a whole new value system, a whole new tradition. If she believes that she must learn that tradition’s rules before she can break them, then she has to become a part of that tradition before she can figure out whether or not its craft will be useful to her old tradition. (Craft In the Real World, Catapult Press, 2021. P. 10)

See the censorship there? It begins with limiting who gets published, and continues with what stories are told, and how.

In terms of the stories that are told, Black child characters are too often limited to telling others how to treat them, to carry the weight of transforming society, rather than being permitted to portray their lives on their own terms.

A few hundred more books with Asian American, Black, Latinx or queer characters, or with some representation of disabilities, Pacific Islanders or mixed race people will not have nearly the impact as these same people actually owning, managing, designing or working in publishing houses themselves.

In 2024, we continue to disrupt censorship on all fronts.