librarypunk - 065 - Book Challenges with Emily Knox

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

This week we’re joined by Emily Knox! If you ever feel like books are conflated with ideas themselves, this is a good one to listen to. Why do books hold such power in a time where we assume nobody reads them?  https://twitter.com/ejmknox Book Banning in 21st-Century America - 9781442231689  Foundations of Intellectual Freedom | ALA Store Media mentioned Books, censorship, and anti-intellectualism in schools Passing (novel) - Wikipedia The Lily goes 'Incognito': Why we made a zine about secrecy  Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military: Shilts, Randy: 9780449909171: Amazon.com Reading the world in 196 books - BBC Culture Foreword Reviews

I'm Justin. I'm a scholar of communications librarian. I'm a pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they then. I'm Jay. I'm a music library director and my pronouns are he him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Emily and my pronouns are she, her, and I'm an associate professor in library information science. Welcome. We finally have you on after bringing up your work so often where Jay usually summarizes it, But we wanted to really get into it and do another episode on book challenges because we did one back in March before this was sort of mainstream news. It was still kind of confined to library land in our little circles.

But it seems now like there's 100 local news articles circulating every week with, it's the same story everywhere, really. Same books to the point where it's just a script at this point. But interesting variations happen. And so we wanted to have you come on and explain a lot of your research and like how you've been feeling about your approach to studying book challenges over the past few years and how it might have changed, stayed the same or anything like that. So my first question is, how did you get into studying book challenges? So my mom was a high school librarian and we always observed banned books week. And so I've just always been interested in banned books. So most of my book reports were on banned books.

One of my favorite authors was Judy Bloom, whose books got on the list all the time. Then as I went through my academic career, I studied, did religious studies, and I studied Evangelicalism and Fundamism in America. And eventually when I decided to get my PhD, I knew what I wanted to study. And you know, I went to study why people ban books. And I really had to think a lot about how I was going to do that. But I knew I wanted to interview people and really look at how their justifications for banning books. So that's basically, it's always been an interest of mine.

It's one of my favorite topics to talk about. And it's the main area that I teach in. So this goes right back to the beginning with your doctoral thesis. I wish I had that much focus in my life. Yeah. basically the book banning in my book, book banning in 21st century America, is my thesis. I wasn't able to get a copy in time, but I did have your 2020 article that was in, it was a sage journal. I want to say it was Phi Delta Capens.

I thought it was a really nice summary of what I've heard of your work so far. I was really dashing to get books, but I didn't have time to do ILL for some of them. So I took a lot of notes. Have there been any changes in the way you've approached this since you started? I mean, you tied in the fundamentalism stuff from the beginnings, which makes a lot of sense to me. We can get into that, but anything changed? Yeah, so actually I don't approach book balance challenges from a left or right point of view. I really see them as an issue of reading practices and print culture, how we think about the book itself in our society.

and how we understand the power of reading in the global north, basically. So that's actually where a lot of my religious studies comes in. I really focus on philosophies and doctrines that came into Europe through the Reformation and how that changed, how people think about reading and literacy and the book. I would say most recently, what I will need to change is that we always assumed good faith when it came to challenges. And so now when I'll have my students do a portfolio, basically I have them respond to a challenge in my intellectual freedom and censorship class. I'm going to have them not assume good faith. And also I'm going to focus more on the

communication aspect. So I always have had students do a communication plan, but I think that's actually much more important in our current environment than it was previously, letting people know why you have these books, being comfortable talking about the books. I just heard a librarian say, you know, I really wanted to defend these books, but I realized I wasn't comfortable myself talking about sex. So how am I going to defend a book that talks about sex? And so realizing what skills you need to develop yourself to say why you purchase a particular book, why it fits with your collection development policy, and why you think it should stay in the library. And I'm just using library generally. And I'll probably be very nuanced more about, is this a book

in a curriculum? Is this a book that is on a summer reading list? Is this a book that is in the school library? Is this a book that's on display? Is this a book? That's on display? Is this a book, that is in a public library? Is it on display in a public library? Really being clear about the request that is being made. And the other thing that's now being said is that I need to update some of my policies to say that my policy suggestions for students is that once a book has, once a decision has been in a book, been made on a book, it can't be revisited within five years. So you can't just keep bringing the same argument against a book over and over again. Once it's gone through the process, that's it for some amount of time.

So that's really what I've been thinking about is making sure that the process is more adversarial and that in the communication plan, you have a way of reaching out to people who will be advocates for yourself. and the library and the book. I remember, I don't know if it was in one of the classes I took from me. Also, everyone listening, yes, Emily was one of my professors in grad school, that I don't know if it was in one of the classes or, but you said, and I know this is like a kind of over generalization, but you told me policies allow you to say no,

and that there's also like protection inherent in that. And so I like that you bring up the importance of like not just having like a policy, of like, this is our collection development, but also these more like thinking ahead as to like, okay, imagine the person on the other side of this policy and what do you need to do to make sure that your collection is protected, that you are protected, student workers are protected, etc. Yeah, and I have had people argue with me, well, they're not following a policy. So what does it matter if I have a policy? And I'm like, that's not how life works, right? Like, you will have no arguments if you don't have a policy. You must have one. And it's not really to per so that somebody

will follow it. It's so that you will follow it and be protected. You can't control what other people do with your policy, but that doesn't mean that you should not have one. Talking about policies, I'm kind of curious how much board members and like library boards have played into your research and whether or not that's a gap that's kind of being filled. Like, I don't know how often board members get intellectual freedom training or if they really truly know what they're going to be making policies for and defending kind of thing. So I don't know.

