Beacon Press has published a pamphlet about banned books. You can download a PDF here. I picked up a hard copy at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. — presumably when bookstores buy books from Beacon, they receive some hard copies of the pamphlet.
The best thing about this pamphlet is not the infographics or text — it’s the QR code that links to some Beacon Press ebooks. These ebooks are free for people who have any difficulty obtaining them, which presumably means schoolkids.
If you’re not familiar with Beacon Press, it started as a Unitarian Universalist (UU) publishing house, got spun off as an independent publisher, but still retains its UU connections.
While banning books may have been “long been used as a tool in the white supremacist war against marginalized communities”, to lead with that claim is illegitimate. Book banning goes back to before the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, with French edicts controlling publication of Protestant ideas and Britain’s control of the press was first used against white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and political dissidents. Our First Amendment came directly from those attempts at the control of ideas, which had affected the majority of colonists, most severely the Huguenots, but also the wide variety of Anabaptists, the Quakers, and even the Anglicans, who had been prohibited from attending services in other than their own parishes, for example. And today, as they were in the 70s when I first became a librarian, book bans are almost solely about religious and ethical ideas and values that we disagree on and feel are being promoted by publicly funded schools and libraries. (The left is not immune from doing that, too.) I think we need to be presenting the problem (and many other problems0 from a place of free discussion of ideas and respect for everyone, and not from a place of which ideas and groups are being most harmed at the moment.