Toward a Plan to Take Lit Crit, YA Lit (& Teens) Seriously, with some autobiographical extrania3/13/2021 Notes toward a new project
OK. There's a new bug in my brain. There's a new stumbling block. I'm obsessing a bit on having lost A.S. King as a Twitter follower. We had gone back and forth a bit about the need for serious critical treatment of YA literature--like (in my head) examining YA fiction through the lenses of not only pedagogy (what is its educational value? how do I best teach YA lit?) and politics (Marxist, feminist, & postcolonial theories), but psychoanalytical, deconstructionist, and postmodernist theory. I had brainstormed a grand project investigating the meanings of surrealism, the connection between surrealism and adolescence, and King's surrealist novels. However, I blew it. I said something offensive or was just plain irrelevant and uninteresting on Twitter, or she didn't like the four-star review I gave Still Life with Tornado (which I may change, just because on rereading it for a paper, it gets better and better), and she left, just before her birthday. Or maybe it was just time for her to cut back on the number of people she was following, and I didn't make the cut. I don't know. All I know is three things: (1) That I'm bored with YA lit crit and want to inject something new into it, (2) I have difficulty restraining impulses to say things on social media (was it my comments about my past behavior with women that I regret, or the somewhat mean things I said about Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, or ...?), and (3) I have a tendency to get really excited about connections and overstep boundaries. Anyway, she no longer follows me. Regardless, she seems like a stellar human being, and she's been through some rough stuff and come through the other side. I admire her, and my interest in her writing continues. Consider this a list of works to examine as a preliminary for a series of articles, and please suggest more if you know of anything, especially anything more recent:
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I haven't been here in a while (not that anyone asked). My youngest daughter (Calliope) was born February 5, two days before Ellowyn's first birthday. I'm in my final semester at Wayne State. Life is chaos with a thin veneer of order, full of cracks that make the chaos visible.
Still, I'm enjoying my classes. In YA Lit, I'm writing two papers on A. S. King, and in the course of that, I've had the good fortune to talk (virtually) with the author herself. In Creative Writing (which won't count toward the MLIS), I am currently writing a scene from a play in which Body and Soul (specifically mandated for this assignment, but I call them Mr. Corpus and Mr. Specter) have a wedding planning business and have a conversation about the floral arrangements for a wedding. It's fun, and creatively satisfying. I've made a start in seeking employment. Had a really good interview with an admirable system, but it was part-time and nonprofessional and over an hour commute. I will get back to that when my head is reasonably well above water. I would love to start the Disrupting Whiteness project, but I don't see that happening for a while. I can't pretend I'm anything but barely holding on, though. I will keep patching over the cracks so the chaos doesn't overwhelm me. Looking at Disrupting Whiteness in Libraries and Librarianship: A Reading List and thinking ... How do you commit to disrupting toxic white maleness and present yourself as the best person for the job as a white male in the library world? I guess I can begin by reading through the Core Resources from that list and reflecting on each of them here. This is not a great historical moment to be a white male. Have to do some real soul searching about how to approach this profession.
Dear mostly fictitious reader, I'm tired. In March 2021, I will turn 50 years old, which is enough to make anyone feel exhausted. Also in March, we are expecting another baby, barely a year since Ellowyn--the infant girl sitting on my lap as I type this, one-handed--was born. That's about halfway through my long-awaited final semester of library school. If I can get through it all, I will hold a Master's Degree in Library and Information Science in May. Around that time, I hope to start a new, full-time, salaried job.
So much riding on it. But in addition to being tired at the moment, I am also excited. The surprises in store for me raising two infant girls will certainly keep me on my toes. The classes I am taking in the Winter will be thoroughly enjoyable (Young Adult Literature and an undergrad creative writing class as a bonus). And the opportunity to get back into the public library and provide service and programming and materials to patrons once more will be deeply satisfying, quarantine or no. For me, 2021 has the potential to be a culmination of years of wandering, working, studying, creating. A new beginning. Yet another, but one in a class by itself. Can you imagine some of these titles being discussed in libraries? Thinking about the false dichotomies hate groups fabricate to position their personal prejudices as relevant to the larger culture. In the examples above, the oppositions of “blacks” to “white women” and “Jews” to “children” are political ploys. If you don’t support the Ku Klux Klan, you must be against white women; if you’re anti-Nazi, you’re an enemy of the children. But, of course, you aren’t. You see through the false claims and rightly reframe the opposition as “hate group vs. target,” “society at large vs. hate group.”
