The Library Journal, a trade publication described as “global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators” across the United States, shared an article on its Twitter account yesterday arguing that library collections are too white.
Sofia Leung, who works as the Teaching And Learning Program Manager at MIT libraries, wrote an article titled, “Whiteness as Collections” to essentially argue for a racist book burning. This deranged academic wants the destruction of literature and knowledge she considers to be “too white.”
The crux of her incoherent rant is as follows:
If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of” that Harris describes in her article. When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. Collections are representations of what librarians (or faculty) deem to be authoritative knowledge and as we know, this field and educational institutions, historically, and currently, have been sites of whiteness.
Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries. They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives via the prison industrial complex, the spoils of war, etc. Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicates that we don’t care about what POC think, we don’t care to hear from POC themselves, we don’t consider POC to be scholars, we don’t think POC are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people. To return to the Harris quote from above, library collections and spaces have historically kept out Black, Indigenous, People of Color as they were meant to do and continue to do. One only has to look at the most recent incident at the library of my alma mater, Barnard College, where several security guards tried to kick out a Black Columbia student for being Black.
This is apart of a global push by the Left toward the end of knowledge and thought as we know it. All actual disciplines are to be replaced with Cultural Marxist agitprop with classic literature banned and Soviet-style commissars indoctrinating children.
“What the social justice academic left, and neoliberal bean counters in college administration, are doing is a smokeless cathedral burn of our civilization’s collective memory,” wrote Rod Dreyer in The American Conservative.
“Now is the time to strengthen the educational institutions and libraries that stand against this Dark Age, and build new ones that do,” Dreyer wrote for his conclusion.
The insipid cultural Marxism of the totalitarian Left has gone too far. Until we take a bold stand on behalf of Western Civilization, we are on a crash course toward an Orwellian dark age enforced by Big Brother.