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I ended up reading Socially Just Library Management in Conservative America to see what someone might be advocating for when you're trying to do things the ALA and/or ethically library way in a place where the governing board or the state is eminently hostile to the library and its purpose.
The author of the paper is clear throughout that people are complex, and that even people who are ideologically very conservative might believe in things that would have socially just results. And that people would support things with socially just results, so long as nobody uses shibboleths to describe them. Which is true. Specific programs and outcomes are wildly popular all across ideological divides, but we can also see that support nosedive when it's described in specific ways. People really loved all the things that the Affordable Care Act did, and supported them widely. But if you called it "Obamacare," then the support sharply dropped, because "Obamacare" was a bad thing, according to the conservative media. The same thing is happening where things that have actual definitions and meanings get twisted out of shape such that "diversity, equity, and inclusion" or "critical race theory" have already been bent so far out of shape that they no longer resemble anything and are instead used to indicate "this things that might help nonwhite people that I don't like," and therefore can be used in whatever way or permutation desired, such that something that isn't DEI today might become fully DEI or CRT tomorrow if new talking points come out from Libs of Tiktok or somewhere similar. It may be an unduly cynical take on the paper, but it looks to me like the first thing that this paper says is that any library worker in a conservative area must admit and acknowledge that they have lost the war of words, and if they hope to accomplish anything, they must always work within the ideological constraints of their opponents.
That ceding of ground is also fundamental to the "pragmatism" and "interlanguage" elements of the paper, as well. The interlanguage part is essentially saying that you and your ideological opponents have to find a mutually intelligible language, with agreed-upon definitions of what words mean, so that you can frame what you are doing in the terms of that interlanguage, so nobody (theoretically) ends up decrying you and your proposals as being third rails because they appear to use the forbidden shibboleths, or that you might be saying something that suggests that libraries and their boards have historically been complicit in racism and in looking the other way on important issues so as to preserve their all-important neutrality. Admittedly, the punishment for such things tends to be swift and harsh, as we are finding out with more and more states passing laws removing protections from librarians and otherwise doing their best to insist that librarians are not allowed to be anything but ideologically aligned to whatever the state says. In that light, giving up on the idea that you might persuade anybody to see things the way you do seems like a very effective piece of advice for someone who wants to keep their job.
If that were the point the author wanted to make, though, they could have chosen a better example for someone not understanding their political situation than the one they did. The example in the paper is, I think, a better example of the possibility of public corruption rather than of a director being fired for ideological reasons. In the example, the new director does a thorough review of the budget and finds out that a fiscal officer is making more than even the director does, so the new director goes to the board and says "Hey, this isn't illegal, but perhaps we should freeze this salary until the other ones move up to be commensurate with it?" Turns out, apparently, the fiscal officer was a beloved conservative and Republican activist and while there was no official reason given for the termination of the new director, there's a strong suggestion made that it was because the new director dared to suggest that beloved activist not be given outsize compensation for their job at the library, and if the director had taken time to learn the political landscape, they might not have made such a fatal suggestion. As presented, it looks to me like the director is doing due diligence and flagging a strange situation where someone is being paid more than the job suggests they should be, which would strongly suggest some kind of possible public corruption, exactly the kind of thing that you're supposed to flag. The director then gets fired for it, which definitely feels more like retaliation for trying to bring light to potential corruption than anything to do with the political orientation of the director or the board. If there's politics being read into this example, all of the reading is being done by the board choosing to see this as a liberal trying to punish their beloved conservative activist.