Both of Meredith Farkas’s articles open with the news of transphobic speakers lecturing in public libraries, first Megan Murphy at the Toronto Public Library (TPL) and then the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) at the Seattle Public Library (SPL). TPL and SPL fall back on neutrality to excuse their decisions to host the anti-trans events. Farkas says that this is a betrayal of public libraries’ duty to take the side of the marginalized, to maintain a welcome and safe space for society’s most vulnerable. Banned Books Week announced several days ago that George by Alex Gino—a middle-grade book about a trans-girl who, though she is known as a boy, wants to play the female lead in the play Charlotte’s Web—was the #1 banned or challenged book in 2019. There are many cogent criticisms of Banned Books Week as a library event and plenty of analyses of particular banned books, including George. But I want to focus on one issue in particular.
On the website Common Sense Media, George has its defenders, including the official reviewer for the site. Of course, it has its detractors too, most of whom worry about young children being exposed to sex. I agree that early exposure to sex can be detrimental to a child’s development and lead to all kinds of problems. In fact, I have personal experience in support of that fear. “You will deserve this anger/hurt/frustration/wrath of the people of color you’ve offended. … even in the midst of your hurt and bewilderment, you will be careful not to dismiss the reality of the people you’ve offended. You will resist the urge to defend yourself, shut your mouth, and listen.” (April Hathcock, “You’re Gonna Screw Up”) There was a lot of reading to do before trying to figure out what I would write in response to Meredith Farkas’s November 2019 blog post “When libraries and librarians pretend to be neutral, they often cause harm” and her May 2020 column in American Libraries, “When Speech Isn’t Free.” An entire issue of the Oregon Library Association Quarterly, the blog Reading While White, a School Library Journal article summarizing Ishizuka and Stephens’s “The Cat Is Out of the Bag,” Debbie Reese’s “Indigenous Critique of Whiteness in Children’s Literature,” and more. It’s still not enough. As a white man who is woefully undereducated on underrepresentation of marginalized groups in kid lit and its impact on members of those groups, I have to work extra hard to overcome a life immersed in white privilege and white culture.
Or do I? Heather McNeil doesn’t seem to think so. According to her last word on the subject (an article positioned at the end of the OLAQ issue on equity, diversity, and inclusion and seemingly meant as a final judgment on the current state of affairs), it’s all gone too far. White folks are tired of being told they’re wrong. We want to receive acknowledgment for trying, and we want marginalized people to accept reasonable limits. McNeil ends her article with the story of an African-American woman in West African garb hugging her and calling her “Sister” after McNeil delivered a lecture on African stories. That’s what she wants: a reward for the effort without further criticism. Reflections on Are Libraries Neutral?Highlights from the 2018 Midwinter President’s Program9/21/2020 Friends, yesterday was a hard day. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Friday, potentially opening up the Supreme Court for another ultra-conservative appointment that could put the last nail in the coffin of a progressive, compassionate United States for some time. To complicate that mourning, a friend reminded me yesterday of Ginsburg’s troubling response to Colin Kaepernick’s “take a knee” protest and white gay men’s tendency to throw Blacks under the bus after their rights are advanced (she posted this article on Facebook, but this one might explain it better). “I got mine. Fuck you.” What a world. In this context, I’m trying to figure out this public library neutrality thing. The stakes are high and getting higher, and, as Rush said, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” To end up reinforcing the status quo is not an option, for the status quo is a division and stratification where everyone, except white, Christian, straight, rich, cis-males, loses. The central questions that arise from this article, recording Jim Neal’s 2018 Midwinter President’s Program, include
The first question is answered best, I think, by R. David Lankes, director of University of South Carolina’s SLIS: “I have seen libraries organize brutal conversations on racism that have included the views of white supremacists, not to ensure neutrality, but to directly counter hateful ideas.” Include it all but take a stand as to which is right during library programs and events. This ensures neutrality in collection development (we collect the publications so that people have access to all sides, and thus all the information they need to refute the errant side) and justice (including letting marginalized people know that they are welcome in the library) at the same time. Am I being naïve? Is this a recipe for disaster? Certain questions would be easier to take a stand on than others, no doubt. But surely, white supremacy is a no-brainer. For now, I’m leaving it at that. We can pick it apart later. (“But,” you may say, “What about the white supremacists who are obviously not made welcome?” My initial thought is “Fuck ‘em.” But perhaps I will think more deeply about that and come back to it.) The second question involves both ethics and public relations, which naturally have an uneasy relationship in many instances. According to the ethics of our