Re:A new moralism is gripping the literary world
by cameldrv on Friday March 19, 2021 @05:58PM
(#26518541)
Well I'm not so interested in the meta-political aspect to this. What I think this shows though is that perhaps librarians aren't quite as opposed to banning books anymore as I thought they were.
It's easy for Chicago to say that they're figuring out what to do long term, but somehow these books were all fine (and in the children's section!) for something like 70 years, and now they're suddenly radioactive.
What this suggests to me is that there has been a shift in values among librarians, and when the publisher made the decision to take them out of print, this forced a reevaluation, and then we discovered that avoiding any whiff of racism is a more important value than free speech. I think that's really sad and depressing.
Librarians are generally quite opposed to banning books and I haven't seen any sign that this is different: some large systems (e.g. NYPL) have said they're keeping them in the general collection and others (e.g. Chicago) have said that they're temporarily removing them from circulation while deciding what to do long-term. I would bet that the major of local decisions will end up being along the lines of either not shelving them in the children's section or having some kind of contextual note for people who request it.