The wife of an old friend of mine is a librarian, which was always good for librarian jokes when we went out to dinner. But she wasn’t joking when she vented about trying to find new novels worthy of shelf space. Almost every book, she explained, is about some coming of age of a marginalized person, whether ethnic or sexual, with intimate detail, little plot and poorly written. And the baby librarians loved them, not because they were good literature, but because they were “correct” literature.
She had nothing against novels telling the stories of marginalized people, although she did have a problem with bad writing. What troubled her was that there was little else being published. The book prize lists were barren of anything else. How many books about teenaged gender nonbinary Norwegian one-legged food-insecure unibrow women with a gerbil can you read?
Stanley Kurtz argues that libraries, like academia, have been captured by the woke.
What in the world is a woke librarian? After all, through venerable proclamations like the Library Bill of Rights, America’s librarians have long pledged to “provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.” The declaration adds, “Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” This professional stance is known as “neutrality.”
By vowing ideological neutrality in the provision of knowledge, librarians ideally enable readers to develop opinions based on broad consideration of the available alternatives. In contrast, librarians who allow their personal politics to control or curtail the provision of information violate neutrality and betray the public trust. A woke librarian, then, is a contradiction in terms.
Contradiction or not, woke librarians — by which I mean librarians who see it as their duty to promote progressive views on race, policing, sexuality and other issues — are everywhere. Yet the Library Bill of Rights has it right: The library should remain sacred ground — a neutral sphere above the fray — precisely because libraries leaven and inform the fray itself.
Like it or not, somebody has to pick the books to put on the shelf. There is only so much shelf space and, from the librarian’s point of view, it needs to be used wisely. This is true both for content and practicality. There’s no point in burning shelf space for books no one wants to read. Choices must be made, and that’s part of the librarians job. But how those choices are made is another story.
At a 2018 American Library Association event, speakers debated questions including, “Are libraries neutral?” “Have they ever been?” “Should they be?” In a 2020 article, “The Moral Arc of the Library,” two librarians described “the role whiteness and white privilege has played in the history of the library profession” and declared that “it is time for libraries and librarians to do away with arguments about ‘neutrality’ and instead reorient ourselves toward social justice in a more intentional way.”
If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same argument proffered by journalists, who proclaim that the media has never been without bias, and so rather than fight against it, strive to be unbiased, reporters should embrace their bias and strive for “moral clarity,” But then, just because some people at a conference called for it doesn’t mean they prevailed and that libraries have abandoned their “sacred ground” of neutrality.
The president of the American Library Association, Patty Wong, wrote a Letter to the Editor to assert this very point.
In “The Battle for the Soul of the Library” (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Feb. 27), Stanley Kurtz claims that library titles and materials support political agendas. This could not be further from the truth.
Could it be?
Libraries represent values that are core to democracy. Trained and certified librarians and library workers provide services and collections that inform, engage, illuminate and help people of all ages learn more about the world around them.
Who doesn’t appreciate values that are core to democracy? Then again, what exactly are those values?
Libraries across the country are addressing the effects of historical inequality and systemic racism on library users, especially people of color and those who belong to historically marginalized and minority communities. Library professionals are dedicated to developing collections that allow every person to see themselves in library resources and provide a means to build understanding among all users.
Maybe Kurtz wasn’t all that far from the truth after all. Even worse is that Wong writes this without the apparent recognition that this is pretty much the issue Kurtz raised, and that Wong’s understanding of neutrality might not be the same as, say, some folks who aren’t “trained and certified librarians,” like parents. And even teachers who didn’t get their masters from Columbia.
There is no question that book banning, burning, eradication, is an affront to both democracy and free speech. Pulling books like To Kill A Mockingbird or the children’s books that might be too sexualized for your typical third grader off the shelf is anathema. At the same time, the question is who decides to select books for that precious shelf space that includes only those promoting “historical inequality and systemic racism.” Are librarians “dedicated to developing collections that allow every person to see themselves”?
The problem isn’t that libraries include such collections, but that librarians’ dedication to the cause compels them to only include books on their precious shelf space that serves that end. It’s bad to censor, to remove books from shelves. It’s also bad to censor by refusing to purchase and place books on shelves because they fail to promote a political agenda. Is pre-emptive censorship any better than post hoc censorship?
Kurtz doesn’t argue that libraries shouldn’t include books with progressive themes, but that they should also include books with other, and contrary, themes. Another Letter to the Editor argues that they do, which is really all that can be asked of a neutral library, but also makes a very salient point to those who are troubled, if not outraged, by what they see on library shelves.
However, the right is historically not a friend of libraries. Library funds are constantly on chopping blocks in conservative areas across the country, and lawmakers in states like mine are trying to ban books on L.G.B.T.Q. themes, critical race theory and other “woke” topics from the shelves.