If that's the case, however, that makes this example a better argument for why trying to fit yourself inside your opponent's ideological box in the name of "interlanguage" and "pragmatism," advocating for the results you want without using any of the language they don't want, is going to be stressful and ultimately may be foolish and useless. Since you can't control what someone else is going to read into a situation, you also can't control when the shibboleths are going to shift. Fred Clark (the Slacktivist) points out this phenomenon in describing how someone hired at a highly conservative religious institution suddenly found themselves no longer "missionally aligned" and was dismissed. The line of acceptable behavior and speech changed, without anyone being told that it had changed, until someone found themselves on the wrong side of it. Furthermore, the only way someone knows the line has changed is when someone gets fired or disciplined for doing exactly the same thing they had done before. For a library director, even one committed to pragmatism and finding interlanguage so they can describe their goals in terms that the conservative board or state will understand and theoretically support, the ground underneath them can always shift at a moment's notice. Legislation being considered and passed with the intent of restricting librarians and teachers in what they can teach in their classes and carry in their collections is almost always worded sufficiently vaguely so as to require the maximum spread of censorship to be sure that someone is aligned with the new goals, and often is constructed in such a way that the most fanatical of community members is given the power to dictate what is allowed in curricula and collections, usually by structuring the language so that the institution is assumed to be wrong and guilty of unacceptable shibboleths and must change themselves within a short amount of time or suffer penalties.
Based on my reading of this paper, I believe the author would suggest that what you do when you find yourself on the wrong side of the board or the legislature is recalibrate yourself and work within your new constraints. A commitment to interlanguage, pragmatism, and avoiding the shibboleths leaves you very little choice in the matter but to adapt to the new situation and pray that the deal is not altered further. Which is pragmatic, but is also the kind of thing where as the opposition gets more emboldened and more threatening, you find yourself pragmatically agreeing to censor materials so they can stay on the shelves (like drawing underpants on all the butts), or to remove them to specific "adults-only" areas (because someone complained that you had queer content where a child might notice it), or not buying materials at all because you know that buying them will make the board upset and threaten (or follow through with) firing you. The pragmatic strategy is often to bide your time when the wind is against you, wait out your opponents, and do what you can within the boundaries that have been set. At a certain point, though, your pragmatism should come into conflict with your ethics, and your ethics should win.
I know this is more complicated, because given the choice between standing up for principles that might get me fired and going along with something so I can continue to provide for the people in my household, I'm not sure I'd stand up for principles, either. (Even though, as a white masc-appearing person, I am historically the least likely to suffer actual consequences for standing up for principles.) And also, many of those laws attacking teachers and librarians carry consequences of losing your ability to teach or librarian in the state if convicted, so it's not just losing your job where you are, it's having to move out of state to get another job in the same sector. Or the consequences might be getting put on a sex offender list for having given obscene materials to minors (since there's no longer any immunity for doing your job), which would presumably also tank your ability to work anywhere there are children. Even if the actual situation was "Yes, a child checked out Heather Has Two Mommies, a community member complained that it was available, and I was charged and convicted of giving an obscene book to a minor because a child selected it for themselves." Lots of places specifically say that someone who is on the sex offender list cannot be within so many feet of schools or places where children are likely to be, and once such a conviction were present, since it's a matter of public record, it would be easy for anyone to find and then brandish as "proof" that this person is an inveterate child molester and that it's okay to ruin their life. (And that the legislation is working as intended, since it got a "groomer" or some other thing out of public service so they couldn't damage Our Precious Children with books or reality.)
We are living in the cursed "interesting times." A system whose guardrails mostly consisted of "you can't do that in public, it'll give the game away!" is having a massive freakout at the possibility that more people recognize the game and either don't want to play or are complaining the rules of the game aren't fair (and haven't ever been, for certain groups). In that freakout, it becomes clearer that the rules that supposedly are there for everyone don't actually exist for specific groups and individuals, which further fuels the protests. Now we're at the phase of the freakout where the people in power are trying to openly take away as many freedoms and powers as they can from others and criminalize the idea of resisting or doing anything even slightly out of lockstep with what the people with power want. To suggest pragmatism and interlanguage with someone who wants you as a subject rather than a peer is misplaced, even if it may be the effective solution to keeping your job. Malicious compliance and plausible deniability may be the most useful things to have in the toolbox for the upcoming few years (decades.) Public support will also be a necessary thing, whether in getting you and your friends to repeatedly request queer books, non-white books, and other such instruments to get into the collection, or in publicly speaking up at board meetings as a member of the public for greater inclusion and against censorship, or it creating catchy and viral videos about how awesome your library is because it accomplishes all of these goals that a functioning society needs. (The library workers will appreciate it. They often can't do any such thing directly themselves, even though management is always swift to remind us that we are also members of the public.)
