Banned Books Week 2023: An Interview with Robin Kirk | Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute (2024)

This interview was conducted over email with Robin Kirk, Author/Co-Director of the Duke Human Rights Center@FHI/Professor of the Practice in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, by Sarah Holehouse, a second-year undergraduate student working for the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute.

How do the issues of banned books and censorship intersect with human rights?

Human rights can be divided into derogable rights—rights than can be limited for specific reasons – and non-derogable rights, which can never be limited. An example of a non-derogable right is the right not to be tortured. But freedom of expression, which covers access to all types of media, can be limited if the material in question is considered “harmful content or ideas.”

So who gets to define harmful? I wrote about this in a recent newsletter. There’s little dispute that materials that instruct on murder, mayhem, or torture, among other violent acts, should be restricted—but not outright banned. Why? Scholars or others, for example, would want access to this material to study where the material comes from or the historical moment in which it appeared—or who created it and for what purpose.

What about books that support and advocate violent views? Banning this type of material could prevent it from falling into the wrong hands; but there is an equal, perhaps greater risk in erasing it from our understanding and history, which leads to erasing that these violent views existed and continue to shape our world.

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about Reconstruction as part of planning a new kids book and I’ve been immersed in the literature of the day celebrating white supremacy. That constitutes, in my view, a clear harm. Should materials that promote violent white supremacy be banned?

I don’t think so because the harm these books might create is more than offset by the value of knowing this virulent part of American history – and the American present. Here’s a specific example. Published in 1905,The Clansmanby Thomas Dixon—a North Carolina native and former state legislator whose papers are in Duke’s Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscripts Library--is about a Confederate veteran who falls in love with the daughter of a northern abolitionist. The couple triumphs in a campaign to disenfranchise Black men, portrayed as lascivious monsters, and defend white supremacy.

In his Author’s Note, Dixon boldly denounces Reconstruction and efforts to “Africanize ten great States of the American Union…In the darkest hour of the life of the South, when her wounded people lay helpless amid rags and ashes under the beak and talon of the Vulture, suddenly from the mists of the mountains appeared a white cloud the size of a man’s hand.”

That “white cloud” was the Ku Klux Klan, responsible for over a century of murder, lynchings, and attacks on Americans who stand up for justice (here’s a good summary and analysisof the book).The Clansmanwas the inspiration for the film “Birth of a Nation.” Into the 1970s, Dixon’s story was still apotent recruitment tool for the modern KKK.

Yet the book remains widely available, includingonline via the Gutenberg Library. I think it’s revealing that book banners have no interest in eliminating violent white supremacist views from public libraries and schools. They are really after something else.

It’s also important to point out that most book bans are not being promoted by individual parents. This is a large and coordinated campaign by the extreme right to censor and control what we read and what we think. It’s not only anti-American. It’s a profound attack on fundamental rights.

Robin Kirk

How does your role as a young adult author shape your experience with censorship?

I think it’s extremely relevant that most of the books that are currently the target of book banners are for kids. Do any of them meet the criteria for “harmful content or ideas”?

Emphatically no.

It’s also important to point out that most book bans are not being promoted by individual parents. This is a large and coordinated campaign by the extreme right to censor and control what we read and what we think. It’s not only anti-American. It’s a profound attack on fundamental rights.

I just finished It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, a sex education book for kids written by Robie H. Harris and (delightfully) illustrated byMichael Emberley. What’s harmful about it? Book banners argue that it is “too graphic and sexually explicit for children,” which is ludicrous since the information is factual and presented in a sensitive, often humorous way: just right for kids.

I wish I’d had this book when I was growing up.

Of course, parents should have a voice in what their own children read. But banning books means that those same parents are denying other families access to material they might choose to give to their kids.

We have a ripe opportunity to stand up for freedom of expression by supporting our amazing public libraries, our school libraries, librarians, teachers, and writers. That means funding; supporting access to all materials in an appropriate way; teaching about the history of books bans and censorship in our courses; calling our elected representatives and ensuring that they support freedom of expression; and most especially voting, especially in local elections for things like school boards.

Robin Kirk

Given that censorship is increasingly impacting US public schools, as well as higher education spaces, what do you see as opportunities for faculty to push back?

I think this moment is an amazing opportunity to educate at the local level, in our own communities. On the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that universal human rights begins:

“in small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world. ”

We have a ripe opportunity to stand up for freedom of expression by supporting our amazing public libraries, our school libraries, librarians, teachers, and writers. That means funding; supporting access to all materials in an appropriate way; teaching about the history of books bans and censorship in our courses; calling our elected representatives and ensuring that they support freedom of expression; and most especially voting, especially in local elections for things like school boards.

Good readers make good thinkers; and a regular habit of reading is as important as nutrition and trips to the gym.

Robin Kirk

As you mentioned, many of the most fiercely banned books have to do with themes of love, America’s complex racial history, and immigrant and indigenous stories. Most of these materials are geared towards teens or young adults. How would you recommend that Duke students, being largely among this impacted group, fight this censorship?

I think the message is the same as for faculty: engage in local politics and support the powerful resources we have in our communities. One last thing: I hope students read and read widely and read voraciously. Not just books: newspapers and blogs and opinions you may not agree with. Graphic novels and picture books (which are having a golden age) and scripts. YA novels and self-help books and comics and poetry (especially poetry). Good readers make good thinkers; and a regular habit of reading is as important as nutrition and trips to the gym.

Read!