Don’t Look Away

On a recent trip to Europe, I was repeatedly asked the same question, “what can we do?” The European library community (and I’m sure the larger global library community) are looking at developments in the United States with confusion and anxiety. How can the federal government close agencies, target the Institute for Museum and Library Services, cut budgets at the National Agricultural Library, stop research at the National Institutes of Health, fire the National Archivist and undo decades of work in libraries and cultural heritage? How can a country so self-identified with freedom and the freedom of speech create a list of banned words that are used indiscriminately to purge websites of collections, data, and documents?

The first fear was that cultural institutions would be closed. The new reality is that they will be transformed, once again, into agents of propaganda and indoctrination. The Institute for Museum and Library Services is not being closed. Instead, the new director wants to use the institute to “restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations.”

Beyond the federal government how can EU librarians and institutions, I was asked, respond to a continuing wave of book banning, firing of librarians consider “too liberal,” and opening librarians up to prosecution for doing their jobs and supporting their professional organizations?

I have one simple answer: don’t look away.

I understand the role and need for institutional statements from IFLA, ALA, SLA, ACRL, and more; after all that’s what this is at its heart. I understand the idea that international pressure should at the very least draw attention to the attacks on the basic tenets of librarianship. I understand the need to simply do something. Keep writing the statements, keep raising the questions. Just know, it won’t work. In fact, the idea that the US does something in the face of international disapproval is kind of the point of the present administration.

No, the real work that needs to be done is what librarians have done for centuries: foster informed conversation and ensure a rigorous memory of the moment that leads to informed action.

A moment when a prosperous and democratic nation decided that the cultural, scientific, and knowledge infrastructure that had led to its prominence in the modern world, was now suspect and full of agents of “anti-American” sentiment. A moment when questioning a nation’s history and actions to seek improvement was represented as dissent. A moment when ideas became dangerous. When education became dangerous, when libraries became dangerous, when words became dangerous. When instead of vital dialog about who succeeds in the nation and how we ensure an economy and democracy that stamps out deaths of despair and gives agency to the social disenfranchised, we empowered the politics of grievance and revenge.

Don’t look away.

Help us document an “anti-woke” McCarthyism. Open up repositories for archives of purged documents. Create a clearinghouse of news articles and first-person narratives of fired librarians. Document the US judiciary that is holding executive agencies to account. Create secure anonymized messaging for library workers in the US and abroad. Host discussions of how to respond, how to support, and how to witness. Just as we have done for other nations around the world.

And then, and I cannot stress this enough, listen and look to your own borders. We live in a time of destabilization. Traditional alliances are being cut. The feeling that we were on a straight path of progress to more freedoms has been shown to be an illusion in the face of cyclical political ideologies. History has not ended.

Know that even with these words, I remain optimistic. Libraries of all types in the US are local organizations. The vast majority of funding for them comes from local taxes and tuition. People still very much support their local libraries and trust librarians. Support for libraries, and education, and museum is not ideological. How these institutions are supported and function still remains, by and large, the province of the community.

It is this locality and community focus-a hard fought transformation over the past decades-that gives me hope. We need to ensure in the US and abroad that community connection is restored and strengthened. Librarians are best to pay attention to city hall instead of the statehouse or the White House. Build consensus. Empower those who feel disaffected. Introduce neighbor to neighbor. Model healthy debate.

And don’t look away.