Georgetown Library Bans ‘Offensive’ Books Catherine Smith
Georgetown University officials removed and banned “all but a few books” from the McCarthy and Reynolds libraries that students have deemed “offensive,” Breitbart reports.
According to a report by the College Fix, Georgetown University officials have removed hundreds of books from campus libraries after students argued that they were riddled with bigotry and the extremely vulnerable students found them unacceptable and offensive.
Student Alexandra Bowman said she noticed a book “prominently featured a Native American on its cover” and therefore she complained to the administration. Shortly thereafter, Georgetown’s Reynolds and McCarthy libraries were almost cleared out.
“While some were simply raucous crime noir murder mysteries representative of the literary and cultural time in which they were written, other books included extremely problematic and damaging elements, including the glamorization of rape, including that of underage girls,” Bowman said in a short comment. “Completely naked women of all races were frequently featured on these books’ covers. Further, many books fetishized young nonwhite women.”
“Upon looking further at the collection of books in the library, we noticed other serialized books, most published in the mid-20th century, with similar pornographic, racially derogatory themes,” Bowman wrote during correspondence with The Hoya a Georgetown student newspaper. “Ultimately, the removal of the books was what we expected to come as a result of our inquiry.”
The Georgetown Review, an independent student newspaper associated with Georgetown University, also contributed to the university’s decision to remove the books from the library. After hearing of Bowman’s complaint, the newspaper published a report detailing the most offensive books in the two campus libraries. Some of the books featured sexually provocative cover pictures. The seemingly innocuous book included in the report was Legion, William Peter Blatty’s sequel to The Exorcist was included in the list.
“But upon first encountering the books, we documented nearly forty of the most problematic ones, predicting they would clear the library when questioned. Keep in mind, except for one book (the last in the series pictured at the end of this article—Death of an Informer), the offensive content was surmised from just the books’ front and back covers.”
Novels by Don Tracy, Carter Brown, Nick Carter and the writing duo Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy are on the Review‘s offensive list, as well as a novel by the late English writer Kingsley Amis. They often include seductive women, foreigners or both.
A Georgetown spokesperson said the decision to remove the books was made out of concern for the sensitivity of the university’s students and staff.
The university “led an investigation into the content of both libraries’ collections” following outreach from the crack research team at the Hilltop and Review. The Residential Life team removed books whose “titles, topics, and images … raised concerns for students and staff,” the spokesperson said.
The student newspaper Hoya was worried how readers might react to a story about offensive books. It put a trigger warning at the top of the story for “racist and sexist content” and offered contacts for campus health and counseling services at the bottom.
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