profession, we must market to everyone. (How can you say the right to read exists if they don’t know where to find the books?). (La Rue reminds us that we place limits on behavior and refuse to let anyone act in an abusive way in the library. Does this extend to obvious symbols of abuse—a swastika, for example—or to other expressions of beliefs that are inherently abusive, such as white supremacy? Including Nazi and white supremacist works in the collection might be valuable for reasons explained above, but allowing a real live adherent to these ideas to take up physical space in the library, prepared to enact or defend their chosen belief erects a reasonable barrier to access for the targets of their beliefs. Would we ask a Jewish person or African-American to simply “have courage” to face this potential danger? James La Rue, to be clear, does not endorse this idea; he states, “There has to be imminent and immediate physical danger.”) A problem arises, however, when we consider the practical matter of sending the message that we include everyone. The hypothetical case of the Black patron who decides not to share space with a Nazi has been explored. What about the working class white conservative patron who sees all of the liberal claptrap in today’s public library and decides that they are not welcome? I base this on an exchange reported by Kathleen de la Peña McCook, distinguished university professor at the University of South Florida, lifetime member of REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking, and 2016 recipient of the Elizabeth Martinez Lifetime Achievement Award, among other awards: The worker who came to my house to help me said, “You might not want me to come in. I am a deplorable.” And I said, “Why would you say that?” And he said, “Your kind of people”—I guess I had Hillary things up still—“don’t like me, and I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.” The image of the library, with its LGBTQ Club and Black Lives Matter display, is what keeps this potential patron away. He (mistakenly?) thinks he is not welcome because the liberals have marked their territory. And we have, really. But our intention, I think, is not to repel people just because they identify as Trump voters. Is it? That clearly goes too far.
In her journal article “From the One-Mule Tenant Farmer to the Hillbilly Highway: How Librarians Can Support the White Working Class” (The Library Quarterly, 2017), McCook posits that library service to three groups, overwhelmingly white in composition, has dwindled over the past few decades. Reduction in focus on “union members, the drug-addicted working class, and veterans” has left behind large groups of working-class whites who would benefit from public library materials and programs. Embracing these three groups would go a long way toward fixing the library’s image problem with white working class conservatives without reducing services to (other?) marginalized groups. Other members of the panel expressed other ideas and weaved other eloquent phrases. It’s definitely worth checking out. But my time has run out, so I must away. Two stories about me:
Story #1. When I was a Libertarian (in my 30s, living in Chicago and working for a libertarian organization that opposed taxation), I had a discussion with my sister—a lesbian who is very much on the left—about the right to exclude people from a private event. I described to her a hypothetical wedding between her and her partner and asked if she would like to exercise the right to keep right-wing, fundamentalist Christian bigots away from the event. She agreed that that would be nice. Extending the right of private entities to guard the safety and comfort of their most vulnerable guests, the environmental integrity of their land, and the free expressions of all their people lay at the heart of my beliefs. I did not trust the government to do these things, and I thought making it possible for the private sector was the solution. Story #2. When I began my journey proper toward librarianship, after losing faith in the private sector, I came across an issue of The Trumpet, a fairly extreme right-wing Christian magazine. (I imagine it is distributed free of charge to public libraries across the country whether they want it or not.) It was suggested to me that I should use my own discretion to decide the fate of that magazine. I could place it on the magazine rack, I could throw it away. I chose to place it on the very bottom of the pile of free publications on the end table in the reading area. This, I know, would be censorship according to the ALA’s definition just as surely as if I put it in the garbage. The truth is, I didn’t want to encourage the beliefs expressed in the magazine so I, as a government employee, chose to suppress it. This wasn’t the right thing to do, but given the chance, I’m not sure I wouldn’t make the same choice today. It is conceivable that this makes me a bad librarian. Even though I now tend to believe in government intervention to secure and protect an enlightened society where all are treated equitably and with compassion, there are many instances that cause me to question the logical consistency of my position. My immediate reaction to white supremacists, for example, is not inclusion and compassion. Is exclusion sometimes necessary to create the kind of society we want? Who gets to decide just what that society looks like? What happens to the excluded? (Do they explode, like the “dream deferred,” causing chaos and strife in the very society that excluded them?) Nathan Rinne * is that rarest of creatures these days, a conservative librarian. I do not agree with