If it’s true that libraries have been captured by the woke, maybe the right should consider what they’ve done to push libraries, and librarians, to the left.
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Geez, H (and Jimmy)…I only got to 1:08 and had to bail…listening to it was literally giving me a blood sugar spike. 🙂
For those of you who don’t want sweet love syrup getting on your clean slacks this morning, a bit less drippy love song for a librarian …
I was a but a teenager when I figured out how to keep my slacks clean.
This is a big deal among younger librarians. Decolonizing the library is a movement that seeks ro remove the emphasis of “cis heteronormative white males.” from library shelves this is part of a similar education movement that seeks to eliminate the Western canon with the badly written books you described at the beginning of this article to teach young people literature.
The ALA does not create a list of books that librarians themselves are refusing to stock. It is a list only of books challenged externally not internally.
Many young librarians forthrightly state in meetings to approving applause that straight white men should not win literary awards because they are already overreprsented in those awards. Certainly that goal has been met with the last few years of ALA literary awards which exclude almost all the output of this maligned group of people.
At my own library it has been a struggle to get the library to purchase a children’s biography of Amy Coney Barett and other conservative figures.
There are many reasons that there is anger at conservatism in many of our education and academic institutions but I fear how this institutional capture exacerbates the divide.
Many librarians removed Dr. Seuss books. I think that says it all.
We all have things we find sacred and for me Seuss is on the top of my cultural list. I cannot imagine ever voting for a Democrat until Seuss is free. He is the most important author in my children’s lives beating out JK Rowling.
When activists demand that certain types of books be removed from the shelves, whether to make room for “better” books or because the content/author is so horrible that the book’s existence in the library is a moral affront, and librarians explain that while they too condemn the books they are nevertheless bound by the Library Bill of Rights, passionate woke younger people are just going to check out the books and steal, deface, or destroy them.
And probably without much consequence, except for fines which will be conveniently forgotten at the turn of the financial year; it saved them the trouble of having to pay to dispose of those books no one wants to read anyway.
So, what’s the answer? Ending with “maybe the right should consider what they’ve done to push libraries, and librarians, to the left,” which in reality requires asking and answering “what [have] they done to push libraries, and librarians, to the left?”
What do you mean when you say libraries are “woke,” when Republican legislators in various states have been proposing laws to jail librarians at least since 2020? Missouri House Bill 2044 was introduced in January 2020, allowing parents to oversee public library collections and fine librarians $500 or sentence them up to a year in jail. Is it a wonder librarians have turned on the right if Republican lawmakers have been threatening to imprison them for over two years? Or did libraries go “woke” first, “justifying” a backlash (leaving aside if such a backlash against books can ever be justified)?
It is interesting that few in the blawgosphere or the media at large are aware that “wokeness” is the logical outgrowth of American corporate sexual harassment training over the past three decades. SH training became ubiquitous after a certain impeachment in 1998, but then a certain candidate who ran for president in 2016 admitted repeatedly to multiple acts that clearly amount to the behaviors forbidden by corporate sexual harassment training…which he also admitted to on tape. After 18 years of “zero tolerance” against sexual harassment, the corporate consequences for SH are proven to be ephemeral if the person is in the C Suite, as the Boss is immune from Human Resources if and when he or she has the power to fire the HR staff, let alone making the phrase “You’re Fired!” a catchphrase on prime-time TV for over a decade.
Briefly there was a backlash, as the lack of penetration of sexual harassment training and policy into the upper echelons of the media became apparent and many big names were taken down by sexual harassment claims, echoing the zero-tolerance SH policies corporate America had made ubiquitous over the previous three decades. Then the right came in, with the patented backlash-to-the-backlash once the media SH cull had taken out Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly.
This time, the country entered into the consequence-free zone it still inhabits and exudes. Appropriately called “flooding the zone with shit,” brazening through accusations while interfering with investigations became standard operating procedure. For those in exalted positions, accusations of sexual harassment became badges of merit and the accusers became smeared as “woke,” which like most hot topics (“Zionism,” “fake news,” “critical race theory,” “insurrection,” “voter fraud”) became words devoid of meaning.
Since then, the right employs the “flooding the zone with shit” strategy with everything, and further pushes us into the fact-free and consequence-free zones most late-stage nations inhabit before they invariably run off a cliff. Many traditional municipal institutions are incapable of navigating through the environment that has become a zone “flooded with shit,” much less operate by the rules of “flooding the zone with shit,” which made schools and libraries “woke” (a buzzword one can guarantee no historian will be able to define, let alone understand 50 or more years from now).
Questions, always questions:
Were you touched in a library? Is that why you turned this into a post about sexual harassment? Were you unable to find a post about sexual harassment in the Hotel library?