It's exhausting to have police brutalizing people protesting the killing of civilians elsewhere (and their own government funding them with money and munitions to keep doing it), police brutalizing non-white people on principle, legislators trying to define women in terms of the men they can be servants of and the fetuses and zygotes they must be servants of, legislators requiring an inaccurate, white-positive version of history be taught, requiring that everyone must be a man or woman, no exceptions, ever, that nobody is allowed to change what they were assigned at birth, and that the only acceptable relationship configuration is one white straight Christian man, one white straight Christian woman, with the explicit intent that they produce as many white babies as they can. To fight on one of those fronts is exhausting enough without adding any others. (There's something here about fighting on your fronts as best as you can and trusting that everyone else will be doing the same on the other fronts, which sometimes seems like a fragile prospect, especially for those fronts that need allies from the group that stands to gain the most if they allow the bad end to happen to others.) The hope that things will get better in the future and that this is an extinction burst for an old set of ideologies is a useful one, but that doesn't negate the suffering that is going on now, nor the viciousness of the actions being taken. The pragmatic actions may be that you field and elect the best candidate you can, that you do the most that you can, and you put pressure on to move things in a more equitable (oop, there's a shibboleth) direction in the ways you can, and that you do so quietly, so as not to arouse the ire of those freaking out. In this day and age, though, and especially in the library world, that feels a lot more like capitulation and sacrificing ethics to entities that have already declared they will never be satisfied and there is no way that you can exist in their box.
As usual, I don't have any practical suggestions or one neat tricks to fix this problem. If I did, I'd be a Library Thought Leader, or possibly a Mover and Shaker, or maybe one of those dreaded Library Rock Stars. And I can't accurately determine what the situation on the ground is for most library workers who are in this position. I think, if I'm going to be giving advice, it would be to borrow from a religious concept where the idea is to keep commandments as best as you can, but if you are in a situation where the options are breaking the commands or dying, life is more important than adherence, and therefore do what you must to stay alive until you can get into a situation where you have the freedom/ability to keep the commands again. Where that differs from the "pragmatic" approach described in the article is that it's much more clear this is an emergency situation and these things are being done to preserve life (your own and others) rather than because you are seeking compromise with those who will happily destroy you.
The author of the paper is clear throughout that people are complex, and that even people who are ideologically very conservative might believe in things that would have socially just results. And that people would support things with socially just results, so long as nobody uses shibboleths to describe them. Which is true. Specific programs and outcomes are wildly popular all across ideological divides, but we can also see that support nosedive when it's described in specific ways. People really loved all the things that the Affordable Care Act did, and supported them widely. But if you called it "Obamacare," then the support sharply dropped, because "Obamacare" was a bad thing, according to the conservative media. The same thing is happening where things that have actual definitions and meanings get twisted out of shape such that "diversity, equity, and inclusion" or "critical race theory" have already been bent so far out of shape that they no longer resemble anything and are instead used to indicate "this things that might help nonwhite people that I don't like," and therefore can be used in whatever way or permutation desired, such that something that isn't DEI today might become fully DEI or CRT tomorrow if new talking points come out from Libs of Tiktok or somewhere similar. It may be an unduly cynical take on the paper, but it looks to me like the first thing that this paper says is that any library worker in a conservative area must admit and acknowledge that they have lost the war of words, and if they hope to accomplish anything, they must always work within the ideological constraints of their opponents.
That ceding of ground is also fundamental to the "pragmatism" and "interlanguage" elements of the paper, as well. The interlanguage part is essentially saying that you and your ideological opponents have to find a mutually intelligible language, with agreed-upon definitions of what words mean, so that you can frame what you are doing in the terms of that interlanguage, so nobody (theoretically) ends up decrying you and your proposals as being third rails because they appear to use the forbidden shibboleths, or that you might be saying something that suggests that libraries and their boards have historically been complicit in racism and in looking the other way on important issues so as to preserve their all-important neutrality. Admittedly, the punishment for such things tends to be swift and harsh, as we are finding out with more and more states passing laws removing protections from librarians and otherwise doing their best to insist that librarians are not allowed to be anything but ideologically aligned to whatever the state says. In that light, giving up on the idea that you might persuade anybody to see things the way you do seems like a very effective piece of advice for someone who wants to keep their job.
