SUNY Oswego held Oz Reads Banned Books, an educational event seeking to educate students about banned books and what they can do to influence the issue.

The event took place outside of Penfield Library on Oct. 3, and was a collaboration between the creative writing department, political science department and the library. There were several tables that had activities relating to different topics with banned books.

“The main goal is to bring attention to the banning of books, and also to the fact that that is increasing,” Laura Donnelly, director of the creative writing program at SUNY Oswego, said. “It’s certainly much more of an issue than when we were doing this five years ago.”

Book bans and pushes for book bans have increased significantly in recent years. According to the American Library Association (ALA), there were 1269 attempted book bans in 2022, nearly doubling the number from last year. These calls for banning resulted in 2571 different books being banned, according to the ALA.

“A lot of times, books get banned for profanity or sexually-explicit material, but that is frequently a kind of smokescreen,” Nicole Westerdahl, a librarian at Penfield Library, said.

Often, the books that are marked as sexually-explicit content will be books with LGBTQ themes or those that question things such as systemic racism. The most banned book of 2022, Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” is explicitly LGBTQ in its content, and was challenged over 151 times for claimed sexually-explicit content.

Widely-esteemed authors such as Toni Morrison are also not safe from serial book bans; “The  Bluest Eye,” recognized as Morrison’s earliest work published in 1970, is one of the most prolifically contested books in present day. The reasons for its proposed banning include the depiction of sexual abuse, equality, diversity and inclusion content, and an alleged sexually explicit nature.

The range of books that are banned or have been banned is broad, including titles such as “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie, to household names like John Green’s “Looking for Alaska.” Even graphic novels are not safe, as books such as Art Spiegel’s “Maus” and Jeff Smith’s “Bone.”

“When we start banning books, that’s when we start stopping voices,” Donnelly said. “And too often that’s also stopping the voices of people already on the margins.”

Books usually get banned at the extremely local level. Book bans almost entirely take place at the level of school boards, which is a position that has to be elected. Professor Allison Rank, the manager of Vote Oswego, said that school board elections have an extremely low turnout rate. This means that the area where voters’ influence is most direct is extremely underutilized.

“It’s easy to think about electoral politics as being sort of about big things that are happening in Washington D.C. but it’s also about local politics, and local politics are where book bannings happen,” Rank said.

One of the biggest goals of the event was to bring attention to the fact that books are being banned at a higher rate than ever before. The state that accounts for the most book bans in 2022 is Texas, with 93 attempts at book bans and over 2000 challenged books, but New York has a fair amount of books up for debate as there have been 82 books challenged and 33 attempts to ban books, according to the ALA.

Photo by Nicolas Diaz Contreras