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silveradeptI have a milestone achievement in how long I've been working at my current employer this month, which is mostly coincidental to the reason why I'm writing this, but it feels odd not to mention it , since I'll be talking a little bit about history and my history. The world of libraries and librarians seems like there's at least a little bit of progress towards being an institution that is part of and responsive to its communities, rather than trying to hold itself apart from them as something above them, more perfected and rarefied than the people that use them. It's worth noting that this idea is illusory and always has been, because a lot of the things that the library believed it was above, like politics, were only that way because the society around them believed they could ignore significant swaths of their own community without consequences.
US audiences, I hope, have been following the extreme uptick in state-level actions intended to prevent free discourse and instruction in educational institutions and state-level actions intended to remove books from school libraries that talk about the experience of people who aren't evangelical cisgender white heterosexual men. Those efforts have expanded, as well, to efforts to try and get books banned from sale in states in general.
All of these efforts have similar stated motivations about the exposure of children to concepts or expressions deemed harmful to them. As best I can tell, the underlying stated reason is a firm belief in meme contagion theory. If a child is exposed to a belief like "queer people exist," the vulnerable and un-immunized child will be infected with the meme to the point where they will discard their own self-image and believe they have to be queer to "fit in" with their peers. Or if the child is exposed to the accurate history of the United States, including the long history of institutionalized racism, the child will develop the belief that the United States is inherently and unredeemably racist and that white people should be ashamed of themselves and feel guilty and personally responsible for all the actions of their ancestors up to that point. (Instead of the approved idea that the United States has solved its racism problem with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and all subsequent inequalities are due to individual actions and cultural expectations.) Children, in this stated belief, are always vulnerable to whatever idea is told to them and will believe it unquestioningly, and therefore responsible adults must ensure the environment around them is free of hazardous and harmful ideas until they can be trusted to reject those ideas themselves.
This idea should sound familiar to anyone who has to deal with Discourse around the idea of "problematic" ships and the insistence that some types of ship are inherently unredeemable and the people that depict them are monsters to be shunned and attacked. It is not new, and it is often the first line of attack against anything deemed harmful to society.
So, education and school libraries are under attack for indoctrination (not new, as such, but much more intense as backlash to the Obama years and Black Lives Matter) and public libraries are caught up in this as well. Like a library having a milage defeated over the inclusion of a small amount of queer content on the shelves (they're doing okay, having raised the operating budget of the library to continue from the community and prominent people like author Nora Roberts) or the return of bullet hole-riddled books to a book bin in a Montana library system and an absolute clusterfuck about an Oklahoma library system planning to implement a gag order about helping their customers find information about abortion services based on their interpretation of a state gag order requirement, but trying to do so quietly and without accountability about who ordered it and what the specifics were.
Also upcoming this month is Banned Books Week, the annual celebration that in the past, retrograde social forces tried to restrict the reading of books, but we're past that now and only fringe elements want to try and ban books now. Examining the top 10 lists of banned and challenged books makes it pretty clear that the current social panics are about queerness and the acknowledgement of the existence of anti-Blackness (and white supremacisy in general). If it hasn't been obvious from all the legislative and administrative actions above.
Even as ALA recognizes that things are way more intense than they have been in the past, there's still some attitudes in libraryland that interfere with the profession doing more for embracing the fact that the politics have come for them and they won't be able to avoid it any more. In these situations, where the censors are coming for the minoritized, it's a good thing that the librarians are stepping up to defend the books and the experiences, but it's also easy to do that, because it makes the librarians the victims against censorship attempts. It's scary to do that when you have Proud Boys pulling out guns at children's programming, let's be clear, but it's an easy ideological position to take to be in favor of as many viewpoints as possible when those viewpoints are "we exist, we're not trying to convert anyone, leave us alone."
All this to say that someone called my work location recently asking about Gender Queer, the book atop the challenged list for this year. A couple days after I had just done a summary of the situation to that staff person to explain what kinds of things I was hoping they would do for their Banned Books Week display. The caller wanted to know if the book was accessible to children (sure, but it's filed in the adult graphic novel section, so they're not going to see it by accident) and what our connection policy is (it's posted on the website if you'd like to read it) and whether that policy included pornographic works (to which the official answer is about not stocking works adjudicated obscene, which Gender Queer is not. Comments about pornography are about specific pages, not the work as a whole, and also, it's always been true to the censorious interests that demonstrated, undismissable queer content is classified as pornography, regardless of whether nudity is involved.)
