I guess we can just make libraries featureless warehouses filled with book shelves and nothing else. If course we’ll have to constantly rotate where each book gets placed lest a book on Black history gets too much time near the entrance and visible.
My library is awesome.
They have so many different themes, movies, board games, authors. Theres more for children than adults though.
Ours had a display up called Reading with my Peeps, featuring a row of peep colored books, pink, blue, green, lavendar.
Ah, good, so you do understand the distinction. It’s just that you have them exactly reversed. Well, that’s an easy enough mistake to correct.
I am not comfortable with ANYONE being relegated to the “back shelves”.
If there’s a display area for “special interests” then I don’t have an issue with, say, a pro-choice display being followed by a pro-life one… as long as BOTH sides are displayed. Or split it in two and make one half gun control and one half 2nd amendment.
Of course, these days it’s usually the conservative demanding the suppression of anything but their conservative viewpoint, and that’s not at all what I’m talking about.
^ This.
Say what? There are many sources that show that (aside from the snark), Sam’s definition is correct. For example:
Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Equity targets equal outcomes.
As kids, we were thrilled to find out that the local public library had a subscription to Playboy, and included it in its list of available periodicals. We were disappointed to find that unlike Time, Sports Illustrated, and Better Homes and Gardens, which were freely available on the magazine racks, you had to ask for Playboy at the desk.
You were even more disappointed when you found out it was the braille edition.
(No joke. Playboy actually had a braille edition that was just the text with no illustrations.)
Since that’s basically a death threat against most of the patrons, most people wouldn’t be comfortable with that. Allowing the Right to dominate a place drives away everyone else, people don’t like going to places on or offline that are calling for their death.
And, equal treatment is not what the Right wants; they want their specific brand of right wing politics to be forced on everyone else, and all other viewpoints to be silenced. Treating them equally enrages them and provokes them into screaming about how oppressed they are.
My college’s library had a subscription to Playboy, with an extensive collection of back issues, but it was apparently an article-only edition, specifically for libraries, with no pictures.
Like most organizations, libraries usually have a mission statement. Here’s the mission statement of the Central Arkansas Library System.
It’s been been about fifteen years since I worked at CALS, so I really didn’t have to deal with the current crop of cultures wars. We frequently had little displays based on what was happening on the calendar and sometimes what was just popular. Twilight was fairly popular at the time and you can bet we had some displays for other vampire/monster books people might be interested in. I was in graduate school at the time and stuck in my own little world, so I don’t quite remember all the displays, but they seemed to fit into the mission statement of the organization.
I went on to work at a musuem that was funded by tax dollars. For the most part, we didn’t court any controversy, but there were some Southern apologists who weren’t happy about some of our exhibits because they thought it was unfair. i.e. We didn’t push the Lost Narrative baloney on the public. I only ran into two problems while I was at the musuem one of which was reasonable and the other unreasonable. Let’s start with the reasonable.
When we had younger children come in we would often show them some old cartoons. The cartoons were wartime propaganda cartoons produced by Disney and Warner Brothers during WWII. Some of you already see a problem with that. I typically didn’t handle this part of the tour, but one day I had to, and as we were watching these cartoons for the first time since I was a kid, I realized just how incredibly rascist they were and wholly inappropriate for a group of young children. One of the teachers was practically coming out of her skin and when the film was over I apologized, explained I hadn’t seen the video, and I would speak to the director about this. We ended up changing the material we showed small children.
We had on display an amputation kit from the Civil War and I used to talk to children about this when I played docent. When it came to the older kids, high schoolers, I went into graphic detail about what a .52 caliber bullet does to a person when it hits their arm to explain to them one of the reasons amputation was so common. For one group, a teacher was unhappy because she thought the information I provide was inappropriate. These kids were 16-18 and I didn’t think anything I said was out of bounds. I was diplomatic about it and said I’d speak with the director about it. We did nothing. The director just looked at me, rolled his eyes, and said, “Nothing bad ever happened in a war, lady.”
Public institutions often have to walk a tight line between meeting their mission statement and not pissing off the public. When I first moved to Arkansas, I went to a local museum and before entering an art exhibit there was a warning that some of the paintings contained nudity. I was flabbergasted that such a sign was necessary, but it is. The thing to remember is that black people, homosexuals, Muslims, and even Catholics are part of the public. They pay their taxes which supports libraries and other public institutions.
