Exercising My Professional Privileges

One of the things that my profession charges me with is maintenance and curation of the collections that are under my jurisdiction. There are several metrics to take into account when deciding whether a particular work stays or goes, including popularity, audience, condition of the material, and what kinds of messages the material gives to the reader. We're not supposed to approve or disapprove of any particular message or author in one part of the Library Bill of Rights, but also we're supposed to work toward anti-racism, anti-discrimination, and other pro-social goals in the ALA Code of Ethics. In any case, in the fiction section, I came across a work that was purportedly a tale of our reality, but was sufficiently wrong in both what it claimed and what it tried to get across as a message that even though it was correctly marked as fiction (and how), I exercised my professional prerogative and pulled it from the collection.

( Let us explore the ways in which this story gets everything wrong. )

( And the stinger, related mostly by hilarity. )