Have you encountered that at all in your research? So not in my research, but when I do a lot of talks. So what we are really seeing is how much our civic life has been, ceded to boomers and whoever is around, right? Like, that's, we are not very good at seating the people that we need to be in place to support our public institutions. So I just want to kind of start there. Some libraries receive, their board members receive full training.

It's almost always based on money. So the more money a library has, the more likely. it is to train their board members. What I often have to talk about is that, you know, there are libraries that are run by someone's grandma, you know, and someone's, you know, in a one room, sometimes out of their house, right? Like, that is, that could be the public library and some of our towns. So getting training to some of the smaller places is a lot more difficult because it's, It takes effort. So what I've been encouraging lately is for the people who are at my talks to run for school board,

to run for library board. This is especially true when I'm talking to academic librarians. They're like, what can I do? They're like, what can I do? I'm like, you can run for the school board. You can run for the library board. Who better than you to serve? And sometimes people are like, well, that seems really political.

I'm like, it's all political. Like, there's no way of getting around that. Libraries have always been political institutions. They are now under siege. And so you have to be willing to do the work. When I talk to library administrators, I say if you have friends, you think would be good on the board. That's how we do the Supreme Court.

You should go ahead and say, go ahead and run. So there's no reason to be coy and hope that other people will take up this mantle. We really have to do it ourselves. Yeah, and they will call you. I did get invited to, because I have applied to be on the library board. In my last town, I got a call right before I moved, and that was no longer eligible because I moved to next city. But I've already, I've, I've already got my application. And ours is by appointment, which is kind of less work. But, you know, if you say you're a librarian, and you're interested in doing it, you know, you'll probably get called.

Yeah. Yep. We did talk, last time we talked about book challenges, we talked about kind of how they originate, but the foot, but how the footwork always gets done by like the busy bodies, the people who are going to be putting in the same time, like the Facebook, grandmas, who were going to go in and handwrite a book challenge and say, I saw this mentioned on Facebook, and that's why I'm here to write out this challenge. You know, you see like handwritten copies of those challenges. all the times, but we were wondering if the way in which book challenges are spread

virally has changed, if that's a new thing, if we're seeing sort of like a younger group of people get mobilized to book challenges, particularly like young men who are not particularly religious, but have these very trad beliefs, you know, they're very misogynists and kind of want all that stuff, but have been raised more or less secular. So I don't I don't usually think about book challenges like in terms of who is necessarily bringing it. So let me start with like the virulity of it. That's basically just social media. But in fact, there have always been groups of people who go around the country challenging books.

It's just that they had to do it by phone. So Loretta Gaffney has a really great book about conservative groups and book challenges. that I highly recommend. And I don't have the title right in front of me. But if you look up her name, you'll see her book. So what they used to do was if someone had challenged a book, there were basically lists of people. And they were in touch with each other. So people have always looked through to see who they are. When I was working on my dissertation, this is before. So this has been in 2012. Actually, this is in 2010. I interviewed one of these people. And he said, sent my name to some of the people that were on his list that he's in touch with. And some of them

are willing to talk to me and some of them weren't. But they've always been together. It's just easier to get your message out with social media. But I think it's important to say that that's for both sides, right? It's for people who are for keeping the book and also for people who are against keeping the book. So the way that is done is through social media posts. I think that's incredibly important to say. So it's not that people who are banning books are doing anything different from people who are trying to keep the books. They are using the same tools. They are meeting up with each other. They are showing up at board meetings. That is what everybody should do. And when I think about people who are, my focus is less on like people's arguments about the books themselves

and much more about what are they trying to say about reading and why is reading so important. How do we understand how people change their minds about something? That's really what I'm looking at more. So I would say like for the younger people who are getting involved with this, it still is mostly moms who show up to these things, who are extremely concerned. There are some people who get on and send to a Zoom meeting and say terrible things, right? That does happen. But I would say the people writing these letters, right, are really groups like Mons for Liberty, some of the others, no left turn, these sorts of groups.

and they have, you can go to their websites, they have the templates on their website, you can just take a look at it and write it out yourself. The way they communicate about those templates is through their social media sites. That's not an illegitimate way to do something. There's no reason why if you want to support a group, you can't make your own Facebook group,

make your own TikTok thing, have a template and have people go to the board, board meeting and say in support of the book. I sometimes think that, you know, we talk about collective action, but often we're very wary of collective action when it's on a side that we agree with. So I just want to put that there. Interesting. They're really good at solidarity and organized. Yes, they are. We could maybe take some notes. Yes. I guess I hadn't considered that because I've, I didn't realize people were timid about this, but I guess that makes sense. You, you people, worry about the tactic.

Like associating it, like, oh, well, if they're doing it, it must be bad. So we should have to do something different. I don't want to get political. Well, it gets into issues of inauthenticity. So what people often say to me is, are people being authentic when they are upset about these books? And I'm like, yes, they are upset. You know, they think that their book, that these books will lead to their children having

bad moral character. There's no doubt about that. So the idea is like, well, if I use a template, then I'm not being authentic. But that doesn't really matter, right? As we have seen. Alec does that all the time, right? You don't have to be authentic in your legislation. Like that's a, in some ways, it's a fallacy to think that way.