his premise that a successful free society is only possible in a West steeped in “the heritage of Christian tolerance” (“Against the Library …” footnote 10). Christianity has exhibited more intolerance than tolerance in its 2,000-year career. Tolerance in the West, I speculate, comes more from the agnostic and Unitarian corners of society. In addition to Christian supremacy, Rinne’s arguments rest on the notion that facts matter very little in contemporary arguments. I find it difficult to argue with this. You can’t observe the rabid debates on Facebook these days without running into this brick wall: “rational arguments are always nothing more than rationalizations which follow innate and tribal impulses. … For the most part, we stick to our group and follow charismatic and confident persons, fads and flows” (“Should offensive books …” par. 11) The facts matter less than the source, and the source is evaluated based on whether their words and sometimes actions correspond to what we have already decided is right. Go ahead, try to convince me otherwise. At any rate, my focus is elsewhere at the moment. Back to the issue. Rinne’s thoughts on collection development in “Should offensive books be removed from your library’s collection?” and “Against the Library Bill of Rights” spark the old debates in my head. His commentary mainly pertains to private or religious libraries, but he also seems to support extending his ideas to public libraries. Should a librarian exclude certain points of view from the collection in order to influence the beliefs and behaviors of the patrons? Or, if you prefer, in order to create an enlightened society? This was, after all, the original impetus behind the public library movement. (See this link, referenced by Rinne.) According to Rinne, it is human nature to do so and perfectly acceptable: “it is inevitable that ‘public executions’ (i.e. shunning, stigma, shaming) happen to those deemed worthy of them, and any books representing their views share a similar fate” (“Against the Library …” par. 8). What deserves these “public executions”? Rinne says that librarians in practice “do not include certain topics in their collection … because they do not wish, in general, to have particular viewpoints which they find immature, offensive, irrelevant, irrational, or threatening represented in their collection.” The examples he provides are generally extreme, but they make the point. Even liberals who purport to value non-Western cultures stop short of giving equal time and space to cultures that practice what nearly all of us (Americans) see as abhorrent. No library, for example would include a book making the case for pedophilia or human sacrifice, would they? (Is this point academic? Would no publisher make them available?) So where is the line, and who draws it? There is a substantial history of public library inclusion of “pornographic” materials, such as Fifty Shades of Grey; law-breaking manuals, such as The Anarchist Cookbook; racist books, such as The Turner Diaries. These types of materials remain controversial and all seem to make Rinne’s list of the excludable. Not every librarian seeks to add them. Should they? The answer seems less and less clear these days, as liberal librarians adopt exclusion in the name of equity. To make of the library a safe space for marginalized community members, we first rescind the invitations to white supremacist groups and anti-LGBTQ groups to use space. Next, we take out materials that reinforce racist or homophobic views; next, those by racist or homophobic authors. Take a look at T.J. Lamanna’s “Dispositif: Or Subjectivity and Neutrality in Libraries.” And then, ask these three (or so) questions:
The latter two (or three) are the stickiest, although there is plenty of disagreement about the first. Within the library profession, a clear majority favors a world that recognizes a responsibility in the white community to step aside and strive consciously to improve the situation of African-Americans, immigrants, the Latinx community, the LGBT community, etc., under the direction and guidance of those communities. Resources are finite, so as a practical matter, this means a devaluation of the Western canon, some degree of exclusion of many conservative viewpoints, and a necessary decrease in the number of white people on library staffs. Assuming the majority vote carries the day, the first question is already decided. Now, about those other two. I am still forming my opinion, which is the purpose of my project, reading and reflecting on these articles. I can be down with imposing criteria that say, “This far, and no farther” to the conservatives. If they want to argue that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization, say, or that Kyle Rittenhouse is a hero, there are potentially ways of doing that without necessarily explicitly denying the humanity of Black people. (Implicitly, it’s a different story, and so the liberals will win those debates.) But if you want to defend the KKK or the Neo-Nazis, no. Just spitballing. The issue gets me dizzy at this point. Is Mein Kampf available in an edition that clearly voices disapproval of Hitler? And where to draw the line? Maybe it’s because I’m a white cis-male of middle-class extraction, but I don’t want to get rid of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, even though they are problematic, and I can understand why they would make for an uncomfortable experience for an African-American reader. I don’t want to throw away Ernest Hemingway or Dr. Seuss because of their personal flaws. I don’t want to jettison J.K. Rowling because of an anti-trans tweet or