Does it matter if books and ideas are technically "banned"?

Structural racism is real; the continued use of the "literacy test" playbook for censorship and disenfranchisement of marginalized groups proves it.

Today the bureaucrats are issuing certificates to vote to people who cannot read the ballot nor even the instructions on a ballot or on a voting machine… The left wing liberals need as many illiterates as they can get to vote in order to keep them in power.

-George Wallace, 1965 (cited by ProPublica)

It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

-Octavia Butler, Kindred

The 1965 Voter Rights Act formally prohibited states, for five years, from administering “literacy tests” to disenfranchise voters. (Significantly, it didn’t end all literacy requirements; states could still, for example, require that voters complete a minimum level of schooling, which is sure to have had the effect of preventing many poor and marginalized citizens from voting.)

These tests were a clear example of de facto discrimination— a way of using state power to oppress specific groups or classes without explicitly passing laws that did so (which would…