Yeah, I'm happy to hand off things for people to rubber stamp if they want to. Yeah, I like writing policies because I feel like it's exactly the kind of coverage that you need. I'm having a hard time right now getting a privacy policy done. But at least I've done my part and gotten it to the admin. And so now it's kind of, I just need to keep bugging them until they do something about it. But I want to get to the kind of the core of your argument. So you talk about in your work books are tangible targets for anti-intellectualism. You talk about different trends that kind of go back to I'm blinking right now.

I want to say Hofstadter. Yes, I do talk about Halfstetter. And then ideas that. that the books contain are conflated with the books themselves. So challenging the book challenges the idea and books reify ideas within them and the imagination of the person challenging it. And you talk about how this comes out of a Protestant tradition of Sola Scriptura. Do you want to dive into that? Sure. So what people say is there are a couple things that they say. So when I talk about the

reification of book, what people will say is, I can't believe someone published this trash, in a book, right? Books should have truth with a capital T. And you can see how that's not really a left-right argument. This is actually an argument that many people make from all political spheres, right? If you're going to take the time to publish a book, and if the publishing company is going to take the time to market it and get it out to libraries, out to bookstores, then it should be true in some way. And so books contain truth and truth. should be in books. So that's the kind of reification. When I think about solo scripture, what I really am thinking about is the idea that if I read this book, I will find my way to

salvation. So the doctrine of my scripture alone is that there's no one between me and the interpretation of this text. All I have is this text. If I read it, I will find what I need for salvation. And in fact, all sorts of of people engage in this. So it's no mistake that after the George Floyd murder, what it showed up, book lists, the idea that if I read these books, if you read these books, they will make you different. So this is like a tight rope that we all walk, right? I do, it's not that I don't believe in windows and mirrors and sliding glass doors. Like I do believe that. But, what I try to say is that you don't know how that's going to affect any one person, right?

There's no saying that if I read this particular book, I'm going to have this feeling about it. Or if you read this particular book, you're going to have this feeling about it. We all bring our own baggage to reading. So that's why I talk about reading practices and uses fishes, interpretive communities, and interpretive strategies to think about who I am as I encounter texts. When people encounter texts that they reject in some way, basically what they say is like, this is my interpretation of the text, and there's no other way to interpret it. The word words mean what they say and say what they mean.

I trace this back to Scottish common sense philosophy. It doesn't really matter, though. It's basically the idea is like what you hear is, this book is trash, you know, like, How can you read it and see anything else in it? Obviously, it is going to lead to this outcome. If you read about penguins, right, which always comes up, then somehow you are going to think it's this very that gay people are okay, right? It is this very closed idea of interpretations of texts.

And this is what really holds all people who, challenge books together. Is this closed interpretation? I call this monosemic interpretation as opposed to polysemic interpretation. The idea that texts are actually open to many different interpretations based on who you are as a person and what you bring to the text itself. Challengers must argue around that because they must argue that there is a one-to-one correlation between reading this book and what the outcome will be. And you just see that. over and over and over again. Yeah, and like instead of viewing, like, it makes it very individualistic,

even if people think that it will have the same effect on every single person, it's still like an individualistic relationship between a person and a text, rather than thinking like, okay, what role is this text play in like communities or larger systems, for example? Because, you know, everyone does bring their own unique experience. and stuff to a text. But then I think especially challengers will like stop there and try to fix it there, fix it, you know, air quotes there, there. And regardless of again, like what political sphere they're coming from, if that made any sense at all. Yeah, but I would say that the challenge for

people in librarianship is that we really approach people as individuals. So although books work in community that is not what's important when the person is standing in front of you in front in the reference desk, right? It's much more about their own information need and what they are asking for. This is, of course, one of the most difficult aspects of librarianship, right, that you don't really know this person very well, you don't know their background. You don't know anything about them. They are just saying they need this thing. And how do you respond to that? And so this is sort of where things get very difficult when thinking about information, and especially when it comes to issues of like misinformation and disinformation. That's where my work flows into that area.

For sure. Yeah. Like larger discourses can be very complicated by just the very nature of the type of work that we do and what its focus can be. Yeah, definitely. And there's another theme sort of running through your work, or at least what I've been able to read. Sorry, I didn't have time to prepare more. It's totally okay. It was very last minute like, can you get him lead on? I was like, sure, I'll email her. Your focus on curriculum and curriculum as another trend that runs through,

I think you point to kind of like American trends in thought, is the sphere of indoctrination that flows from anti-intellectualism. and that curriculum is coercive and that the concern with indoctrination is that when we are assigning these books, we're assigning them because we want this outcome. We want to make your children. What was, hang on, I've got a... Up yours, woke moralists. Woke moralists. There's it.

