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As surely as night follows day, as the Bard might have put it, the book banners are at it again. This time they're after the Pulitzer-Prize-winning American classic To Kill a Mockingbird. It's being pulled off a Grade 10 English course in a Brampton, Ont., high school after a sole parent complained about the word “nigger” in the text. And because a frightened principal abandoned principle.

Ironically, the subject of this great literary work, which has been on school curricula in Canada and the United States for decades, is the complexity of race and class in a backwater of the American South during the 1950s, before the Civil Rights movement forced the beginnings of change. It is a psychologically dense tale of sexual taboo and the legacy of slavery in a society still ruled by Jim Crow legislation and two centuries of fear, exploitation and hatred. I can't imagine a better way to teach young people about such realities than a coming-of-age story whose layered meanings they can absorb with the help of a good teacher. When you are 15 and in Grade 10, such learning can weave a textured understanding of the world.

That, of course, is precisely what the book banners fear.

The banners and their various enablers have been stock characters in every society since the printing press was invented in the 15th century. No surprise there. Making books accessible to large numbers of people looked dangerous to authoritarian leaders. If the intimate act of reading (unmediated by themselves) encouraged people to think independently, these same readers might eventually challenge the established power structures, be they church or state, and who knew where that might lead?

Occasionally, the authorities in question might go further still. I remember a long-ago trip to Portugal during the regime of the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, where it was explained to me that keeping peasants illiterate was government policy.

Long before books were replicated in multiple copies, banning was effected in other ways. In the marketplaces of medieval Spain, political parody and satire were vocalized in verse, to the delight of the townsfolk – leading one beleaguered king to publish an ordinance forbidding “the singing of songs.”

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press around 1440 was a revolutionary discovery that changed the world; in fact, it remained unequalled until the equally astonishing invention of the Internet, in our own age. The printing revolution spread across Renaissance Europe; and it didn't take long for the Catholic Church, the highest authority of the day, to discern the inherent moral, not to mention political, dangers of uncontrolled access to books. In 1559, Pope Paul 1V promulgated a list of forbidden works (known in Latin as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum) which grew exponentially over the years. By 1572 it included Dante, the collected works of Peter Abelard, Thomas More's Utopia, Machiavelli, Rabelais, William of Ockham; indeed, the list covered the entire range of Europe's literary production, including those pre-Christians, Virgil and Ovid. One hundred years later, a professor in the Spanish city of Logroño was jailed for four years for even mentioning a prohibited book.

“ Yes, it is all quite depressing, but there is a happy side: Banned books are always so very enticing ”

The Index was not abandoned until 1966, when it became too difficult to keep up with the accelerated rate of 20th-century book publication.

Even a cursory glance at the secular book bannings of the 20th century reconfirms the authoritarian's fear of unmediated reading. It also tells us something about the politics and the mores of the societies where censorship has occurred. For example, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was banned in Hunan, China in 1931 for “the portrayal of anthropomorphized animals acting on the same level as humans.” Unsurprisingly, Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front, was banned in Nazi Germany for “demoralizing and insulting the Wehrmacht.”

Lebanon banned The Diary of Anne Frank for “portray[ing] Jews, Israel or Zionism favourably,” as well as Dan Brown's popular The Da Vinci Code, deemed to be “offensive to Christianity.” Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence, was banned for obscenity in the US, the UK and Australia, then reinstated when social mores changed. William Golding's Lord of the Flies was banned in Western Asia because it suggested that “humans are truly savage” (although it is hard to imagine that anyone who has ever participated in, or studied, warfare might not have independently noticed this feature of homo sapiens). Across North America, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn has been another perennial target.

In Canada, more than a hundred books have been challenged over the past two decades alone, in schools, in the courts, in libraries and in bookstores, but although they have been removed from classrooms and shelves, they have rarely been banned outright. Today, the stated reasons are usually perceived racism, inappropriate sexual content and, occasionally, political reasons, including one claim that a children's book misrepresented the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Margaret Atwood's dystopic The Handmaid's Tale is a frequent source of inspiration to the censorious class.

Yes, it is all quite depressing, but there is a happy side: Banned books are always so very enticing. We itch to read them – and we usually do, sooner or later. I'm sure I'm not the only one who hid a book my parents disapproved of under the covers to read surreptitiously with a flashlight.

The book banners have always been with us and I'm sorry to say they have no plans to leave. The best we can do is to shore up the courage of those in the front lines – the school principals, the librarians, the elected members of school boards. They don't need to back down at the slightest hint of dissent. Some of them just think they do.

Erna Paris's latest book is The Sun Climbs Slow: The International Criminal Court and the Struggle for Justice. She is chair of the Writers' Union of Canada.