Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes a post on her blog about threats to democracy. One of this is described in this post: the threats to libraries and librarians by extremists who want to ban books.
This essay is dedicated to librarians and library staff across America, and to a family member who worked as a library clerk in an elementary school for many years.
“It felt like a knife in my heart,” said Audrey Wilson-Youngblood, a Texas library services coordinator, of the flood of accusations from parents that she and other library staff in the Keller Independent School District harmed students by having books on LGBTQ themes in their collections.
Across the country, librarians in school and municipal libraries feel that knife being turned. Activist parents, sometimes working in conjunction with GOP politicians or right-wing groups such as Moms for Liberty, are waging an authoritarian-style assault on libraries and librarians.
When illiberal forces are on the march, the education system and any public institution that encourages independent thinking and pluralism become targets. In Texas and elsewhere, the spread of censorship, and harassment meant to silence library workers –including by labeling them as pedophiles — models the authoritarian culture the right is trying to install in America school by school and town by town.
It’s not surprising that libraries and librarians trigger the enemies of our democracy. Public libraries are places where community members of all backgrounds, political beliefs, and economic situations gather, and where elderly and lonely people can find a sense of companionship. This is why social scientists single out libraries as antidotes to the conditions that harm civic life and ultimately degrade democracy: political polarization, disinformation, economic inequality, and isolation.
School and public libraries also have long provided refuge to people of all ages with difficult home situations, and librarians can become trusted mentors and guides.
My weekly visits as a child to my own town library set me on a path of learning. The library also became a personal anchor for me when I went through a difficult period as a teenager, to the point where I took a job there as a messenger clerk, as did a close friend (who is now a member of the Lucid community).
Shelving and straightening the books, and seeing how they were treated with such care, instilled a lifelong respect for the craft of writing and a commitment to intellectual freedom that sustain me today. As my friend notes, the library was “a safe space to think and dream.”
Of course, thinking and dreaming are activities that run counter to authoritarianism: “Believe, Obey, and Fight” was the Fascist slogan. Books become threatening objects, as centuries of bookburnings by repressive political and religious entities attest.
In the US, myriad state laws and book bans seek to remove the history of White racism, slavery, and Fascist genocides from view, along with writings about LGBTQ identities and experiences. In the Keller, Texas, school system alone, as of March almost three dozen books had been sent for review by a district-formed book committee on the grounds that they are “pornographic” or will create “emotional distress.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, an expert in authoritarian double-speak, calls his version of such censorship “curriculum transparency.” Yet there is nothing transparent about the process by which books are removed. As Carolyn Foote, a retired Texas librarian and co-founder of the advocacy group FReadom Fighters notes, these aggressions are about “breaking that contract of trust” between librarians and the public and degrading professional ethics.
A display protesting book bans and restrictions at a local library. Charles Hickley/CC BY 2.0
The goal is not just to create a hostile work environment for library staff, but also to pressure administrators to submit to corrupt tactics such as banning books on spurious grounds and accepting slanderous speech used against their colleagues.
For right-wing parents and politicians aren’t just going after books. They are also personally attacking library employees as “groomers” who encourage inappropriate behaviors and relationships with children.
Associating LGBTQ individuals and their allies with pedophilia is an established strategy among the global right, including in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. And Vladimir Putin uses fake sex-crime charges to imprison researchers who are writing about things he wants buried.
Ideological fanaticism spurs attempts to dig into librarians’ private lives and harass them so they will resign. In Virginia Beach, GOP state representative Tim Anderson filed a FOIA Act request in May 2022 to learn the identities of librarians at schools that had materials some parents saw as sexually explicit.
It also lies behind attempts to criminalizelibrarians. In Clinton Township, NJ, the police department received a request for criminal charges to be made against librarians whose institutions had books with “obscene” content. And some states are challenging laws that shield teachers, researchers and librarians from prosecution. An Oklahoma law removed exemptions for teachers and librarians “from prosecution for willful violations of state law prohibiting indecent exposure to obscene material or child pornography.”
Unsurprisingly, many librarians have left their jobs. Some have resigned, others have been fired for refusing to remove books from their collections. Wilson-Youngblood, a 19-year veteran of the Keller school district, resigned due to the stress of working in a hostile environment. In small towns such as Vinton, Iowa, the library itself has had to close for lack of staffing.
Vinton’s fate may portend the future, since the number of groups targeted for censorship is bound to expand. In Vinton, right-wing activists not only objected to the presence of LGBTQ staff and LGBTQ-themed books, but displays of books by Vice President Kamala Harris and First Lady Jill Biden. For radicalized Republicans, Democrats are not just people with different opinions, but political enemies whose ideas should be banned.
Luckily, the digitization of books makes it hard for total bans on content for children to stick. The Brooklyn Public Library’s Books UnBannedprogram offers a free library card to people aged 13 to 21 across the U.S. so they can check out books digitally.
Yet libraries and librarians urgently need our support. Contacting your town or school administration to express solidarity and approval with current policies is one way you can push back. Another is to step up as a volunteer or even run for office on a town or school board that has oversight on library issues.
What Amanda Litman, executive director and co-founder of Run For Something, said about school boards in our interview is also true of libraries. They play “a foundational role in determining the kinds of citizens that kids ultimately become.” Libraries, and librarians, are essential to a healthy democratic society.
It is a natural progression. You start by attacking the LGBTQ community. There are not many of them. No one will defend them because they are generally distrusted by a public that does not think about them. Then you begin to link these distrusted minority groups to your political opponents.
Fascist policies of the Twentieth Century lived on this technique, and those who do not see this are either blind, unaware, or deliberately complicit in the process.
Librarians are indeed “grooming” readers—to become citizens who do not harm each other for their own gain. Groom away, I say.