Postmodern neo-Marxists. But I think what your argument is is that educators should be saying, no, these books have multiple interpretations and that there's not an intention. outcome, it's simply that the intellectual life is worth pursuing on its own. And that will be our bulwark against challenges. Are you interpreting it right? Yes. And that's why this is so difficult to do, right? Because you are saying, I think it's important for kids to read this book. I think it will introduce them to a different way of thinking. But you don't actually know if it will make them think differently, right? That's not a thing you can know. You just know that I have presented this information to you. We are going to talk about it. You may or may not make this part of who you are

as a person. You may be very upset about it. When I teach undergrads, I always start this way. I'm like, y'all are just not going to agree with everything I say. That is fine. Some of the things you're going to be really upset at me about. I had one student in my student of Viales be very upset because I made them read the liberal rag, the New York Times. You know, like, you just never know what someone will be upset about. But that's not my job. My job is not to change your mind. My job is really to introduce an idea to you. For you to, and I'm going to use eating metaphors, to ingest it, to think about it. And perhaps as you move through your life, you'll think about that idea in the future, right? Oh, I remember when I was in my social informatics class, that professor that I had us read

that liberal rag, the New York Times, you know, also talked about perhaps why it may be important to think about my data privacy, right? I really try to not think about what the outcome is. The outcome is very individualistic. I can just introduce different ideas. You also mentioned that the coercive nature of curricula forces people to experience ideas otherwise they wouldn't have experienced. Yeah. Yeah. A fear of lack of control there, I think. Absolutely. We cannot get out of the idea that curriculum is coercive. It simply is. I talk about this when I talk about misand-differences information. So, it is true that a vaccine mandate means a loss of bodily autonomy. I mean, that's true. You need to

have a good reason why, right? Stopping at, oh, curriculum is coercive doesn't really help. You have to be able to say, and this is why I think it's important that we know the history that is presented in 1619, right? to think about American history from the point of view of enslaved people for whom 1619 might be a more important date than 1776 because not much changed for enslaved people in 1776, right? That is just a way of thinking about our history that maybe wasn't introduced before, right? Maybe you've never thought about that before. You may think that's illegitimate, you know, like, no. we must start in 1776 with the Declaration, right? Okay, doesn't mean that the enslaved people weren't there and weren't freed through, you know, the Declaration of Independence. It's really important

that we say what things actually are. The state has a vested interest in having good public school curriculum. That's absolutely true. There's a reason why we have that. And I think that rather than trying to say, oh, the state doesn't do that. Like, that doesn't make any sense, right? Like, we should actually say, we do this because we think it's important for you to know the truth about our history, especially as we move to a majority minority country and must wrestle with people who will be gaining power. And as people who are currently in power, may have to lose some of their power.

The discussions of like the purpose of curriculum, especially I'm thinking of, because especially in this article, you talk about the like, we need diverse books movement and like discussions. Because I know in talks I've seen you do a lot comes up of like high school English classes. And I see on Twitter a lot of times people, I'm no fan of the quote canon myself either. I think it's a thing to be interrogated. but I don't think that that means that some of those things don't have merit on a school curriculum. Like there's a reason why a lot of those are. I've seen on Twitter a lot lately people talking about like remove everything off, replace it all with YA fiction. That's what the kids relate to.

That's what they actually like. It's more fun to read. And then you get into these arguments, which I see actually these mirror similar arguments to people arguing about the value of like a library science degree. for example is like what is the purpose of education is it to prepare you for the workforce is it to allow you to study advanced topics and ideas to explore ideas prepare you for a whatever kind of society and like so I know that a lot of times like the YAification there's nothing actually like wrong with YA fiction but this like YAification of high school English class, like a call for this is often I also see in the name of like diversifying

curriculum. But also I think it's like missing the force for the trees a lot of times, especially like why books might be in a high school English curriculum, especially as we're talking about like, no, this is coercion. We just have to think about why we're coercing and with what. So this actually goes to some of the other topics that I discuss in my work. I think about canon a lot. I don't quite write about it as canon. But the problem with the way that we have curriculous, the canon set up, is that it really only allows for certain stories. So Morrison is part of the canon. But there are more than just Morrison, right? So passing, and I cannot remember who wrote Lawson. Is that who wrote Passing? Nella Losson.

lots of people in the Harlem Renaissance, right? There are tons of black writers and contemporary black writers who could be included in the canon. But what tends to happen, I just read a really excellent element, which I can link to once it gets up, about the gatekeeping that happens in the canon and how it actually reinforces other societal structures that we have. So what is education for? It is to build skills for the workforce, but also the main thing that education does is it builds social and cultural capital. I am a Georgian at heart. I believe that he has this absolutely right. Are you an educated person if you have not read Shakespeare? There's a reason why they bring Shakespeare into prisons, right? It's not just a coincidence. I remember in high school,

my English teacher was appalled that we had not read Hamlet. We read Julia, Julia Caesar, a bunch of others. It was our senior year. He's like, ah, we'll just watch it. Like, y'all must be exposed to Hamlet because how can I let you out of AP English if you haven't read Hamlet? That's really much more how education works, right? What does it mean? People talk about things like critical thinking, but what do we mean? by critical thinking, it sort of means like, oh, you get this idea that you're constantly like doing hermeneutics of suspicion. Like that's what we would have called it in religious studies. But that's not really what people do with their educations. It exposes you to,

quite frankly, upper class tastes. That's one of the things that education is intended to do. it exposes you to a network of people who will help you get a job. It provides you a credential so that I, when I'm hiring people, can easily see on their resume that they possibly can do this job when other people can't, right? That doesn't mean they can, but it is, you know, essentially a certification tool. Education does a lot of things that are not just, that are sometimes unspoken. And and really have to do, this is really where I think we need to do much more about class when it comes to how we think about education. So, you know, with, this is totally off topic, but I'm very interested in people with the loan forgiveness, right, saying, well, what about the people who

went in the trades, right? Not thinking that, well, some of those people also have loans, right? Like, it's not just as simple as like, okay, you still have to get training. And then what I also worry about is that if we set up things where higher education, as in a four-year degree, is not open to everybody, who will we push to get those trade jobs? We're not like Germany where, which is not as homogenous as it used to be, but I think we can all call guests who in your typical high school would be. would be told, oh, you should go get an automotive degree as opposed to a four-year college degree. I think we aren't always thinking about how we reinforce our societal things through education.

