Njamba abbreviated our walk in the woods at Orchard Beach this morning. We ended up hearing most of NPR's "On the Media." It was about libraries, starting with campaigns against libraries and librarians that are fueled by right-wing hysteria about grooming children by queer pedophiles. It got me thinking about the different ways we imagine libraries.
That campaign is mostly about public libraries, both community libraries and school libraries. I guess lots of people have early memories about libraries. I remember going through every child-directed biography in our school and public library. I remember reading about John Paul Jones, Ted Williams, Dwight Eisenhower, and Young Tom Edison. I remember reading history books for kids: We Were There with Jean Lafitte at New Orleans, We Were There with the Lafayette Espadrille, We Were There at the Boston Tea Party.
I also remember an unloved fifth-grade teacher who gave us a regular homework assignment of "study guides" on each of the fifty states. They were worksheets with spaces for us to fill in the area, population, principal industries, principal crops, etc. I found them grueling and sometimes impossible. We had an Information Please almanac at home, which provided some of the information. We also had an encyclopedia from 1938 that my grandpa purchased for my mom and my uncle, but let's just say that whatever information I could locate there was over twenty-five years out of date: Alaska and Hawaii weren't states in that book, there had been no Second World War, the population of California was 6 million instead of 18 million. One night I got permission to go to the public library to do that homework. (After school was not an option; it conflicted with Hebrew School.) It's only about a twenty-minute walk, but going out after dinner was a huge deal in my family.
Anyway, I was astonished when the librarian directed me to the World Book Encyclopedia. Astonished because opposite every page with an entry about one of the US states was a table containing all the information I had been struggling to find to fill in Mr. Harris's stupid study guide. The exact format! The exact order! I knew that some of my classmates had that encyclopedia sitting in their rooms because I had seen it when I visited their homes. I was astonished because what had been a kind of unpleasant treasure hunt for me was clearly a simple and quick matter of copying some words and numbers for them. Looking back on this after forty years as an educator I am horrified by the lack of any intellectual content in fifty nights of this homework. But I am also horrified by an assignment that casually privileged children whose parents bought those (expensive! roughly $10,000 in 2022 dollars) 20+ volumes. I am not pleading poverty, but that was not something my parents were buying for us.
So this story serves in a way as a bridge between two ideas of the library. First, as a place where people can have access to books and what is in them for free, regardless of how much money they have. Second, as a place that stores and canonizes KNOWLEDGE. Think for a moment about a printed encyclopedia, whose editors decide what subjects deserve inclusion and what subjects do not. Who contract writers to give an authoritative account of those subjects, deciding what is true and what is not. The mere idea that a table including state bird, state tree, state song presents anything that helps us understand a state both flattens and trivializes what we think of as knowledge, turning learning into an accumulation of factoids. Why do we even have "state birds"? Why is the cardinal the state bird of seven different states? Does knowing that my state, New York, shares the Eastern Bluebird with Missouri add to my understanding of anything?
And there is a conception of the library that shares this idea of complete, canonized knowledge with encyclopedias. The dream of a complete library goes back at least to Pharaoh Ptolemy I in the fourth century BCE. The library at Alexandria collected about half-a-million scrolls by means of purchase, confiscation, and theft in order to achieve the Pharaoh's goal of possessing every book ever. The idea continued in the science fiction of the 20th century and has received new impetus with the existence of an internet. I read a short story once about a PhD candidate of the future whose dissertation work consisted only of trying to come up with a project that nobody else had done already. An original project could be completed instantly by using the all-knowing computer, but an original idea was also vanishingly rare. This idea suggests that all human knowledge is finite. It also suggests that anything worth knowing can, in fact be known. It says that maybe we humans don't yet know everything, and maybe we individuals can't know everything known by humanity, but individuals can at least have access to everything that humanity knows. I think even that is wrong, because it assumes that the things we think we (individuals, experts, humanity as a whole) "know" are in fact true.
There is a third understanding of library, which bleeds into the word archive. It includes not just every book, but every piece of paper. Today it would include everything that has ever been typed onto a computer: every job application, every snarky Tweet, every photo of lunch, every text message asking "WYD?" A friend's dad once showed me his basement, which was filled end-to-end and floor-to-ceiling with library shelving. On the shelves was every invoice and every bill of sale from his business, every gas and electric bill from his home, his and his children's report cards... I struggled to figure out whether all of this could ever have any value. When he gave up his home for an apartment it was all moved into a rental storage unit. Now, less than a year from his death in his late nineties it will be up to his children to see if they want to keep some of it, and how to dispose of the rest.