The initial staff person did the correct thing and passed it up to the supervisor on shift, who presumably had the rest of the conversation with this person. The censor apparently mentioned some of their YouTuber sources, which the supervisor took a look at the video lost and went "yeesh" about. We should probably report this as an attempted challenge to ALA-OIF, honestly, even if there was no formal reconsideration process triggered from the conversation. And we can rest on our policies, knowing that they're able to cover these situations and that there is a reconsideration process to follow, and that neither our Board nor Administration have been taken over by interests sympathetic to the censorship brigade so as to provide some outside-policy method to censor materials.
To say this is easy to resist is wrong, but I do want to point out that these kinds of censorship attempts play into the strengths of how libraries are perceived and how we market ourselves as bastions of freedom and democracy, protectors of the freedom to read, and barriers of a wide range of viewpoints, including some that members of the community might feel offended by. It's that last point, and its pithier friend "A good library has something in it to offend everyone," that I'm finding less attractive over time. Because that kind of attitude is often used to justify the presence of white supremacy, transphobia, homophobia, and other materials that we could, according to our started collection policies, more aggressively remove from our collections for being incorrect, outdated, or, shock and horror, offensive.
Make a suggestion like that, though, and you start getting people telling you it's a slippery slope or that removing those kinds of materials would be unethically political or partisan, or substituting the personal views of the library worker over the institution's policy. For example, one of the displays at our location is trying to get some additional usage out of a biography section, and the person mentioning it said they put up some works about the recent Administrator of the country, but they said "fighting my own implicit bias" when they said it, and because it was in text, I couldn't tell whether it was meant seriously or satirically. For context, this person making the comment about implicit bias is a woman of color, and that made me think. Whether this was a statement made in jest or seriousness, and while I know the idea of implicit bias is that it's applicable to everyone about everyone else, it seemed farcical on its face to consider that a woman of color might have an implicit bias that would need fighting or recognizing against a white man who was extremely explicit in his racist attitudes and who has a following, many of them in positions of power or campaigning for them, who are equally explicit in their racism. Then I remembered both
and I realized that a statement like that is there for the people who get it to laugh at the prospect and for the people who would otherwise clutch their pearls or complain about how there's an unacceptable political bias against a twice-impeached office holder with racist policies about immigration and racist orders about inclusion, who appointed judges with the explicit intent of reversing decades of settled precedent so they could allow their friends to criminalize health care that prioritized the living over the fetal, who was extremely careless with national security secrets while in office and appears, by all the evidence, to not only have stolen classified records and stored then in insecure places, but to have lied repeatedly to the government about having returned them or having them in the first place. Because "neutrality" demands there be no judgment passed on the content that is in our collections or requested to be in our collections (or who is using our spaces as platforms for their messages), regardless of who might be hurt by that content or those messages. We can decry the removal of content or the attempts to do so, but in no way are we allowed to suggest that perhaps some content is best left out or taken out based on its potential or actual harms.
And because of that, Banned Books Week is constrained in the things that it can meaningfully talk about. And so am I, if I try to make sure my statements are grounded in the actual policies of my organization and the national organizations whose policies we adopt. There's the Ninth Principle of the Code of Ethics to work with that's about working to defeat systemic injustices, but it's one principle in an entire framework and tradition that is all about not intervening proactively, if at all. I can justify a lot of things as "we're passive collectors, motivated only by concerns for space and budget" and what I would like is to be able to say "our policies and procedures utilize the professional judgment of our library staff to actively build and maintain a collection that minimizes harm to the minoritized, promotes the voices of the marginalized, and prioritizes the truth of history over a comfortable fantasy rooted in white supremacy." Something that, when people came with a desire to censor, they could be told to get lost rather than that their specific tack toward censorship won't work.
To make that true, the library procreation also has to fix how white it is and make it easier for non-white librarians and administrators to exist and get promoted in our systems, so what happens is genuine, rather than the fantasy of what a mostly-white profession believes will be effective.
Celebrate the freedom to read in your area by crushing the fascists beneath your feet and enjoying the lamentations of their co-conspirators.