I'm on that topic or something I think about a lot, which is the way that the elite educate their children compared to how we do public schooling. And so the facing forward rows of public school versus the collaborative discussion-based focus of peer learning and things like that and like Montessori styles. So, private academies. Elite private academies always have a credentialed school librarian, always.

They have a fully stocked library. They have well-trained library staff, always. And I tell my students that all the time. It is not in your basic day school academy boarding school that don't have school librarians. They always have school librarians. Not only do they have school librarians, they probably have an entire staff. And the librarian is not the person doing the IT, right? It's just a completely different world.

And, you know, I'm sure they'd be really upset if they took the school librarian from, I don't know. I grew up in D.C., I mean, in Maryland, so cathedral, friends, you know, St. Albans, Glenel, Galby's day schools that were around me. They always had libraries, beautiful libraries. Yeah, it's just something I think about once in a while. I don't get in front of a class as often as I used to, so I don't get to talk at students about thinking critically about their school and structures and things that aren't just media literacy. I know your work isn't focused on discerning the ideology of people who, or focused on particular ideology of the people who are challenging books, rather like tendencies that people tend to follow in our particular culture. But I want to talk ideology in terms of this sort of critique of liberalism, this universalizing everything, this universalizing force of everything of like a free speech and access to

materials, the wide open bulwark that we say, anything could really go into the library if we really needed it too, if it had some sort of collection value. And we've talked about critiques of this, you know, it doesn't really happen. There's a collection development policy or there's at least collection development practices. There's not this wide open thing. And also asking, does anyone really fully believe it or not? That's another question. But, But I wanted to get your thoughts on, do we have a situation when there are eliminationist or racist and trans music materials allowed to propagate through society? Do we have a obligation to create communities where people are not actually threatened by the materials that we are putting out in displays that we are putting out in our collections that are given equal time? The thing I worry about the most, for instance, if someone does a pride display, they say, well, we also have to do it.

display of transmissic materials because that's equal time. I could imagine that actually happening in the public library. Just like all of J.K. Rowling's work. Just put that up there. Yeah. And her awful new book that's longer than Infinite Chest apparently. Harry Potter and the Twitter Wars. Yeah. So I wanted to get your feel on that if you're willing. Yeah, sure. So I am always very wary when librarians start talking about what should not be on the shelves. I have my students read Selection Not Censorship by Lester Ashheim. My current worry about it is that it reifies the power of white women in librarianship, which those are the people who would be making those decisions, right?

The field is what, 80, 90 percent white, 90 percent women. That is a lot of power over what should be on particular shelves. I also worry a lot about paternalism, the idea that someone, particularly a group of often white women, middle class, often married, heterosexual, cis, women are making a decision about what might harm me. That makes me a little worried. I talk to a lot of groups of librarians. There are sometimes nobody, no one who looks like me, I'm a black woman. You know, sometimes there is one person who looks like me.

I worry that this leads us back to when librarians were really involved in the fiction wars. The idea that we know what is best. We know what is good for people to read. we were going to be part of the assimilationist classist movement by giving people good books and not not good books. We already are really into this anyway, right? I just saw lots of posts about why are people reading so much James Patterson? Why are you worried about this? This is not your problem. There are a lot of people don't read at all. You know, like what do people want to read? There's obviously something about James Patterson's corporate book machine that people like to read.

What can you do to get people to read other books if that's a problem, right? I am always, always worried about paternalism and the idea that other people know what might harm someone else. It just gets into very difficult power struggles. I also, worry that like those things just do not work out the way people think it will, right? There's no shared definition of racist, ableist, any of those things, right? That's, that is only, those are only ideas that are shared in certain communities. So the idea that I can say, I'm not going to put this book up because it's racist or because it's transmissic, right? That's not something that would necessarily work across different communities. And I worry that the more librarians

engage in saying, this is good, this is bad for these reasons, that's just not, I worry that it will backfire very quickly. So I'm not someone who believes in balance. You do not have to put up one thing because something else about. I talk about representation, not balance. This comes from Jennifer Friedman, who is the reference and zine librarian at Barnard College, strive for representation and not for balance. But, I mean, you don't have to put up necessarily, actually, I would say maybe putting up J.K. Rowling's thing is the way to get around that if someone asks you. But I would actually say not to be like punitive about it, just put up something on Amish fiction. right? Like, don't put up what people like what would people who are conservative in your area like to read? I mean, there's tons of clean fiction out there, right? Just put it up. You know, you don't necessarily have to show, like, put up, I don't know, some of these books that are coming out, but like, put up a book from the Heritage Foundation. Put up a Gorsuch's new book, right? He's a Supreme Court.

justice, right? Like, there are ways of saying, yes, we understand that there are people who have different ideologies within this community without necessarily being hurtful. I just pictured in my brain like a queer erotica display right next to the Amish fiction. Because I say, like, what's the Amos term for a bodice ripper? Most public libraries don't collect erotica, right? That's very true. Because, and it's a very true. Because, and it's a lot of it. This is also in my arguments because women and children are seen as not having critical distance from a text. So they are very worried about women being sexually aroused by what they read. This is not true of men.

