Last month, I went to a library in more or less the exact middle of America, and everyone was there – kids, elderly people, students of all ethnicities and ability levels – quietly doing their own thing, together. A librarian interviewed me in an elegant amphitheater in front of Kansas City residents. We spoke about immigration, politics and the climate crisis and managed to laugh a lot too. Some audience members challenged my views, and we talked it out right there. We had a frank and fun conversation in a public space, free to all, and streamed live for people who couldn’t make it to the library that day. I only later thought about how rare that is – and how profound.
“Libraries are this quiet, powerful space that are just always there, right?” Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada told me. She is a librarian and was elected president of the American Library Association (ALA) earlier this year. “We are that constant, for everyone. We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
Pelayo-Lozada is taking on the role at a time when the right has intensified an orchestrated assault on books, intellectual freedom and, of course, libraries. In her words, it’s “a political, concerted, organized attack that makes it hard for us to do our jobs”.
The ALA has been tracking bans for two decades and reported that 2021 was the worst year for attempted censorship yet, with 1,597 books challenged. As long as there have been books, there has been censorship. Often censorship is demanded under cover of vague “public decency” concerns, but the truth is these are simply a veil over a darker motive – silencing unwanted perspectives and protecting the status quo.
We see this play out in today’s move to ban books, with many of them about LGBTQ+ rights or racism, often written by people of color. I asked Pelayo-Lozado why she thinks this is happening. “Our goal as libraries is to empower our users; to empower them for critical thinking, to empower them to make their dreams come true. And that can be scary to folks who maybe don’t want everyone to be in power, who want to have power over others.”
As the Guardian has reported, the censorship frequently pushed by conservative groups is linked to wealthy rightwing donors even as they masquerade as grassroots efforts, with names like “Moms for Liberty” and “Parents Defending Education”. EveryLibrary, a political action committee for libraries, reports that many states have passed laws to change how libraries handle complaints about books, making it easier to remove them. Republican legislators, who loudly claim they are all for freedom of speech, are working to change how library board members are appointed and challenging laws that protect librarians and teachers from prosecution should they be accused of sharing something someone could find offensive.
The battle against intellectual freedom has escalated from the legal into the physical world. Twenty masked neo-Nazis recently protested outside a library in Boston hosting a Drag Queen Story Hour event. Last November, members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group, showed up at a school board meeting in Downers Grove in Illinois. There, they jeered at students arguing for their right to read Gender Queer, an autobiography about the nonbinary author Maia Kobabe’s journey of gender identity as a teenager and one of the books targeted by conservatives nationwide.
Are they so frightened of young people reading about someone else’s life experience? I think the right wing is really afraid of libraries not because libraries promote any one type of information but because libraries promote information itself.
“Our core is figuring out how to provide information and providing access to information, in whatever form that looks like – whether it’s paper, whether it’s audiobooks, whether it’s digital literacy, we are here for that,” Pelayo-Lozado said. She believes this mission and libraries’ stated core values of democracy and diversity are what is so challenging to some. “We are trained to make knowledge and ideas available so that everybody has the freedom to choose what to read.”
Hannah Arendt deeply understood fascists and their fear of a well-informed and independent-minded population. As she put it: “There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”
Libraries help us to think. That is why they are powerful, and that is why they are under attack. That is also why we must protect them.
Maeve Higgins is a Guardian US columnist
