As we push towards Banned Book Week Awareness, it is only right that I point at a book that has a real chance of provocation. Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness Towards Racial Violence is such a book. Written by a Texas historian, Cynthia Skove Novels, this looks at how a group of immigrants in post-Civil-War Texas associated themselves with the culture of lynching in order to assert where they belonged socially. The awful effects of a society whose value has shifted to hate and violence has the potential to upset, provoke, and insight outrage, but perhaps this is where librarians end up on the battlefield. Of course, this book hasn’t been banned, or attempted to be banned, but maybe you can see where one might think banning it is a good idea.
Yes: The content of this book should upset you. It should upset you because it happened. But how do you learn from history if you ban the accounts from accessibility? Don’t hate the book, hate that it had to be written. By better understanding the value racial identity holds in this country, and by also seeing the difficulties immigrants have, do, and will face when becoming members of the United States, one can perhaps gain insight into a solution to this disgusting social tendency to find such an alliance. And if we’re lucky, future generations can prevent such set-ups from perpetuating.