So people have gotten on me. I'm like, I call it dude books. Dude books are rarely challenged. But libraries do not collect, public libraries do not collect erotica because of the worry about how it will affect the women's brain. It seems like that's out of like any, like, what I say in, people are like, how can that be? I'm like, trust me. There are tons of public library collection of all policies. I am still someone who is against the backlash against 50 Shades of Gray.

People can criticize its depictions of BDSM all they want, but the people say this book is harmful. I'm like, shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. Like, I hated when I saw librarians being like, we won't let you check out 50 Shades of Gray. I'm like, okay. I was working like front desk like, page. patron service, public service job when that whole thing went down. And yeah, I won't go into it because that's a whole different topic.

But I found at least having checked out quite a bit of erotica from the library I used to work at and being a romance fan, a lot of the times those books just vanished too. And that's also because people also because women don't want to be pressured out of enjoying things, I feel like if that makes sense. Like the same reason people don't want it on the shelves is the same reason it gets stolen off the shelves. So this is one of the things I say in my new book is I talk about the rise in romance reading with the Kindle.

This is in my privacy chapter because no one knows what you're reading when you read on your e-reader. And so there was a huge spike in romance and erotica. So I suspect that those books are actually going out in e-book collections than they are necessarily from the shelf. Yeah, I know definitely when I lived in Salt Lake City, had a much larger e-book library collection available to me than I do now in New Hampshire. And I read so many filthy things in that e-book collection. And now it's like nothing. But what I was going to say earlier, and like I was glad I put it in the notes about like I'm not a free speech absolute.

by any means, but I am always wanting to push, it's like, okay, well, we can't allow this. It's like, okay, but who is making those decisions and why? I feel like that, it never gets to that point. Like, I know this comes up a lot when it's like whether or not you let certain people speak on a college campus. And it's like, I also don't think Ben Shapiro should be coming to a college campus or these other people who have literally, like, incited violence on campuses. but do I want the president of this neoliberal hellhole making that decision?

Because this has happened, they just didn't start weaponizing that against like Palestinian activist speakers and stuff. Like that is a thing that happens. So that's always like a framework. It's like, okay, if we don't want these kinds of materials in our collection for whatever reason, what does that mean? Is there a policy we can point to? And like who's making that decision and why? And I was, I was reminded of, um, I think it was when I was in 502 with you, and the sort of wave of public libraries starting to weed, like Fat Albert and Cosby Show stuff was happening.

And you pointed out how many of these libraries are weeding Woody Allen's movies. None. Exactly. And that it's like, we say that like, oh, yeah, it's one of those things where it's like, these are good. Good's not the right word. But I feel like another reason why I like your work so much is I feel like the discussion of race and class, not just of in the materials, but of the people making these decisions. I feel like because librarianship is just so like white, just that I say it's like the three of like three of the four people on this call is just like not something that gets brought up a lot. And so, yeah, like I think we should, even the people who are being more critical about, you know, collection decisions and stuff, but then even pushing those people to think critically about who is getting to make those decisions and why and who was like, can you make those decisions with the money you have, et cetera.

Yeah. And actually, I think I probably also talked about how the authors, especially the male authors who, who, have been critiqued. I'll just put it that way. I didn't want to use their term cancel conjure. Our Sherman Alexi, Juno Diaz, right, they all have something in common. We don't hear that much about that happening to white male authors, quite frankly. I would also say, so I do have my students do a speaker when they, when I have them do that portfolio. So some of the academic students who are interested in academic libraries. What I really try to emphasize is that the problem is less the speaker and the more the people who invited the speaker. And that is what makes it so hard to deal with. Because what it opens up is that

there are people within this community who are racist, ableist, you know, all these different things. And essentially, inviting the speaker is simply a symptom of what is the more pressing, problem, which is that you're actually in community with people who think it's okay to invite someone like Ben Shapiro. So that is actually the issue to get to. So when we were dealing with this on the campus here, I said, well, you know, we should have a process when there's a speaker, right, that you have to say what harms might be caused with this speaker. We have to do that when we do institutional review board, right? And they were like, well, you know, some people might say like, you know, liberals might cry, you know, or something like that. I was like, well, that tells you a lot

about who those people are, right? They can say that, but now you know what the purpose was for inviting this person in the first place. And the problem isn't inviting the person. The problem is that there was this group of people who think that that was okay. And that is what we're not getting to overall in our world. And I just want to say, like, this is what I try to get to when I talk about mis and disinformation. People want to have really easy fixes for it. I'm like, no easy fixes. You were talking about like emotional intelligence, knowing yourself, knowing how you encounter information, just saying, well, this is misinformation, so we're going to remove it. That's not going to do anything, right? Like, you really have to think, especially when it comes to things

like media and cultural literacy, it's really about knowing yourself, right? Being aware. I remember what my second point was from earlier in like talking about how like, there is no one definition of what does ex phobia mean? right or exism means and it's reminded me a lot of a lot of queer and especially trans discourses mainly on Twitter by people who are far too online including myself but especially around fiction and normally between like very transgressive fiction authors uh trans authors writing incredibly transgressive fiction um versus trans authors who sort of view the like representation as glorification and condoning, and, like, why would anyone want to read that this is harmful just putting it out there?

