Censorship

The image shows two hands holding open a book with colorful scribbles and letters coming out of it.

Master1305 / Shutterstock 

The school district is back to bipartisan leadership, but exclusionary policies and white supremacy have not lost their stranglehold.

Ryan Duncan 9-27-2023

Indian River School Board member Peggy Jones speaks during a town hall meeting in Gifford at the Gifford Community Center, July 31, 2023. Jones asks while holding back tears, "Can you imagine an African American middle school student sitting in a classroom and seeing there is a benefit of slavery? Can you imagine an African American teacher having to teach that?" Credit: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect.

Across the U.S., a coordinated effort is being made to suppress any history that might be deemed “uncomfortable” to its listeners.

In Oklahoma, the state’s superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters sparked outrage by saying that teachers could teach about the Tulsa Race Massacre so long as they did not, “tie it to the skin color and say that the skin color determined it.” New legislation restricting the teaching of “divisive concepts” in Tennessee, Georgia, and New Hampshire has teachers fearing they’ll be fired simply for discussing racism or sexism in history.

Lexi McMenamin 1-25-2021

The Parler app on the screen of smartphone. Ascannio / Shutterstock.com

Parler was removed by app stores and its web server, Amazon. But getting rid of Parler is like cutting one head off a hydra: Since Parler’s suspension, MeWe and Rumble have seen massive gains.

Sharaf Maksumov / Shutterstock.com

FOR 20 YEARS, Alex Jones, a radio show host and founder of the Infowars website, has been spreading one off-the-wall conspiracy theory after another, and, for the past decade, social media have amplified his voice and his reach to a level his predecessors on the “paranoid Right” could never have imagined. In early August, Facebook and Google-owned YouTube finally took measures to effectively ban Jones from their platforms. But the way they did it raises more questions than it answers about the possibility of restoring respect for truth to public life in the United States.

Way back in the dying days of the 20th century, Alex Jones started his career ranting about the old conspiracy standbys, such as fluoride in our drinking water. But then 9/11 happened, and Jones took his act to a whole new level, claiming that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were really “inside jobs” unleashed by the secret government to launch a global war and suspend civil liberties.

In days gone by, such a theory would have been passed around on mimeographed fliers, and mainstream journalism, shackled by considerations of fact, wouldn’t have touched it. But the social media era has freed us from all that. Now anybody can say anything, and everybody can hear it. Suddenly Alex Jones had an audience of millions for his Facebook pages, his YouTube channel, and his website; this success seemed to egg him on to ever more outrageous pronouncements. Finally, he hit rock bottom with the claim that the Sandy Hook school shooting was faked (to provide a pretext for seizing Americans’ guns) and all those grieving parents were only acting.

Sandi Villarreal 10-19-2016

Jerry Falwell Jr. introduces Donald Trump at Liberty University's convocation.

A student editor at the Liberty Champion, Liberty University's student newspaper, is crying foul after his column was axed by university president Jerry Falwell Jr. The piece — part of a weekly column by sports editor Joel Schmieg — took aim at Donald Trump's so-called "locker room talk" in which the Republican presidential candidate bragged about being able to get away with sexual assault.

Image via REUTERS/Chris Tilley/RNS

What does the Bible have in common with Fifty Shades of Grey or one of John Green’s best-selling young adult novels? For the first time in nearly a decade, the Bible made the list of the American Library Association’s 10 most frequently challenged books last year.

Julie Polter 10-03-2012

TECHNICALLY, the Tucson Unified School District did not ban any books after the Dec. 27, 2011, state court ruling that upheld the Arizona Education Department’s order finding the Mexican American Studies program illegal. But in January, the school district removed from classrooms seven books it said were referenced in the ruling and put them into remote storage. The district, according to Roque Planas of Fox News Latino, also “implemented a series of restrictions ranging from outright prohibition of some books from classrooms, to new approval requirements for supplemental texts, and vague instructions regarding how texts may be taught.”

Former Mexican American Studies teachers have been instructed to not use their former curricula or instruct students to apply perspectives dealing with race, ethnicity, or Mexican American history. So, for example, Shakespeare’s The Tempest can still be taught—but former Mexican American Studies instructors have been advised to avoid discussion of oppression or race (which have long been taught as themes of the play, even in predominantly white classrooms many miles removed from Tucson).

Belinda Acosta 10-03-2012

(Tatiana Morozova / Shutterstock.com)

Author’s Note: When Arizona House Bill 2281 was used to dismantle the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson public high schools earlier this year, books used in the courses were removed from classrooms—in at least one school as students watched. Most of the titles, but not all, were by Latino writers.

