Jeff Chang on libraries

Via Racialicious: Jeff Chang's In Defense of Libraries is a must-read.

When music is determined to hold no more monetary value, it is deleted. That is where most of our recorded history lies. In the cut-out bin. In the Trash file. Locked behind the copyright fence. Lots of it belongs there like the Eagles. But what about when it doesn’t?

We change the culture, and politics follows.

The folks who are against us, who are against a vibrant vital public core, know this. The budget cuts inflicted we face here and all around the country are about laying waste to the public space and fencing it off. And they are about stopping cultural change right where it begins.

In the library, I am in a space beyond the marketplace, beyond consumption, beyond the money censors, beyond the noise. I am in a place where librarians have accumulated the knowledge and the stories important to me and my community.

The library is the embodiment and the refuge of our collective imagination.

Yes.

And I've seen enough times when libraries have failed at being that, and -- still, this is the ideal that I have, this is what I believe in.

Well-Meaning Privileged People writing about How Awful It Is To Be Marginalized

Apropos of something, I've been thinking about children's and YA novels written from a standpoint of Well-Meaning Privilege. Remember when all the books about black people were about how awful slavery was? And all the books about Jewish people were about how awful the Holocaust was?

It seems to me that there's a genre of books where
1) The assumed audience is a generically privileged reader;
2) The purpose of the book is to educate readers about the lives and experiences of a marginalized group;
3) The most relevant emotion for a privileged reader to feel, when confronted with the experience of a marginalized group, is pity.

1 and 2 are problematic in themselves -- 1 for the way it assumes that people of that marginalized group aren't even readers, 2 for the ways it can slip into a viewpoint that's othering/exoticizing/ethnographic and for the way they tend to reduce every character to some kind of iconic emblem of their own culture. But it's the pity that's really toxic.

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