And both of these are coming from trans people and quite often, like, leftist trans people. There was literally a trans author who got, like, bullied and mocked so much for writing a short story that she had to commit herself and is detan transitioning, I believe. this was a couple years ago, she wrote a really transgressive science fiction story and a lot of other transgressive is harmful and it made me upset and it hurts me and therefore it's harmful for everyone else. So that's definitely, and especially, again, right now it's a lot around them, transgressive fiction and what can be depicted and who it's hurting and who's making those decisions. That's a very sort of dominant discourse online right now, I would say. I'm surprised it's not in libraries more.

Or maybe it is and I haven't seen it. Yeah, I was going to say I really like your point about how it's the person who invited the speaker is at the heart of things as opposed to the speaker themselves. Because I kind of see how that parallels to these movements of conservative people moving on to library boards with explicit. plans to change collection policies or root out the bad things in their library system. Because I feel like a lot of the people who then, like the community who then very strongly reacts against that, like didn't even believe that sort of thing was possible in their community. And I feel like a lot of that is sort of, it's like a liberal bubble. Where everyone you know is cool with queer people. So therefore your whole community must be

cool with queer people. And then when somebody's throwing a hissy fit over drag queen story time, a pride display or whatever, and I'm speaking of queer just because that's my identity. I literally saw Nazi stickers on lampposts on my walk in my town last night. Right. And then especially people who aren't affected by the, they're kind of like, well, we can't let that stand. And it's like, well, if you had thought about this before this even happened, it wouldn't be a reactive thing. So like you're saying if you run for school board or run for library board, this other person wouldn't have been able to take over the whole thing. I don't know if I'm, if I'm explaining that. I think that's, I think that's correct. And like, what I've been talking about a lot now is not flattening people.

So as you're talking, Jay, I was thinking about how I just read this, or listened to an article about a trans woman who was at January 6th. She's a former like army major and was one of the people who trained the proud, she is a proud boy or something like that. I don't know how it all works, right? But she, I mean, there are very up in front conservative trans women. And so like she was one of the people leading the charge into the capital. And so it was very, it was a very.

we're a conversation because the people she was leading the charge with were like, yeah, we're really supportive of trans rights. And you're like, oh, okay. You know, the idea that people are, so this is something that Randy Schiltz really talks about a lot in Conduct Economy Pugman. I know there's all sorts of stuff with his books, but I love and the band paid on it on and I love Conduct and Becoming coming because he talks very clearly in that book about how conservative all of these LGBT, I was supposed to say LGBT people that he met when he was talking about gays and lesbians in the military. He was like, I was just surrounded by these incredibly conservative people. And ever since reading that book, I'm like, yeah, you know, we don't

actually talk well about intersectionality. The way that actually we all have intersectional identities that don't always map on to what we want to think about. So, I mean, I don't use this term in the same way Kimberly Crenshaw-Dott uses it. I'm using it really as a heuristic to think about what are my identities. How do they play out in certain contexts? What do I have similar to some people and different from other people? And when we are working in a library, people bring all of that, all of that, to the desk and say, can you get me this book? Can you get me this thing? They log into, you know,

to get the e-books, right? It's not just one thing that people are bringing in. I gave a talk and I talked about, so this is the leader of the proud boys. His wife wrote something about how great the proud boys are, but all I could focus on was their children. They have elementary school children, right? Do they take those children to the library for Story Hour? Probably, right? Are you going to throw those children out with their parents because he is a leader of the proud boys? No. You know, like, that's not how libraries work. The kids can come to Story Hour and they can sit there and listen to the stories. And what you hope is by exposing them to ideas that are different from what their parents are telling them all the time, that they might be a different person. That to me is like what,

how we have to think about things, because I had forgotten that, oh yeah, this guy is a horrible person, also a husband and father, right? Like, it's, you can't disassociate that from who that person is. And we often try to do that. But I think it's, gets us into very difficult territory when we do that. Thinking about those kids and how, you know, you hope they become something different than what their parents necessarily are trying to get them to be. Like, I feel like part of the path of that is like getting conservative trans women or getting, you know, people who have a parent, who have surface level contradictory identities

and beliefs, right? Like, and I don't know if we should view that as a kind of progress or not, I guess, is kind of what I grapple with there, is whether or not the fact that somebody figured out how to make those things coexist means that there's hope for them to keep moving or, yeah, I'm not, I'm not even entirely sure certain what I'm trying to articulate there, but. People are just, are really people, right? They react to things in different ways. Our job as librarians is to meet people's information needs to help people to flourish.

So that's the term I've been using more, is thinking about the idea of flourishing to support our communities as best we can to provide services that are needed. The library is the most amazing institution. I was just listening to something about like remote work and libraries came up all the time. I'm like, yes, it's one of the few places where you can just sit and not have to pay any money, you know. It is a collectivist institution. We pool all of our resources to provide other resources for people who both can and can't afford them. We don't do.

You can only use this if you are lower that are higher than a certain wage. Like we just don't do that. We don't do means testing. There are so few institutions like that around. And I worry that if we try to form people to be a particular way, that will lose some of the things that are really important about the library. I don't think libraries are neutral. Libraries stand for all those things that I said, right? The flourishing of human beings, a place that people can go to, quiet,

for you when you need it, providing information, freedom of expression, story time. Like, these are the things that sometimes providing lunch for kids in the summer, right? Like, all sorts of things. All those things are very political. They are all very supportive of our communities. And they are, I just think they're so vital. I'm super distressed by this place where the board decided to close the library instead of, letting it have books, like, first of all, that's a bad idea and it did not work out for them.

