{"id":19823,"date":"2016-12-13T06:54:26","date_gmt":"2016-12-13T11:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=19823"},"modified":"2016-12-13T06:54:26","modified_gmt":"2016-12-13T11:54:26","slug":"criticism-vs-suppression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=19823","title":{"rendered":"Criticism vs. Suppression"},"content":{"rendered":"

The differences between hateful speech and constitutionally restricted hate speech, between criticism and suppression, have become subsumed in the publishing world as there have been a spate of recent critical discussions regarding published books which swiftly devolved into social media choruses calling to have these books removed from publication, or to have their publication cancelled. In several recent examples this year those calls were successful and the books were either removed, cancelled, or indefinitely delayed.
\nAt DDG Booksellers, for the last 25 years, I have had the same ordering policy as most other bookstores. I stock the books from publishers which I choose to stock as a professional buyer. Selections are filtered based on my experience and understanding of our local market and also according to my personal biases, both positive and negative. My freedom to choose from among published books flows directly from their publishers’ freedom to publish whatever titles they choose to publish. I will, however, order absolutely anything a customer asks me to as long as it is in print and available. The store’s policy embodies both my right as a buyer and proprietor to stock the books I want to carry and the right of my customers to read and purchase whatever books they want to own and read.
\n
\nSome years ago a customer special ordered several titles from a publisher called the Noontide Press, the publishing arm of the Institute for Historical Review, which turned out to specialize in books and journals denying the Holocaust. Though an entirely secular person, ethnically I am of German Jewish descent. As you may expect, these particular special ordered books were spectacularly offensive to me. I called the publisher and ordered them anyway. They represented falsifying history, denying genocide, and were profoundly anti-Semitic. I considered them hateful books. Nonetheless they did not represent hate speech exempted from First Amendment protection. The only legal exceptions to First Amendment speech involves “fighting words,” words which would provoke a reasonable person to violence, or words given in a context likely to cause imminent harm to others, “incitement intended to and likely to produce imminent illegal conduct.”[i]<\/a>
\nWhen we think of restricted speech the most commonly attributed exemplar is the “dangerous speech” example of shouting fire in a crowded theater, which was given in the Supreme Court’s Schenck v. United States decision. When a book is labeled as racist and hate speech, “the kind of garbage that needs to be eliminated at all levels, particularly in publishing.”[ii]<\/a> and a volley of calls for sending the book to the guillotine follows, it is the First Amendment that ends up being trampled by the publisher’s frantic exit from a crowded theater. Criticizing a book is vitally important, calling for its suppression is dangerous.
\nSuppression of published works is a deprivation of liberty. The price of that liberty is the coexistence and interaction with books of which we are critical, a price which it is crucial we pay. That critical dialogue is an integral part of the living process of a healthy and dynamic literary marketplace. In the present moment, with the First Amendment already under fire, this is not the time to undermine it further with calls for publishers and authors to self-censor. Publishers need our support for publishing whatever they choose, in their professional opinion, to publish. Poor decisions will result in poor sales, just as our own poor buying decisions do. We can criticize their decisions both in speech and by not buying the books, but we should adamantly defend the publishers’ right to publish them.
\n[i]<\/a> No, there\u2019s no \u201chate speech\u201d exception to the First Amendment, by Eugene Volokh, https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/volokh-conspiracy\/wp\/2015\/05\/07\/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment\/?utm_term=.6851db14cb39
\n[ii]<\/a> http:\/\/bookriot.com\/2016\/12\/02\/its-not-funny-its-racist\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Publishers need our support for publishing whatever they choose, in their professional opinion, to publish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}