Free the Word

Book bans are about fear, control and the desperate need to manage public imagination

- Divya Tiwari

Tall began when the Texas State Board of Education mistook a brown bear for a potential red threat that might turn kids into communists. In 2010, the Texas State Board of Education banned Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? It was not because it was a piece of subversive literature corrupting young minds, but because they confused its author, Bill Martin Jr., with a completely different Bill Martin, a Marxist philosopher who wrote Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation (2008).

Joseph Maximillian Dunnigan, founder of the Banned Books Museum in Estonia, shared this absurd anecdote during a conversation with Outlook. He said, “When they banned this Bill Martin, they also accidentally banned the children’s author Bill Martin. That was very embarrassing, of course, and they had to apologise. But it shows, I think, something very important, which is censorship is not a very useful, effective tool. And usually it is used by people who are not very, let's say, skillful and thoughtful.”

Apparently, a children’s book featuring a yellow duck and a blue horse was dangerously close to igniting a proletarian uprising or so they thought!

As bizarre as it sounds, this episode isn’t an outlier. It stands as a perfect example for the absurd logic that governs censorship worldwide. Whether it’s a misread author bio in the United States of America or a line about religious identity in India, bans are rarely about books themselves.

The Roots of Censorship

Book bans are about fear, control and the desperate need to manage public imagination. Throughout history, censorship has been wielded by those in power to suppress ideas that threaten their authority, often cloaked in the guise of protecting society. The