US audiences, I hope, have been following the extreme uptick in state-level actions intended to prevent free discourse and instruction in educational institutions and state-level actions intended to remove books from school libraries that talk about the experience of people who aren't evangelical cisgender white heterosexual men. Those efforts have expanded, as well, to efforts to try and get books banned from sale in states in general.
All of these efforts have similar stated motivations about the exposure of children to concepts or expressions deemed harmful to them. As best I can tell, the underlying stated reason is a firm belief in meme contagion theory. If a child is exposed to a belief like "queer people exist," the vulnerable and un-immunized child will be infected with the meme to the point where they will discard their own self-image and believe they have to be queer to "fit in" with their peers. Or if the child is exposed to the accurate history of the United States, including the long history of institutionalized racism, the child will develop the belief that the United States is inherently and unredeemably racist and that white people should be ashamed of themselves and feel guilty and personally responsible for all the actions of their ancestors up to that point. (Instead of the approved idea that the United States has solved its racism problem with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and all subsequent inequalities are due to individual actions and cultural expectations.) Children, in this stated belief, are always vulnerable to whatever idea is told to them and will believe it unquestioningly, and therefore responsible adults must ensure the environment around them is free of hazardous and harmful ideas until they can be trusted to reject those ideas themselves.
This idea should sound familiar to anyone who has to deal with Discourse around the idea of "problematic" ships and the insistence that some types of ship are inherently unredeemable and the people that depict them are monsters to be shunned and attacked. It is not new, and it is often the first line of attack against anything deemed harmful to society.
So, education and school libraries are under attack for indoctrination (not new, as such, but much more intense as backlash to the Obama years and Black Lives Matter) and public libraries are caught up in this as well. Like a library having a milage defeated over the inclusion of a small amount of queer content on the shelves (they're doing okay, having raised the operating budget of the library to continue from the community and prominent people like author Nora Roberts) or the return of bullet hole-riddled books to a book bin in a Montana library system and an absolute clusterfuck about an Oklahoma library system planning to implement a gag order about helping their customers find information about abortion services based on their interpretation of a state gag order requirement, but trying to do so quietly and without accountability about who ordered it and what the specifics were.
Also upcoming this month is Banned Books Week, the annual celebration that in the past, retrograde social forces tried to restrict the reading of books, but we're past that now and only fringe elements want to try and ban books now. Examining the top 10 lists of banned and challenged books makes it pretty clear that the current social panics are about queerness and the acknowledgement of the existence of anti-Blackness (and white supremacisy in general). If it hasn't been obvious from all the legislative and administrative actions above.
Even as ALA recognizes that things are way more intense than they have been in the past, there's still some attitudes in libraryland that interfere with the profession doing more for embracing the fact that the politics have come for them and they won't be able to avoid it any more. In these situations, where the censors are coming for the minoritized, it's a good thing that the librarians are stepping up to defend the books and the experiences, but it's also easy to do that, because it makes the librarians the victims against censorship attempts. It's scary to do that when you have Proud Boys pulling out guns at children's programming, let's be clear, but it's an easy ideological position to take to be in favor of as many viewpoints as possible when those viewpoints are "we exist, we're not trying to convert anyone, leave us alone."
All this to say that someone called my work location recently asking about Gender Queer, the book atop the challenged list for this year. A couple days after I had just done a summary of the situation to that staff person to explain what kinds of things I was hoping they would do for their Banned Books Week display. The caller wanted to know if the book was accessible to children (sure, but it's filed in the adult graphic novel section, so they're not going to see it by accident) and what our connection policy is (it's posted on the website if you'd like to read it) and whether that policy included pornographic works (to which the official answer is about not stocking works adjudicated obscene, which Gender Queer is not. Comments about pornography are about specific pages, not the work as a whole, and also, it's always been true to the censorious interests that demonstrated, undismissable queer content is classified as pornography, regardless of whether nudity is involved.)
The initial staff person did the correct thing and passed it up to the supervisor on shift, who presumably had the rest of the conversation with this person. The censor apparently mentioned some of their YouTuber sources, which the supervisor took a look at the video lost and went "yeesh" about. We should probably report this as an attempted challenge to ALA-OIF, honestly, even if there was no formal reconsideration process triggered from the conversation. And we can rest on our policies, knowing that they're able to cover these situations and that there is a reconsideration process to follow, and that neither our Board nor Administration have been taken over by interests sympathetic to the censorship brigade so as to provide some outside-policy method to censor materials.