But every archive cannot be dismissed as hoarding. When I looked into the ongoing struggle of the Lakota over the Black Hills, (see for instance "The Black Hills Are Not for Sale" and "Still More: Treaty Rights") I was able to obtain a photocopy of the minutes of a 1920 meeting of tribal leaders initiating the lawsuit that remains unresolved today, despite the Supreme Court's 1980 decision in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 It showed a very different set of conversations than I would have imagined. Those minutes were being held in the library of Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, South Dakota. Shortly after the librarian generously sent me this document, the library was threatened by unusual spring floods, the result of sudden warm temperatures after an exceptionally snowy winter. I sent a donation of thanks, in part because I imagined the destruction of that archive.
When I looked into resistance to the draft during World War 1, I was able to get digitized records of inmates at Leavenworth Penitentiary. (See "Green Corn Rebellion" and "More On the Green Corn Rebellion.") Looking at the prison records of participants in this armed march against the war, including their friends and family who were authorized to correspond with them by mail, allowed me to see what connections did (and did not) exist among the rebels. This is important to understand given the multiracial nature of the uprising in Oklahoma, including Blacks, whites, and Natives in roughly equal numbers.
The flip side of this is the archives that have vanished in fires and floods. Genealogists all know, for example, that the rolls of the 1890 census are largely gone, damaged by a 1921 fire in the basement of the US Department of Commerce. In fact, that fire is largely responsible for the creation of the National Archives. But when I was looking into property records in so many places around the US, I was surprised to find how many of them had been destroyed. And I cannot help but suspect that much of this was intentional. So much land belonging to African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans somehow ended up in the hands of their white neighbors over the course of time. It is hard for me to imagine that the repeated pattern of disappearing paper records, records that would document the real owners, was all accidental. It is just too convenient.
But let me return to the current campaigns against libraries. They are not particularly new, just accelerating. Efforts to ban books have been an American perennial, documented year after year by the American Library Association. There are those who want the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to be removed from the shelves. I guess these people really don't believe their own rhetoric about the undeniable superiority of capitalism because they are apparently afraid that if somebody reads this 1848 pamphlet our entire economic and social system will be endangered.
I am a little puzzled by the endless campaign against the Captain Underpants series. For those of you who have no preteens in your life these books are the ongoing saga of resistance by two fourth-grade class clowns against their mean principal. I guess there are people who feel the premise is too disrespectful and antiauthoritarian. Again, is our civilization really so fragile that it is imperiled by a bunch of nine-year-olds chuckling about the pranks of George and Harold?
Catcher in the Rye? Centers a teenage slacker who questions everything.
Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret? Frank discussion of menstruation. (If we don't say it aloud will it stop?)
The Things They Carried? I don't know; insufficiently worshipful of war and warriors?
To Kill a Mockingbird? You already know. Even this white savior narrative is too explicit about the horrors of racism.
But that is the bridge to the current attacks on libraries. Because a number of state legislators, challenged to say where they saw critical race theory being taught in the public schools, immediately pointed to To Kill a Mockingbird. It is easy to see that "Critical Race Theory" was coded language for the racist right. It is an approach to understanding the way white supremacy is cooked into law, without necessarily being mentioned explicitly. It is offered as an elective in some law schools, not mandated in grade school curricula. But the language that is used to criminalize it is revealing. Parents are urged to report anything taught in school that makes their children "uncomfortable." And you can definitely read that sentence as "white parents" and "white children." All the examples raised by the politicians riding this hysteria are about white children who are learning for the first time about the history of enslavement and Jim Crow and finding it horrifying. None of those examples are about Black or Latino or Native or Asian children who are othered by their teachers and administrators. And the books these parents want removed are by Toni Morrison and Ta-Nahisi Coates and Sherman Alexie. I am prepared to defend the value of that literature as part of a mandatory curriculum. But they are apparently prepared to demand that brilliant literature - literature that is written by people who aren't white and offers a different point-of-view - be banned from library shelves.
It is also definitely worth noticing that these campaigns only pretend to be grassroots phenomena, instigated by parents who are disturbed by their children's reaction to what they have been taught. Take Boundary County, Idaho. Angry citizens there are demanding the recall of the library board and they have presented a list of 300 books that must be removed. The head librarian quit her job after endless death threats and armed protesters parked outside her house night after night. But the library never owned any of those three hundred books!