Only a very sick, cowardly individual would attack a librarian.
They took care of that problem in my district. They got rid of librarians and now my old library isn’t the library anymore. It’s the Discovery Center.
Horrific.
And in schools across the country, libraries have been replaced by “media centers” that are mostly dumb terminals for taking standardized tests and practice tests and doing mind-numbing, test preppy online depersonalized worksheets-on-a-screen
Evidence that education “reformers”:are not supporters of education in a democracy.
Kudos to the Brooklyn Library for standing up to intellectual oppression. When you go to their home page, you can read more about the digital library pass, and you get make a donation to help them disseminate digital books to subscribers. “Public schools and libraries are the two most democratizing forces in America.” Frank McCourt https://www.bklynlibrary.org/books-unbanned
“My weekly visits as a child to my own town library set me on a path of learning. The library also became a personal anchor for me” this was my experience as well ; we had school, the library was on the same common as my church. We walked ; there were no movie theaters , or grocery stores , or roller skating rinks in my town of 2,000 people. The library stood out as a significant place (along with 3 churches on the Town Common.) in this rural area devoted to agriculture. There was one Hat factory where my mom worked. My sister took me to the library and read to me from her high school textbooks (she later moved to Houston and raised 4 children there). I am not too far from that original town but in a city of 60,000 people and we need our libraries.
When I worked in the first Bush administration as Assistant Secretary in charge of research, I vacate friends with Carolyn Reid-Wallace, who was Assistant Secretary in charge of Postsecondary Education. Carolyn was raised in Williamsburg, Virginia. She invited my partner and me to visit for a weekend. As a young Black girl with a love of learning, she sought opportunities to read. She went to the town library as a child of 8 or 9 and tried to get a library card so she could check out books. The librarian said, “Sorry, little girl, but Negroes are not allowed here.” She left, the tears rolling down her cheeks. But as she walked away, she heard a loud “Ssssst!” She turned around and saw a young white librarian at a side window, who beckoned her to come closer. The librarian handed her a few books and told her to bring them back in a week. Same time, same place. She did, and this exchange continued for a very long time.
Now, the right fires the librarians because they are “grooming” children to read and learn.
What a story! Thanks Diane!
“an expert in authoritarian doublespeak”
This is a phrase to be remembered. It will be extraordinarily important over the next few years.
Do you suppose DeSantis learned that at Harvard law school?
Or was already being an expert a requirement for getting accepted?
Irony (Republican Style)
Ban the books!
Not the crooks!
Ban the Librarians!
Not authoritarians!
Ban abortion!
Not extortion!
Ban the thinking!
Not the drinking!
Ban the hope!
Not the grope!
In case anyone missed it. That last one was a reference to our last two presidents.
Ban the craft
Not the graft
Ban the map
Keep the crap
Ban the vax!
Not attacks!
Ban Me too!
Not the coup!
Ban the pill!
Not the swill!
Ban the reading!
Not the cheating!
Ban the frog!
Not the fraud!
Ban the Grapes!*
Not the rapes!**
*Of Wrath
**on college campuses
Ban the crying!
Not the lying!
Ban the choice!
Not the boys!
Ban the science!
Not deniance!
Ban the facts!
Not the hacks!
Burn all of the books!
And burn the Reichstag too:
Freedom! And all such Orwellian gobbledygook!
Freedom! from voters like you, and you — and you!
Ban the precedent!
Not the President!
I started to write that you were on a roll, SD.
If you were on a roll, it would be a fine brioche, SomeDAM! I so appreciate your wit and craft. Well done.
The Republican fascists are doing the same thing to election workers, many of whom volunteer their time to help collect and/or count ballots.
Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education.
“Concerned parents are right to challenge these books, and they must continue to do so, despite the racial and phobic-laden insults that will meet them in response. Catholic parents in particular have the support of Vatican II’s Gravissimum Educationis, which champions the role of parents in the educational endeavor. “Book bans” are not about books, They are about protecting our children from the real “existential threat” looming in schools: the imposition of the Sexual Revolution’s Reign of Terror on America’s youngest citizens.” Catholic World Report, 2-17-2022.
Parents have every right to monitor and “control” what THEIR children read. They do not have the right to determine what other parents’ children may read. No one is forcing these “objectionable” books on any children. Good grief!
Sharon,
You are exactly right.
If a parent doesn’t want their child to read a book, they should say so (even if the book will be on the final exam), but they do not or should not have the right to determine what other children read.
“The least powerful are represented as sexually… needing regulatory control. The most powerful espouse these controls as key to public social order while maintaining their own unaccountable sexual access to….”
Lisa Duggan
The Catholic Church has a long and storied history of burning stuff — including people (be, Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for suggesting that there was more than one Earth out in the Universe)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
People who don’t like bonfires should not cross the Pope.
The only reason they didn’t burn Galileo was because they were afraid the resulting explosion would be worse than simply keeping him under house arrest.
Bruno was hung upside down in z village square before being burned to death.
Like I said, if you don’t like what the Pope says and does, you should just keep your mouth shut.
Poet-
The Wikipedia entry for Curtis Yarvin which describes his right wing political theories makes one a bit sick. His fiancee is Clarisse Thorn who wrote articles focused on BDSM and polyamory. Her actual name is Lydia Laurenson. At her website, The New Modality, on the profile page she provides a link to the info, “(Very Secret)”.
Thiel and Yarvin are described as in accord about politics. It may not be a surprise that Thiel’s politician, JD Vance, appeared to urge spouses to stay in violent marriages. Nor, would it be a surprise that he would be interviewed at a Catholic site about morality in regard to opposition to abortion.
Thiel is also funding a Senate candidate in AZ named Blake Masters. Wholly owned.