Alexie Sherman because of a pattern of sexual harassment. I don’t want to exclude the works of the Black Power or Black Arts movements due to their misogyny and homophobia. Imagine a library completely purged of the works of anyone whose personality or history includes something reprehensible, how small and truly undiverse it would be. This is not the world I want to create. Some might say this is a straw-man argument, and perhaps it is. But the rhetoric on both of the far sides of the political aisle makes me anxious. I’ll give you this: librarians are not neutral, nor should they be. However, we must live and work in a human world that is necessarily complex and messy. At some point, safety and comfort must give way to challenge and character-building. (I can see where “challenge” and “character-building” favor those in power, however, like boot-strapping. Perhaps resilience is a better word. At any rate, we need to negotiate the particulars.) I must believe that we can empower marginalized people without destroying the quality of the library collection. I must believe we can figure this out, together. Reflections on GARE's Advancing racial equity in public libraries: Case studies from the field9/14/2020 “It takes political will, intellectual energy, and practical skill, first, to recognize the racist legacies of LIS structures ... and, then, to devise ways to transform them.” (Christine Pawley, “Unequal legacies: Race and multiculturalism in the LIS curriculum,” Library Quarterly, 2006) The document Advancing racial equity in public libraries: Case studies from the field from the Government Alliance on Race and Equity is thick with jargon and initially sets off my alarms for corporate masturbation. Like “sensitivity training” for police, would this be another elaborate but ineffective exercise that looks good on paper but never gets outside of the training room? Thankfully, the report delivers multiple examples of the plan carried into action by a handful of public libraries, proving its point that “change can happen quickly when it becomes an institutional priority.”
On a practical and measurable level, GARE defines racial equity as “When race can no longer be used to predict life outcomes and life outcomes for all groups are improved.” Ultimately, the goal according to PolicyLink’s “Equity Manifesto” is “just and fair inclusion into a society in which all, including all racial and ethnic groups, can participate, prosper and reach their full potential.” GARE takes this rather lofty and utopian goal and addresses it with a six-step plan designed to tackle every aspect of the issue. Under the rubrics of “Normalize” and “Organize,” the GARE plan first calls for gathering support among the leadership, then moving out into the staff and other stakeholders and into the community itself. It then “Operationalizes” by using established tools to measure problems and devise solutions in a “Racial Equity Plan.” The advantage of this elaborate plan is its involvement of people of color at all levels in leadership positions. Libraries have long been dominated by well-meaning white folks who have assumed that they know what communities of color need without having to consult them. That library staffs are so overwhelmingly white does not help the situation. Past problems associated with this unbalance include segregation; “neglect[;] paternalism[;] … tacit approval of prevailing norms[;]” “adding scattered voices from communities of color without a meaningful shift in power, representation or authority[;]” and multicultural initiatives that “merely celebrate[] differences as exotic” (Lorna Peterson quoted in Honma, 2005) and are “usually focused on creating more tolerant individuals rather than more equitable institutions.” As April Hathcock says, this was (and is) “a self-congratulatory and complacent approach to the ‘problem of diversity’ without ever overtly naming and addressing the issue of whiteness” (2015). Frankly, we white people are naturally incapable of seeing the problems without assistance. Our privilege blocks us from the realities that people of color live with on a daily basis. We need to take our direction from people of color who have a clearer view. At the same time, we need to own the “issue of whiteness.” Racism is a problem, but it’s not “their problem”—it’s ours. We can’t see it because we have been immersed in it for our entire lives. By “ensuring people of color are leading the work and involved in planning early and often,” we gain access to that valuable outside perspective and are given an opportunity to make real changes. But what matters are the results, not the rhetoric. It is essential to point out that none of these solutions are in the form of a quota system. Each one addresses a disparity that affects communities of color more so than white communities, therefore improving racial equity without erecting artificial barriers for white patrons. This should legitimately take all the wind out of the sails of whatever opposition might arise. Here are just a few of the important changes that the GARE plan has been able to achieve: Fines and Other Access Barriers
Programming
Computer Access
Hiring and Workplace Culture
The GARE plan appears to be extraordinarily successful in helping libraries to reach their racial equity goals. Old solutions have failed for too long. Widespread adoption of the GARE plan would lead to giant steps in the right direction. |
AuthorJeffrey Babbitt, MLIS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University who is pursuing a career as a librarian in Michigan. Subject Headings
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