If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

There has been a kerfuffle recently in bibliophilic circles when a social justice librarian wrote up an incindendiary view in her blog, Whiteness As Collections by Sophia Leung (it always astonishes me how blatantly racist social justice theorists are without them realizing it.) Her key observation -

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.

As usual, as innumerate and historically ignorant as they are passionate and arrogant.

Such a negative attitude about libraries by a librarian is rather shocking. It brings immediately to mind the cautions of earlier observers about the tyranny of totalitarians. From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823), by Heinrich Heine as translated in True Religion (2003) by Graham Ward, p. 142

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

And of course, the magnificent Ray Bradbury in his coda to Fahrenheit 451.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

And then there is Kurt Vonnegut, speaking as one who had his books literally fed into a furnace by a school. From his letter to Charles McCarthy, head of the Drake, North Dakota School Board which sponsored the burning of 32 copies of his Slaughterhouse-Five. Emphasis added.

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

There is a sad corollary, given Sophia Leung's profession. From one of his later books, A Man Without a Country,

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

That was fourteen years ago. There now sits Sophia Leung. Matches in hand.

There is a particular irony matching the great thinkers in the stacks behind her and the small-minded hate of Leung. Vonnegut suggests above

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

Most Americans, given our admirable tradition of first amendment fundamentalism, would endorse this view.

But such open hearted liberalism (classical liberalism) is not in Sophia Leung's compass. From the concluding lines of her post.

I still have some thinking to do around this topic, but curious to hear what others think. I’m less interested in hearing that you don’t buy it, so don’t bother with those types of comments.

The heart of a totalitarian barbarian. It might be summarized as "I have a hate-based racist agenda and I would be interested in hearing from anyone who supports that and I don't want to hear from anyone who doesn't agree."

I suppose it is too much to hope that, as a librarian, she might read from the great thinkers of the past on these topics. I could even recommend some titles. Even if some of them are old dead white males.