But also, like, that's not just what a library does. Where do the kids go after school? They go to the library, you know? Where are they going to go now? Are you going to pay for their child care after middle school? No, you know. So I really hope that we can think of ways to really advocate for all of our libraries. and our collections as we go through all of us.

Ty, this was something you said earlier about like how so much of these discussions is framed as like some form of protection and which just normally comes off as paternal and then patronizing reminds me of, so we did an episode with historian Ben Miller. He does the podcast Bad Gays. It's really good. And at the end we talked about, we brought up the idea of queer. stories and histories being challenged, especially in libraries right now with like the book, gender queer and stuff. And we talked about how instead of being on like the defensive and the

reactionary, instead just be affirming like, no, screw you. There are people in this community who are queer and that rules instead of trying to do this defensiveness of the books, but like being like, no, this is a way of supporting of the community, not as a like, protective, but just like affirming. So I don't know what you maybe thought about that angle against books. I don't know how effective legal it is, but I think there are also people who just want to know more about what does it mean to be gender queer, right? Like it's, it might just be like, okay, I hear my kid talking about this. I don't know what this is, right? I should read something. I'm going to go to the library. They keep talking about this book, gender queer. Do you have the book. genderqueer? Can I read it? You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't actually have to be much more than that, right? That's an information need that the library should fill and say like, yes, we have this book. We have other books, you know, that you might want to read about all sorts of people, right? Along with gender queer, you should read, I don't know. I can't think of anything off the top of my head. But anything on the current list, right?

Read about the penguins. Right. I mean, like, there's just so many. And there's so many wonderful books. Like, that's what you should say, you know? Like, you don't actually know why someone is coming in to ask for it. I often think that what you actually hear is fear. It is adults who are afraid that their children will be queer, trans.

That is what this is about. it is not about other things. It is about my children. If they don't read this book, then they won't get this idea. That's not true. That's not how the world works. And it might not even be their kid. They might be like, well, my best friend said he was trans. So I want to know more. What can I read about that? Right. I think that it doesn't have to be someone in your community because that to me is the importance of importance of books being windows, right? That you can live in an extremely white or whatever community, but it is still extremely important that you have the hate you give on your shelf, even if your community that you serve is 99% white because that's the world we live in. You should also, I've been talking up works in translation. We don't just live in, we live in a world, right? How many works in translation do you have on your shelf? Are they works in translation from all sorts of countries? You can start with the woman who read a book from every country. Just get all those, right? It's like 174 books.

Do you have them all? Right. Maybe you can't buy them, but put them in your e-book collection. Do them with a consortium. Make sure that like it's easy to get them. Start there. Don't go to just the usual places to get your book reviews, right? Like I read forward reviews myself just to make sure I can see what the indie publishers are putting out. Are you picking up local zines in from the kids in your high school? I don't know. Like people are just doing so many different things. That is how you should think about your collection, right? Like much more expansive and broad. When I get to the thing about translation, people are like, oh, I really need to check my works in translation. I'm hoping to read over my sabbatical Japanese mysteries because apparently during the golden age... I have a good

recommendation for you. Okay, excellent. And I'm like really excited. I don't know if my library has them. I will just buy them. But like it doesn't, I guess what I'm saying. It doesn't have to be like literature, right? It can just be like whatever, you know, like a fun book that is in fact a hard-boiled mystery that is in translation from Japan. I just read the Mirror Visitor series, which is French. It's actually a duology even though she has it as like a quad.

It's not really a quad. It's basic fantasy. It's great. do you have that? You know, like getting, thinking more broadly about, you know, what are people reading around the world? What are we importing easily? What is being translated? Who are the gatekeepers for those translations?

I think is just as important because it's, that's what the library should do is open up the vistas, you know, to everyone. Well, I want to wrap up because we've gone for quite a while now. So I know we could probably just keep going for another hour, which would not be good because I'm sleepy. Emily, thanks for coming on. Is there anything you want people to check out, follow social media, anything like that? So I do have a new book coming out called Fundamental Foundations of Intellectual Freedom. It's published by ALA Neal Schumann. It's basically my course. I encourage people to check it out. It discusses a lot of the things we discuss here. I'm on Twitter.

I just do work stuff mostly on Twitter. So that's at E.J.M. Knox. And I'm always happy to talk about this topic. So I talked to all sorts of groups. My actual favorite was when I would give talks at Rantul Public Library, sometimes to just buy people about BAM books. and once gave it and a little girl was there. She was about seven.

She wasn't quite interested in my topic. What she really wanted to know was how you write a book. And that was so wonderful just talking to her about how you write a book, how you become an author. So I, you know, I'm always happy to talk about anything and be easy to get in touch with them. I'm a Knox at Illinois. I hope she writes a book. I hope so, too. She was just so.

sitting there. I was like, is she going to ask me about bad books? I'm not sure she's read any bad books yet at that time. I bet she has insightful things to say about that books. And then she should write a book about it. Yes. And she's like, how did you write your book? How do you become an author?

I thought about writing books. I'm like, oh my gosh, let's talk. So I'm like, to be an author, you have to write. That's one of the major things that people sometimes don't get to. You got to sit in front of the either with your notes. notebook and your pencil or in front of the word document. Learn to outline. Really important skill. Yes. Yes. Can't suggest it enough. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. Good night.