Instead of swallowing their dismay, several students documented what they witnessed through social media. That’s how members of the Houston-based writers’ collective Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say heard about what happened in Tucson. Incensed by the stifling of knowledge, they organized the Librotraficante (literally, “book traffickers”) book caravan. Their goal was to “smuggle” the “contraband” books back into Tucson, and bring attention to what critics contend is a troubling combination of anti-intellectualism and the state’s anti-immigration stance enacted earlier.

Nuestra Palabra members worked with partner organizations along the caravan route to hold press conferences and celebrate Latino arts and culture at several Librotraficante book bashes. In addition to the public events, the five-day journey stopped in six cities, seeding Librotraficante underground libraries along the way. This is a reflection on riding the Librotraficante caravan, which took place in mid-March.

SEEDS. My parents were farm laborers for part of their young adult lives. They did that body-leeching work in the hot Texas sun, picking and hauling cantaloupe, watermelon, onions, and anything else that required a human hand.

My life has been very different from theirs. I make a living working at a desk. But I keep an image near my computer: It’s a black-and-white photo of farm laborers working a field. Bent at the waist, their arms hang from their torsos, grazing the ground like roots recently pulled from the earth. Whenever I start whining—about how hard my chair is, or that my computer is too slow, or that my agent doesn’t love me as much as his other clients—I look at this photo. I work, but the kind of work shown in the photo is grinding and thankless.

Because the workers’ faces are hidden in the shadow of broad-brimmed hats, I feel that I know even less about them. I don’t know their story. What I do know is that the spinach, tomatoes, and onions I enjoy on a chilled plate are because of these faceless, distant people. And yet, I know I’m not that far removed from them. Besides our shared heritage, it’s hard not to feel a sort of kinship to someone who makes it possible for food to appear on your plate.

Joshua Witchger 1-25-2012

Saudi Arabia’s first public display of contemporary art opened last weekend in Jeddah.

The National reports that the city was crowded as people visited the raw concrete building that features more than 50 pieces from 22 local artists, under the somewhat provocative title, “We Need to Talk About It.”

The exhibit displays a spectrum of the land’s story – past, present, future. But because the art is open-ended, multi-faceted, and Saudi Arabia is governed by powerful clerics under a version of Sharia law, this public test of authority proves to be a difficult subject.

Joshua Witchger 1-24-2012

Take a roller coaster ride on a classical music score, and see a voilionist respond to a cell phone interruption. See a visual of the day the internet went dark, and generate your own SuperPAC name. Plus, for the first time, Disney employees can grow facial hair. Take a look at today's links of awesomeness!  

http://youtu.be/uub0z8wJfhU

Elizabeth Palmberg 9-08-2010
So far, Craigslist isn't explaining its dramatic decision last weekend to replace with the word "censored" its entire "adult services" section, a listing which activists and state attorneys general
Benedict Rogers 2-12-2010

Google's vow to pull out of China last month was partly based on the discovery that human rights activists' Gmail accounts had been hacked into, purportedly by Chinese intelligence. As a human rights advocate, this is worrying news for all who seek to fight for justice around the world.

Julie Polter 11-01-2005

To sing or to die: now I will begin. There’s no force that can silence me. —Pablo Neruda, “Epic Song”

In a world so torn by poverty and war, perhaps music can seem like a secondary concern. But as Christians know so well, music feeds the spirit, comforts the downtrodden, strengthens the weary, and can give words a power they do not possess on paper. Imagine life without your favorite hymn or the song that safely channeled your teenage rebellion, or the anthem of peace or protest that still stirs you. Imagine life without Bach or Handel, or Neil Young, or Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” (dismissed in its day by Time magazine as “a prime piece of musical propaganda”).

Imagine if someone literally took away your song. Wouldn’t you hunger for it like bread?

When a government or powerful religious or ethnic group tries to turn off the music, the stakes are high. Music is another way to hear the news and a means to find common passion between very different peoples. In this way silence, or a restricted diet of state-approved tunes, can diminish us. But the more immediate and sometimes tragic cost is borne by the artists around the globe who have faced intimidation, loss of livelihood, imprisonment, torture, and even death for recording, performing, or distributing their music:

  • South Africa revoked singer Miriam Makeba’s citizenship and right of return after her 1963 testimony about apartheid before the United Nations.

  • Populist Chilean folk/political singer and songwriter Victor Jara was one of several musicians who supported the successful 1970 campaign of Salvador Allende to become president of Chile. When a 1973 military coup overturned the Allende government, Jara was among the thousands of citizens subsequently tortured and executed. His torturers reportedly broke his hands so that he couldn’t play his guitar; his final lyrics, written on scraps of paper during the few days before he was killed, were smuggled out by survivors.
Julie Polter 1-01-2000
Artists and believers have something to talk about.
Andrew Schleicher 7-01-1999

Project Censored listed the Multinational Agreement on Investment’s threat to U.S.