To say this is easy to resist is wrong, but I do want to point out that these kinds of censorship attempts play into the strengths of how libraries are perceived and how we market ourselves as bastions of freedom and democracy, protectors of the freedom to read, and barriers of a wide range of viewpoints, including some that members of the community might feel offended by. It's that last point, and its pithier friend "A good library has something in it to offend everyone," that I'm finding less attractive over time. Because that kind of attitude is often used to justify the presence of white supremacy, transphobia, homophobia, and other materials that we could, according to our started collection policies, more aggressively remove from our collections for being incorrect, outdated, or, shock and horror, offensive.
Make a suggestion like that, though, and you start getting people telling you it's a slippery slope or that removing those kinds of materials would be unethically political or partisan, or substituting the personal views of the library worker over the institution's policy. For example, one of the displays at our location is trying to get some additional usage out of a biography section, and the person mentioning it said they put up some works about the recent Administrator of the country, but they said "fighting my own implicit bias" when they said it, and because it was in text, I couldn't tell whether it was meant seriously or satirically. For context, this person making the comment about implicit bias is a woman of color, and that made me think. Whether this was a statement made in jest or seriousness, and while I know the idea of implicit bias is that it's applicable to everyone about everyone else, it seemed farcical on its face to consider that a woman of color might have an implicit bias that would need fighting or recognizing against a white man who was extremely explicit in his racist attitudes and who has a following, many of them in positions of power or campaigning for them, who are equally explicit in their racism. Then I remembered both
- the general impulse of white people to insist on being treated as individuals rather than as a group (even as they treat others as groups all the time, that's what implicit bias is about)
- the overwhelming whiteness of libraries and how that overwhelming whiteness tends to produce the belief that it's possible to be nonpolitical and neutral in collection development and other policies, even on top of systems that are biased but declare they aren't
and I realized that a statement like that is there for the people who get it to laugh at the prospect and for the people who would otherwise clutch their pearls or complain about how there's an unacceptable political bias against a twice-impeached office holder with racist policies about immigration and racist orders about inclusion, who appointed judges with the explicit intent of reversing decades of settled precedent so they could allow their friends to criminalize health care that prioritized the living over the fetal, who was extremely careless with national security secrets while in office and appears, by all the evidence, to not only have stolen classified records and stored then in insecure places, but to have lied repeatedly to the government about having returned them or having them in the first place. Because "neutrality" demands there be no judgment passed on the content that is in our collections or requested to be in our collections (or who is using our spaces as platforms for their messages), regardless of who might be hurt by that content or those messages. We can decry the removal of content or the attempts to do so, but in no way are we allowed to suggest that perhaps some content is best left out or taken out based on its potential or actual harms.
And because of that, Banned Books Week is constrained in the things that it can meaningfully talk about. And so am I, if I try to make sure my statements are grounded in the actual policies of my organization and the national organizations whose policies we adopt. There's the Ninth Principle of the Code of Ethics to work with that's about working to defeat systemic injustices, but it's one principle in an entire framework and tradition that is all about not intervening proactively, if at all. I can justify a lot of things as "we're passive collectors, motivated only by concerns for space and budget" and what I would like is to be able to say "our policies and procedures utilize the professional judgment of our library staff to actively build and maintain a collection that minimizes harm to the minoritized, promotes the voices of the marginalized, and prioritizes the truth of history over a comfortable fantasy rooted in white supremacy." Something that, when people came with a desire to censor, they could be told to get lost rather than that their specific tack toward censorship won't work.
To make that true, the library procreation also has to fix how white it is and make it easier for non-white librarians and administrators to exist and get promoted in our systems, so what happens is genuine, rather than the fantasy of what a mostly-white profession believes will be effective.
Celebrate the freedom to read in your area by crushing the fascists beneath your feet and enjoying the lamentations of their co-conspirators.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-14 05:58 pm (UTC)I assume your collection is there for the researchers to consult in their coursework, or for the research that one of the faculty does. Also, university library and therefore your content is presumably created toward adults who can consent to see the material.
I'm not surprised that the preacher burning the books was also watching the movies. Rather than admitting to hypocrisy, it would be easy enough to claim that it was an intelligence-gatherong trip. (That, and there are a lot of places that believe their preachers are inherently holy and incorruptible, so it wouldn't matter if they saw the thing the rest of us were supposed to stay away from.)