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.
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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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June 2021
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