San Diego City College students like Jonathan Primero used Sharpie markers to cross out parts of articles to create a poem at a recent workshop in the campus library.
They picked from different copies of poems, articles and newspaper clippings to cross out sentences to make their own poems.
The purpose of the workshop was to highlight what censorship can look like by allowing students to change a piece of text with the swipe of a pen.
“It’s good to be able to be on the other side of manipulating what someone else wrote,’’ Primero said. “We’re censored to only what other people want us to know. Maybe we should look beyond what we can just read and try to see what’s behind those black lines.”
Primero was among the students on hand for the City College library’s poetry blackout workshop, hosted as part of The American Library Association’s and Banned Books Week Coalition’s annual Banned Books Week events held across the nation.
Censorship is defined by the American Library Association as limiting or removing access to words, images or ideas. The decision to restrict or deny access is made by a governing authority.
Students who participated in the workshop were able to observe how easy it can be to restrict access to texts, books, and academic materials, and how their access to information can can be limited when censorship takes place.
“Banned Books Week, in general, supports intellectual freedom and the freedom to read whatever you want to read,” said Marley Rodriguez, the Equity and Outreach Librarian at City College.
City’s library participates in Banned Books Week to underline what censorship is and how it impacts students.
“If censorship does occur and books are banned, which they have been, how boring does that become to just have access to only one perspective and one type of information?” Rodriguez said.
Students like Primero said that not only does censorship impact current students like him, but future ones as well.
“Banning books can be detrimental,” Primero said, “because knowledge is power, and when you ban certain books, you could essentially handicap our youth.”
