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

[silveradept]

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.

One of the main strains of criticism about Banned Books Week is that OIF really wants to represent censorious interests as straw entities. Government agents in suits demanding the removal of works from shelves, or people who have those kinds of powers making public statements about how some books should not be on library shelves. The reality is that the well-publicized censorship attempt anywhere in the country is generally one of two things - ineptitude, where someone tried to do a censorship but got caught at it (or turned out not to have the power they thought they did) and it blew up into something public, or inevitability, where the censorship is already going to happen, and even if there are protests or attempts to halt the censorship, they won't be able to stop it from happening.

The second thing that OIF doesn't always acknowledge is that the grand majority of censorship attempts happen in schools, where there are different rules and responsibilities given over to the librarians and teachers compared to a public library collection. And, honestly, most successful censorship attempts in school or public collections leave no actual record of their existence, because a lot of censorship is handshake agreements or specific prejudices that are allowed to exist as de facto policy even as they never become de jure policy.

There's an entire second aspect to be spun out of this that's about how the OIF Top Ten is an excellent indicator of what the biggest moral panic of that year was rather than an accurate tracker of what has been censored and where. A bigger treatment of this would be outside the scope of the story, except for the aspect where the last few years of top ten lists have been almost completely about queer works, and it tracked pretty well through the fight over the L and G of LGBT that then shifted into the T part once it became clear that lesbians and gay men were no longer going to raise sufficient ire in the rest of society. And that this year and last, the top ten now has several books that are heavily about racial justice, which tracks nicely with all the panic about "critical race theory" and the stark reality of seeing institutional and structural racism writ nakedly on the bodies of Black people. (I think a researcher would find this fascinating.)

Anyway, so, as an aspect of the greater conversation now happening in libraries about their own role in upholding structural racism and what can be done toward making libraries less on the side of those structural -isms, the picture book section has been getting more materials "face-out" (with their covers displayed so as to be eye-catching and easy for people who don't have a specific book in mind to catch and check-out) that have characters of color on their covers or that talk about issues like climate change or organizing or the history of marches. This wasn't a policy decision, but we have people in our community and staff where characters of color would be reflecting them, and others where focusing on characters of color counteracts the publishing trend that, as of 2018, was still more than 50% white characters.

I heard from my supervisor on one of the days right during banned books week that a "concerned parent" had sent an e-mail that they felt the face-out displays in the children's picture book area were unnecessarily politicizing children. They had arrived, expecting our face-out displays to be leaves, autumn, and other seasonal things, and instead had seen climate change and organization. They believed that children were more than "political actors" and thought we were being reductionist. They also felt the need to indicate that while they had engaged in transracial adoption, they didn't see the color of their child, but instead saw them as a child. (Yes, I can hear the hiss from the back. I did, too.)

My supervisor told us this as information, not as a request or demand to change anything, but so that we would be informed. (My supervisor passed a competency check there. Hopefully, he was aware that was a competency check that needed to be passed.) I consider this feedback to be positive, even though it was couched as a concern from the parent, because it meant someone displayed their racism because of the books on display.

For the narrative of this story, and this post, though, I want to point out that the request and concern is a censorship request. The belief that children are too innocent or don't understand big social issues like racism is wrong - research says that children are already able to separate by racial categories before they reach school age, and if you ask about the experiences of children of color, you'll find they're already experiencing individual and structural racism long before they reach the age where they're able to intellectualize those experiences. If there's no person in their household who wants to talk about things, then it falls to books and media to provide them that outlet. They can see others like them going through the same things, or gain information about what their experiences are and be able to articulate it to those around them, even if those around them won't believe it or will insist that it's not true. (Children are already political entities, as much as segments of society would like to pretend that a Black child being killed by police for playing with a toy gun and a white man getting food and camaraderie from police after he had killed many others isn't political or structural, but individual.)

Censorship these days is almost never going to be people loudly declaring that they are going to censor works and then going about it in a public way, unless they feel it's inevitable. Usually, it starts with a letter or a conversation about how things that their children are being taught or shown make them uncomfortable, and wouldn't it be better for everyone if we hid away the uncomfortable things until the children were older? Or a talk about how a book unfairly maligns all white people as racist (one of the few times that white people can easily conceive of whiteness as a racial identity) as therefore it is inappropriate to be taught in a classroom or assigned as required reading. Sometimes it comes from the outside, with a parent complaining that the education their child is receiving at school is incompatible with their home beliefs (tough shiiiiit, you're a parent, you have to do the hard work of explaining your beliefs to your child and convincing them that they're still good ones to hold), but sometimes it comes from someone who is inappropriately using their power as an administrator or as someone who has financial control to ensure their beliefs are followed under threat of being disciplined or starved of funds for not falling in line. (Never in legally actionable ways, though. That's ineptitude.)