If that were the point the author wanted to make, though, they could have chosen a better example for someone not understanding their political situation than the one they did. The example in the paper is, I think, a better example of the possibility of public corruption rather than of a director being fired for ideological reasons. In the example, the new director does a thorough review of the budget and finds out that a fiscal officer is making more than even the director does, so the new director goes to the board and says "Hey, this isn't illegal, but perhaps we should freeze this salary until the other ones move up to be commensurate with it?" Turns out, apparently, the fiscal officer was a beloved conservative and Republican activist and while there was no official reason given for the termination of the new director, there's a strong suggestion made that it was because the new director dared to suggest that beloved activist not be given outsize compensation for their job at the library, and if the director had taken time to learn the political landscape, they might not have made such a fatal suggestion. As presented, it looks to me like the director is doing due diligence and flagging a strange situation where someone is being paid more than the job suggests they should be, which would strongly suggest some kind of possible public corruption, exactly the kind of thing that you're supposed to flag. The director then gets fired for it, which definitely feels more like retaliation for trying to bring light to potential corruption than anything to do with the political orientation of the director or the board. If there's politics being read into this example, all of the reading is being done by the board choosing to see this as a liberal trying to punish their beloved conservative activist.
If that's the case, however, that makes this example a better argument for why trying to fit yourself inside your opponent's ideological box in the name of "interlanguage" and "pragmatism," advocating for the results you want without using any of the language they don't want, is going to be stressful and ultimately may be foolish and useless. Since you can't control what someone else is going to read into a situation, you also can't control when the shibboleths are going to shift. Fred Clark (the Slacktivist) points out this phenomenon in describing how someone hired at a highly conservative religious institution suddenly found themselves no longer "missionally aligned" and was dismissed. The line of acceptable behavior and speech changed, without anyone being told that it had changed, until someone found themselves on the wrong side of it. Furthermore, the only way someone knows the line has changed is when someone gets fired or disciplined for doing exactly the same thing they had done before. For a library director, even one committed to pragmatism and finding interlanguage so they can describe their goals in terms that the conservative board or state will understand and theoretically support, the ground underneath them can always shift at a moment's notice. Legislation being considered and passed with the intent of restricting librarians and teachers in what they can teach in their classes and carry in their collections is almost always worded sufficiently vaguely so as to require the maximum spread of censorship to be sure that someone is aligned with the new goals, and often is constructed in such a way that the most fanatical of community members is given the power to dictate what is allowed in curricula and collections, usually by structuring the language so that the institution is assumed to be wrong and guilty of unacceptable shibboleths and must change themselves within a short amount of time or suffer penalties.
Based on my reading of this paper, I believe the author would suggest that what you do when you find yourself on the wrong side of the board or the legislature is recalibrate yourself and work within your new constraints. A commitment to interlanguage, pragmatism, and avoiding the shibboleths leaves you very little choice in the matter but to adapt to the new situation and pray that the deal is not altered further. Which is pragmatic, but is also the kind of thing where as the opposition gets more emboldened and more threatening, you find yourself pragmatically agreeing to censor materials so they can stay on the shelves (like drawing underpants on all the butts), or to remove them to specific "adults-only" areas (because someone complained that you had queer content where a child might notice it), or not buying materials at all because you know that buying them will make the board upset and threaten (or follow through with) firing you. The pragmatic strategy is often to bide your time when the wind is against you, wait out your opponents, and do what you can within the boundaries that have been set. At a certain point, though, your pragmatism should come into conflict with your ethics, and your ethics should win.
