https://www.wsj.com/articles/drag-queen-story-hour-is-just-the-beginning-american-library-association-woke-social-justice-book-banning-white-supremacy-11668193580?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
In 2006 the American Library Association offered its members buttons emblazoned “radical militant librarian.” We should have taken the message at its word. The American library, once a haven of neutral calm, has become a battleground in the culture wars.
In 2018 the ALA dropped the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder from its annual children’s literature award. The reason? The supposed culturally insensitive portrayals in her landmark “Little House on the Prairie” series. Three years later, the organization issued a “Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work.” It claimed that “libraries have upheld and encouraged white supremacy both actively through discriminatory practices and passively through a misplaced emphasis on neutrality.”
The quiet, neutral library was out. Full-throated progressive politics were in. As Emily Drabinski, who was recently elected president of the ALA, said on her website: “So many of us find ourselves at the ends of our worlds. The consequences of decades of unchecked climate change, class war, white supremacy, and imperialism have led us here.”
The condemnation of the history of the American library, by its own gatekeepers, has done more than bring “Drag Queen Story Hour” to children’s reading rooms. It has also upended the library’s traditional role as an organization primarily dedicated to the acquisition, preservation and circulation of books. This radical overhaul is the work of some of America’s largest cultural philanthropies.
Last month the Mellon Foundation hosted a panel discussion on the American library with Mellon president Elizabeth Alexander, ALA executive director Tracie D. Hall and Los Angeles City Librarian John F. Szabo. “Library workers are on the front lines of some of our most pressing social justice issues,” began the discussion. They are “no longer relegated to the reference desk.”
What does this all mean? For one, that today’s librarians mock “the shushing part” of the traditional library: “I can’t think of too many contemporary library spaces I’ve been in where the librarian is going to be a shusher,” Ms. Hall said. “I probably was the librarian that others might have wanted to shush.” The panel spoke of “fulfilling the promise of what libraries were meant to be in terms of equity” through sewing classes, co-working spaces and “entrepreneurial incubators.”
