TISHLILS(HIPA): How to Properly Talk About Censorship and Libraries

I have a Banned Books Week story for all of you. And, even better, it's a story about censorship, so it's both temporally and thematically appropriate for everyone.

For the people who are unaware, Banned Books Week is a production of the American Library Association (ALA)'s Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF), set for the last full week of September. The most famous element of this annual entity is the Top Ten Most Challenged Books list for that year, based on the reported challenges to OIF.

The usual way that Banned Books Week is celebrated in most public and school libraries is something that could charitably be described as "tawdry carnival theatricality," as a co-worker of mine so effectively put it. Photo-booths where people could take a picture of themselves behind bars for "reading banned books" and splashy displays of which books have historically been challenged a lot (but by "historically," they usually mean things like Nineteen Eighty-Four, To Kill A Mockingbird, or Slaughterhouse-Five) and the reasons for those books being challenged. It's supposed to be a celebration of the freedom of people to read or view the materials that they desire without interference from others.

( The story )

To bring it back around to where we began, how could Banned Books Week stop being about tawdry carnival theatricality and focusing on the past in a way that paints libraries as saviors? Can libraries tackle having real and meaningful conversations about ongoing efforts to classify queer material as automatically adult? Can we host forums about the moral panic about the idea that even if individual white people don't do a conscious racism, they still benefit from structures that are racist and that have been going on for generations? Can we tell groups who want to use the library as a legitimizing institution for their efforts to get lost if their beliefs are in conflict with our core values? Can we talk about the ways that people who are expressing their own beliefs are doing a censorship, even if they believe they're right and the unmarked default?

I have only a small censorship story to share with you for this Banned Books Week, but my small censorship story is neither unique nor isolated. The response should neither be small nor isolated.

And the slightly-behind End of September linkdump - Late Spetember 02021

Hello, let's begin with selections from the Small World contest that shows some of the smallest things in great and captivating detail.

The decision in Bell v. Tavistock in the UK has been rescinded, and it is once again a matter between people and their medical professionals with regard to the use of puberty blockers and other trans care. Good. And, perhaps, if the defeat can make the opponents of affirming care focus hard on trying to overturn it without success, they can waste time, effort, and resources they can't then use to attack others.

The lawyers involved in several suits alleging widespread elections fraud in states that the previous Administrator wanted to win and did not are being recommended for sanctions and possible disbarrment by the judge that had to listen to the case and make a ruling on it. The Honorable Linda Parker's opiion and order is 110 pages, but makes clear just how much these lawyers have aggravated the judge and made a mockery of the legal process [PDF] and is worth a read on those grounds alone.

( And even more inside )

Last for tonight, the heroes of the comic books as rendered in a traditional Northwest indigenous art style.

And The Latest Kate, combining affirmations and natural scenes together into really beautiful art. The statements themselves are excellent, the drawings are great, and the intersection of the two is really quite gorgeous.