They’re Coming for Our Guns, They’re Taking Our Statutes, Now Our Books

This no less than from the Library Journal, a professional magazine for Librarians. Read the full screed at your peril.

WHITENESS AS COLLECTIONS

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.

Think it’s not going to happen?

Burning The Books – Germany

Our History:

• Notre Dame moves to cover up ‘demeaning’ Christopher Columbus mural

We are already destroying the statues representing our history.

Now we get rid of the history

History Majors at Universities may soon go the way of the Dinosaur

The University of Wisconsin — Stevens Point could soon drop several majors, including history, because of students’ lack of interest, according to a cost-benefit analysis recently proposed by UW-SP Chancellor Bernie Patterson.

The chancellor proposed that the university “must become a new kind of regional university” by adapting its current programming to better suit the surrounding community and the educational demand of incoming students.

[RELATED: Study: top colleges don’t require US history courses for history majors]

And this from my stash of old stuff.

From the 2003 Television docudrama: George Orwell – A Life in Pictures. A reminder from George Orwell.  This is where we are.

This is what happens at the end of the least and great cultures. Always. A fascinating history list of how so many cultures devolved and their libraries.

The Burning of Libraries

In one moment, a mob of barbarians can destroy a country’s history, can erase the work of lifetimes of scholars, can inflict a wound on humanity that it will still be suffering 1,000 years later – long after the religion and philosophy and cause of the barbarians is forgotten.