I know this is more complicated, because given the choice between standing up for principles that might get me fired and going along with something so I can continue to provide for the people in my household, I'm not sure I'd stand up for principles, either. (Even though, as a white masc-appearing person, I am historically the least likely to suffer actual consequences for standing up for principles.) And also, many of those laws attacking teachers and librarians carry consequences of losing your ability to teach or librarian in the state if convicted, so it's not just losing your job where you are, it's having to move out of state to get another job in the same sector. Or the consequences might be getting put on a sex offender list for having given obscene materials to minors (since there's no longer any immunity for doing your job), which would presumably also tank your ability to work anywhere there are children. Even if the actual situation was "Yes, a child checked out Heather Has Two Mommies, a community member complained that it was available, and I was charged and convicted of giving an obscene book to a minor because a child selected it for themselves." Lots of places specifically say that someone who is on the sex offender list cannot be within so many feet of schools or places where children are likely to be, and once such a conviction were present, since it's a matter of public record, it would be easy for anyone to find and then brandish as "proof" that this person is an inveterate child molester and that it's okay to ruin their life. (And that the legislation is working as intended, since it got a "groomer" or some other thing out of public service so they couldn't damage Our Precious Children with books or reality.)
We are living in the cursed "interesting times." A system whose guardrails mostly consisted of "you can't do that in public, it'll give the game away!" is having a massive freakout at the possibility that more people recognize the game and either don't want to play or are complaining the rules of the game aren't fair (and haven't ever been, for certain groups). In that freakout, it becomes clearer that the rules that supposedly are there for everyone don't actually exist for specific groups and individuals, which further fuels the protests. Now we're at the phase of the freakout where the people in power are trying to openly take away as many freedoms and powers as they can from others and criminalize the idea of resisting or doing anything even slightly out of lockstep with what the people with power want. To suggest pragmatism and interlanguage with someone who wants you as a subject rather than a peer is misplaced, even if it may be the effective solution to keeping your job. Malicious compliance and plausible deniability may be the most useful things to have in the toolbox for the upcoming few years (decades.) Public support will also be a necessary thing, whether in getting you and your friends to repeatedly request queer books, non-white books, and other such instruments to get into the collection, or in publicly speaking up at board meetings as a member of the public for greater inclusion and against censorship, or it creating catchy and viral videos about how awesome your library is because it accomplishes all of these goals that a functioning society needs. (The library workers will appreciate it. They often can't do any such thing directly themselves, even though management is always swift to remind us that we are also members of the public.)
It's exhausting to have police brutalizing people protesting the killing of civilians elsewhere (and their own government funding them with money and munitions to keep doing it), police brutalizing non-white people on principle, legislators trying to define women in terms of the men they can be servants of and the fetuses and zygotes they must be servants of, legislators requiring an inaccurate, white-positive version of history be taught, requiring that everyone must be a man or woman, no exceptions, ever, that nobody is allowed to change what they were assigned at birth, and that the only acceptable relationship configuration is one white straight Christian man, one white straight Christian woman, with the explicit intent that they produce as many white babies as they can. To fight on one of those fronts is exhausting enough without adding any others. (There's something here about fighting on your fronts as best as you can and trusting that everyone else will be doing the same on the other fronts, which sometimes seems like a fragile prospect, especially for those fronts that need allies from the group that stands to gain the most if they allow the bad end to happen to others.) The hope that things will get better in the future and that this is an extinction burst for an old set of ideologies is a useful one, but that doesn't negate the suffering that is going on now, nor the viciousness of the actions being taken. The pragmatic actions may be that you field and elect the best candidate you can, that you do the most that you can, and you put pressure on to move things in a more equitable (oop, there's a shibboleth) direction in the ways you can, and that you do so quietly, so as not to arouse the ire of those freaking out. In this day and age, though, and especially in the library world, that feels a lot more like capitulation and sacrificing ethics to entities that have already declared they will never be satisfied and there is no way that you can exist in their box.
As usual, I don't have any practical suggestions or one neat tricks to fix this problem. If I did, I'd be a Library Thought Leader, or possibly a Mover and Shaker, or maybe one of those dreaded Library Rock Stars. And I can't accurately determine what the situation on the ground is for most library workers who are in this position. I think, if I'm going to be giving advice, it would be to borrow from a religious concept where the idea is to keep commandments as best as you can, but if you are in a situation where the options are breaking the commands or dying, life is more important than adherence, and therefore do what you must to stay alive until you can get into a situation where you have the freedom/ability to keep the commands again. Where that differs from the "pragmatic" approach described in the article is that it's much more clear this is an emergency situation and these things are being done to preserve life (your own and others) rather than because you are seeking compromise with those who will happily destroy you.
