Weighing conflicting points of view to arrive at reasoned conclusions is a key humanistic competency, and Americans’ willingness to permit the public dissemination of texts that they find personally objectionable can serve as one marker of this capacity.
Findings and Trends
In 2016, Americans were less supportive of suppressing most types of texts than they were in the early 1970s, even though a nonnegligible minority of Americans still supported censorship of this kind (Indicator V-15). The greatest decline, 28 percentage points, was in the share of Americans willing to suppress books advocating homosexuality.
Source: Humanities Indicators 2019/American Academy of Arts and Sciences
An exception to declining support for the removal from libraries of books on particular topics is texts asserting the inferiority of African Americans. The level of disapproval for this sort of text varied within a very narrow band over four decades. In 1976, 38% of American adults favored removal. In 2016, the share was 36%.
Data on Americans’ willingness to allow books by Muslim clergymen with an anti-American message are available going back only as far as 2008, but they reveal that approximately half of Americans—a considerably larger share than for any other type of material examined here—favor removal of such books from libraries.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