These are not the conversations we're having around Banned Books Week in libraries. I think they are conversations worth having, but I think they have some wrinkles to them that have to be ironed out before the conversation goes to the public. Libraries tend to believe that censorship is an action that happens to them. The process by which libraries make decisions about what to spend their limited funds and shelf space on is called selection, instead, but the results are often the same, practically. Censorship could be more accurately classified as "a selection decision that I don't agree with." where the I could be personally or institutionally.

Libraries tend to adhere to the principle of free speech maximalism, so any selection decision that gets made on the principle of "some things do not belong on library shelves" tends to get classified as "censorship," except when there's a written selection policy in place, then it becomes "policy." The truth is that the library censors all the time as part of its normal selection and deselection policies. (Setting aside that the entire publishing pipeline also censors a lot of things well before libraries get the choice to buy them for the moment, although that's also important.) Your library doesn't carry things deemed obscene because the selection policy says you don't buy them. Your public library probably doesn't carry explicitly visually pornographic materials because of their selection policy. So we've already established that there are boundaries. The fight is where they are, not whether they exist.

Historically, libraries have also been championed as "the people's university" or "the last bastion of democracy" and other phrases that indicate people think of libraries (or thought of libraries) as places where people should be able to educate and uplift themselves and otherwise become better citizens and scholars with the help of trained professionals. The history of libraries is such that libraries were supposed to be the people who helped the immigrants assimilate, the poors become respectable, and all the BIPOC become culturally white, even if their skin tones meant they would have to happily and cheerfully bear the burden of never being white enough to be equals. Libraries and Librarians were perceived as saviors on a mission of mercy to help those less fortunate, so they had to make sure their shelves were stocked with enlightening and strengthening materials to achieve this mission.

Both of these ideas should make it easier to shove the perception window in a more social justice-y direction, honestly. It will run into the problem of white people believing they have solutions without having consulted the people they're supposed to be helping, of course, which will take more work to untangle. But if we already admit we make decisions about who gets selected and who doesn't, and we admit that librarians work best when they're trying to raise the level of the discourse of the citizenry around them, the last useful component in place is to be willing to orient ourselves in a direction toward better justice for all, and then to say and do with our whole being that we are working in that direction. Which means that some people will not be on the shelves, no matter how popular they are, because they have fundamentally anti-justice beliefs. That means carrying people who our communities believe are better at creating a more just world, and employing more people who have better ideas of what justice is in positions that hold actual power to bring them into existence. (And un-employing people who would rather cling to their -isms than leave them behind.)

(It'll also mean having to gracefully accept course corrections and accountability from the people who know better when they tell us we're screwing it up, and that's difficult for an institution that has bought into the lies that they're better than everyone else, nobler, or more pure.)

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.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Censors have never understood that if you tell me a book is banned, I'll read it and it was as true in my beloved 17th century as it is now!

As it happens, I've just finished reading a book on censorship in the seventeenth century for a work project.

[silveradept]

Sure, but for a book to be known as having been banned or challenged, it means the censorship attempt failed at staying quiet (or was never meant to be quiet). I feel like there's a lot more censorship going on than what we hear about precisely because it is successful at both achieving it's ends and staying quiet about its existence.

[davidgillon]

One of those times I wish dw had a 'like' button.

Also one of those times I wish real life didn't mean this was a subject that needed writing about. But the Tory MP who demanded at the Tory Party Conference that people who talk about white privilege should be referred to the government extremism programme demonstrates that censorship is alive and well and living in government

[silveradept]

Very much so. And in our era, it seems to be that the authoritarians and censors have sympathetic ears in places that can become government or that believe themselves government despite having been ejected.

[ephemera]

*reads with appreciation"

[silveradept]

Thanks for reading.

[elisem]

Well explicated. I will be thinking about this for a good while.

[silveradept]

Thank you for reading. I hope the thinking ultimately proves productive.