That was only part of it, Sam added snark implying that the reasoning for trying to get equity going was for imaginary reasons. As if it is just the left proposing that, in reality DEI also deals with the inequity that women and people with disabilities endure in the workplace. The point is that, unless all women turned liberal, the reality is that DEI is not just a leftist idea.
I acknowledged the snark (not like that isn’t a prime feature of this forum). Chronos said however that Sam had it “exactly reversed”. That is not consistent with a correct definition (equity means equal outcomes) plus some mild snark.
Equity is very much an idea of the left. In fact it’s even narrower than that: there are plenty of people on the left that reject equal outcomes as a goal, and instead embrace the Enlightenment ideals of equality of opportunity.
I should emphasize that as an observation, no one disputes some degree of inequity. It’s the “and therefore we should discriminate against some people to bring the outcomes back in line” part that is contentious. I find that this conflation of observation vs. what-we-should-do comes up a lot in this sort of thread.
We are here because, in the context of library displays:
The context was clear, @Chronos is referring to Sam’s definition that includes also an imaginary helping of not being fair to right wing points of view, in this case, it includes book censorship and also censorship of seemingly leftist points of view of books at the library. The right wing right now is attempting to pigeonhole many books and efforts at equity as just being leftist nonsense.
There was also a very misleading post claiming that DEI trainers do not use the definitions of equity and equality that are in the dictionary. As I had training on that, the point stands, there is a lot of ignorant points there by attempting to add DEI training as just being a leftist agenda.
Chronos was responding to the definition that Sam supplied. This is independent of whatever else is going on in the conversation.
The E in DEI almost always means equity using the equal outcomes definition. This is not right-wing propaganda; the proponents themselves say this, and claim it is a desirable goal–despite it having poor support among the American public.
Again, so are all women and people with disabilities leftists?
Anyhow, sticking to the point, one should not omit that there are many on the right that clearly are disgusted at the sight of many books that they notice that are making a mockery of many points that the right is trying to promote. Equity or equality to those books is not in their agenda.
Black literature — indeed, Black art — has long been a target for coordinated campaigns of censorship and repression, usually facilitated by local, state, and federal government action or inaction. Since at least the Harlem Renaissance, Black writing in the United States has been widely treated as obscene, seditious, and even dangerous. The greatest Black writers have been feared for precisely their ability to highlight the injustices of American society with clarity, lyricism, and urgency.
The racist campaign of repression against Black authors has never really stopped — only ebbed from time to time. Today, however, this campaign has roared back into life with a relentless effort to remove Black-authored books from libraries, race-conscious subjects from curricula, and any mention of racism from our collective history. This is partly an obvious backlash to the racial justice movement sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others — but it’s also just the latest chapter in a long story of racist censorship.
Completely irrelevant. What we are talking about is discriminating against certain groups in order to achieve equal outcomes. That is what the E part of DEI is for. Obviously not all women or minority groups support this even if they think there is inequity present.
As for the rest of your post, there is an obvious difference between promoting certain viewpoints vs. not banning certain ones. Banning is bad. Any supporter of free speech can agree to that. Promoting certain viewpoints is a different argument entirely.
Nope, it is when dealing with an ignorant post.
Sure… (of course this is also a reply for the early “despite it having poor support among the American public.”)
- Regardless of race, most Americans share this view including a majority of Latinos (53%) and about four in ten Blacks (40%) and whites (39%) who believe the nation’s ethnicities, races, and religions makes the U.S. much stronger.
- About two in three Americans either strongly support (28%) or support (38%) mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training for employees.
- This includes 90% of Democrats, 61% of independents, and only 39% of Republicans. 84% of Black Americans have this opinion as do 70% of Latinos and 59% of whites.
That is ok, now as it is clear that the current banning of books and attempts at removing displays in libraries are coming mostly from the right, what would you do?
I’m going to stop the tangent here as it feels like a hijack. Feel free to create a new thread if you think it’s worth continuing.
Ignore them? Bring the case to the Supreme Court if they’ve somehow passed some obviously unconstitutional laws. I’m not aware of any cases where the bans have actually held up in court. They all get knocked down pretty rapidly.
The Supreme Court is a nakedly partisan right wing institution at this point; they care about pushing a right wing agenda and hurting anyone not a right wing Christian, not the law nor the Constitution. Much less justice.
The Fifth Circuit court is even more nakedly partisan, and yet they still struck down the Texas book ban:
The First Amendment doesn’t leave a whole lot of wiggle room.