For over five decades, I have been a children’s book fanatic. I love the boundless potential books have to provide portable adventures, educate, inspire empathy, and offer new perspectives. Thus the recent proliferation of book challenges and banning attempts targeting children’s and young adult titles feels personal.
Comparing books to mirrors, in which readers can see their own experiences reflected, and windows, through which they can peer into unfamiliar lives, settings, and events has become almost a truism in children’s literature circles. However, the analogy remains as powerful as when Emily Style argued for a balanced curriculum’s need for both types of framing and Rudine Sims Bishop, who had for years been proclaiming the importance of child readers seeing their “own life experiences mirrored in a book,” published “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” It is a useful framework for examining what is at stake with crusades to mandate the exclusion of certain voices and stories from schools and libraries.
The books recently challenged in great numbers disproportionately feature BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors and characters. These populations traditionally have had few mirror books and, historically, were more likely to encounter books that reflected distorted views of their communities than authentic mirrors. Decades of work supporting diversity in books for children and young adults gradually increased the frequency of all children being able to see people like themselves and their families in books on shelves in their schools and pubic libraries, with all the attendant benefits of having their presence recognized and validated. Those of us who have always had books that reflected our lives might take for granted the endorsement they provide, but story after story, study after study bear witness to the transformative impact of discovering a mirror book for those who have seldom seen their lives reflected.
Of course, one reader’s mirror is another’s window. “Window books” are valuable in providing expanded horizons and glimpses into different lives, often with wonderfully engaging stories. For readers from the mainstream, they can also reduce the risk of narcissisum from gazing too long into mirrors. Sometimes, we can catch a glimpse of our own reflection while looking at a “window book–as I, a middle-aged white woman in the 21st century, relate to the ten-year-old, Black protagonist of Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham–1963 regarding the experience of being a middle child–and we can be reminded of shared humanity among our differences.
Sometimes, however, the vistas that reflect someone else’s understanding of the world provide undesired viewing. Perhaps they show scenes that contradict the viewer’s beliefs about society and the world and how it is or should be. Or the glimpses of characters who look like oneself reflected through others’ stories are unflattering. The reaction in recent years is increasingly to seek to ban these discomfitting books, not just to refrain from reading them oneself or keep one’s own children from doing so, but to implement and use laws that mandate that nobody’s children can read these books. Often in the name of parents’ rights.
Boarding up the windows to block out the uncomfortable perspective or painful reflection, or insisting on replacing somebody else’s mirror with a posed portrait or scripted scene, is the wrong answer. Doing so prioritizes the (dis)comfort of some readers over the comfort of those who need their “mirror” books, the preferences of some over the rights of all.
Most challenged books are returned to the shelves after their publicized challenges. Some even benefit, at least in the short run, from the publicity involved, with increased sales and attention. However, would-be censors do not have to claim victories in skirmishes that get books formally banned from classrooms and libraries to win their war of suppressing perspectives that do not reflect their own views. If they use enough intimidation tactics, they can prevent certain types of books from being included in the future. Too many teachers, already slammed with ever-increasing duties and pressure from parents, community leaders, and politicians, will make the logical choice to play it safe in the texts they teach, read aloud, and even shelve in classroom libraries–or will have that choice forced upon them. Librarians will be more cautious in their book purchases. Books that tell stories some readers desperately need to hear will be kept out of sight of those who need these windows and mirrors most.