Most of this list represents a new tack by the enemies of literature. They're not so prudish as to oppose any reference to sexuality, only to the sexuality of LGBTQ people! But their argument is the same as the opposition to the Communist Manifesto and Captain Underpants. It is still the danger of such exposure. They insist that children can "turn gay" by reading about gay people. They accuse the librarians of grooming.
I will not dismiss the need for parents to safeguard their children against pedophile adults. We have all seen the scandals of pedophile priests and clergy in all denominations. We have seen the Boy Scouts of America file for bankruptcy because of the weight of sex abuse cases. I will remind you that most groomers, like most people, are heterosexual. I will ask why you think heterosexual children can be groomed to become gay by reading stories about gay people, but all these gay people failed to "turn straight" despite reading and viewing endless stories about straight people. I will also remind you that these people believe that their fourth grader is being groomed by Harold because at the end of Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-A-Lot it is revealed that he will grow up to have a male domestic partner. I will remind you that they also believe that every Hollywood star and Democratic politician is part of a vast conspiracy to cannibalize children. I will remind you that nobody can point to where all these disappeared children came from.
So is this really about grooming? Or is somebody using parents' fears of predatory pedophiles for some other agenda? And is white supremacy the only reason for attacks on libraries that actually stock antiracist literature? Or is it also a helpful fear that provides racist cover for another agenda entirely, one that many of these racists wouldn't support if it traveled under its own name?
Let's go back to that episode of "On the Media" that we heard because Njamba didn't really feel like walking in the woods this morning. The host interviewed Emily Drabinski, who is the interim chief librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center and the president-elect of the American Library Association. Drabinski apparently made herself a lightning rod for all this anti-librarian venom by posting a celebratory tweet about her election as a Marxist lesbian. But she argues, and I agree, that underlying the opposition to libraries is an opposition to public institutions. Remember that World Book Encyclopedia that I eventually accessed at the library? Without libraries the only children who could use that encyclopedia would be those whose parents paid for it. The history of public libraries in this country, like the history of public schools, goes back to the earliest trade union movement. Both were demands that learning be made available to people who could afford to pay for it. There were no public schools at all in most of the states controlled by enslavers before the Civil War. Public schools in the former Confederacy were begun by the Reconstruction legislatures, the program of formerly-enslaved people. Segregated schools weren't a means of separating Black children from white children; they were a means of denying education to Black children.
In 1959 the white librarian in Lake City, South Carolina called the police on nine-year-old Ronald McNair because he wanted to borrow books. Yes, that Ronald McNair. The one who earned a PhD from MIT. The one who served as an astronaut on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984. The one who died in 1986 when the Challenger disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean. That library is now named after Ronald McNair. But the campaign to defund libraries will prevent another Ronald McNair from reading the books about space that he wants.
Privatization as an ideology argues that the profit motive ensures better services for us all, an argument without evidence that amounts to a quasi-religious faith. Privatization as a practice allows profiteers to step in and provide (or pretend to) services while exploiting every shortcut imaginable to maximize their returns. But privatization as a political strategy is a way for the wealthy to shed any public responsibility at all. Why pay for schools that my child won't attend? Why pay for airline inspection when I'm hiring my own pilot to fly my own plane? Why pay to keep libraries open when I buy the books I want and profit more when you all have to buy your own, too?
There are exceptions. The fire service used to be private. If you paid a subscription in advance, the firefighters would come to put water on your house. But it turns out that fire doesn't discriminate between subscribers and non-subscribers and if your neighbor's home was fully engulfed in flames, yours was going up, too. So the fire department became a public service, paid for by all our taxes. Policing is a different kind of public service. Yes, the rich still maintain their own private security, but they can also tax us to provide a police force that protects them from the rest of us.
But they have very little interest in our education, beyond training us to work for them and produce their profits. When you see some hack demanding to know why we teach science instead of how to fill out credit card applications, remember that they want us to be climate skeptics so that they can keep profiting on both the destruction of our planet and our need to pay usurious interest to them. When you see them mocking the study of history, remember that they really don't want us to know any. In the days of Jim Crow, white exploiters didn't want their Black workers able to read contracts or calculate rent and debt. How different do you think the capitalists of today are? The entire charter school scam is the latest trick to defund and dismantle public education. And the idea that librarians are grooming our children to be gay?
Wake up.
