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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#15: "I am at the vanguard of a progressive institution."
Oh, I wish. This is the sort of thing that library school teaches the gradautes, and much like the previous library-related one, about how a new recruit can make changes in their organization, it's almost pure public-relations material, unless you happen to be in a very specific space and time.
( Shall we talk again about the library as a fundamentally conservative institution? I think we shall. )
If public libraries (and schools) were really allowed to be progressive institutions and to work toward being the kind of place that provided for the needs of their community, rather than what a bunch of white women think, filtered through the particular experience of being underfunded and subject to intimidation by people who don't understand what's happening, but do have the ability to control how underfunded they are, we could do a lot more, and a lot better. It would take having to get rid of a lot of cherished, "traditional" values and finding ways of making sure that getting the high quality education needed for the position wasn't economically ruinous, so that we could finally get people in the profession who looked like and came from our community and would be trusted to do it right. (Or at least to get closer to doing it right.) Maybe when the demographics of librarianship look more like the demographics of the country, we'll have a better chance at achieving the progressive part. And maybe, at that point, we'll be willing to tell the people screaming at us that we're leftist-pinko-queer-woke-communists to fuck off, instead of panicking that somehow we've uninentionally stopped being neutral, and that has to be rectified immediately.
#15: "I am at the vanguard of a progressive institution."
Oh, I wish. This is the sort of thing that library school teaches the gradautes, and much like the previous library-related one, about how a new recruit can make changes in their organization, it's almost pure public-relations material, unless you happen to be in a very specific space and time.
( Shall we talk again about the library as a fundamentally conservative institution? I think we shall. )
If public libraries (and schools) were really allowed to be progressive institutions and to work toward being the kind of place that provided for the needs of their community, rather than what a bunch of white women think, filtered through the particular experience of being underfunded and subject to intimidation by people who don't understand what's happening, but do have the ability to control how underfunded they are, we could do a lot more, and a lot better. It would take having to get rid of a lot of cherished, "traditional" values and finding ways of making sure that getting the high quality education needed for the position wasn't economically ruinous, so that we could finally get people in the profession who looked like and came from our community and would be trusted to do it right. (Or at least to get closer to doing it right.) Maybe when the demographics of librarianship look more like the demographics of the country, we'll have a better chance at achieving the progressive part. And maybe, at that point, we'll be willing to tell the people screaming at us that we're leftist-pinko-queer-woke-communists to fuck off, instead of panicking that somehow we've uninentionally stopped being neutral, and that has to be rectified immediately.
