The Fifth Risk

Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

     Kathy hadn't taken her brother seriously.  You really think they're going to hire an oceanographer? A girl????      

     A few weeks later she ran across the call for astronauts again, this time in a science journal. They really did seem to want women scientists. And she sensed that she might be the sort of woman they were looking for.  "I never brought normal girl books home from the library," she recalled.  "I was fascinated by maps and the stories they told." She was handy, too, and quick to figure out how things worked. [p. 137]

COMMENT

     Kathy Sullivan did become an astronaut.  Then she joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and figured out how to re-frame tornado warnings in order to get people to actually pay attention to tornado warnings and take cover.  That is to say, her scientific work has saved the lives of many people.

     She describes her own identity as a scientist in terms of library borrowing -- a  scientist is someone who doesn't read "normal girl books."  This comment relates to a previous post, What are We Teaching Boys when We Discourage Them from Reading Books about Girls?  in which a librarian (who should know better) shames boys for reading a "girl's" book.  Likewise, Sullivan must have felt some degree of adult disapproval for reading "boy's" books.  Why else would she think that an interest in maps was not "normal" for girls?   (I also happen to love maps)

    The library offers a valuable kind of  anonymity.  A child with a library card can take a book off the shelf and take it home to read without ever asking for anyone else's permission.  This freedom for kids to chose what to read, even if adults or other kids don't like it, is mentioned over and over in library stories as a formative experience in the search for identity.

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, Penguin Random House, 2015.

     I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grandfather once worked.  Moorland held archives, papers, collections and virtually any book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for three different works.  I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention.  I would arrive in the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Sterling Brown. [p.46]
...

     The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, their right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.  I was made for the library, not the classroom.  The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.  Slowly, I was discovering myself. [p.48]

COMMENT

     "The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. " It's a statement so beautiful I'd like to engrave it on the marble facade of a library, if libraries still had marble facades.

     Ta-Nehisi Coates was destined to grow up to be a bookish, well-read person. His father, W. Paul Coates, worked as African American Studies reference and acquisition librarian at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center; He also owned a bookstore and founded Black Classic Press.

     The "jail of other people's interests" is Coates fils' rationale for his idiosyncratic research method but it also gets to the core what libraries are all about. Education has done its job when students are able break free from lectures, classroom assignments and the pursuit of grades. All that schoolwork is a foundation, but the library is the place where students truly become independent thinkers and complete their transformation into scholars.

The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah

Michael David Lukas, "The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah," New York Times,  Dec. 2, 2019, p. SR2.

    This is the version of Hanukkah that I grew up with: presents and chocolate gelt; latkes with sour cream and applesauce; a few somber, off-key songs that no one fully remembered, about Judah Maccabee.  This is the version of Hanukkah I had in mind when my daughter and I walked down to our local branch of the Oakland Public Library to check out a stack of books about the holiday.
      Most of the books we found presented a familiar narrative -- dreidels and menorahs, evil Romans and pious Maccabees -- but between the lines, there were some hints at a darker story, enough to send be to Wikipedia and the Books of Maccabbees of the (definitely not Jewish but very helpful) Bible Gateway website, which led me back to the library for another stack of books, this one for myself .

COMMENT

      

     This story exemplifies a kind of search for religious identity that shows up in several other library stories I've collected [1]. This one has an especially good description of the research process of religious questioning.  It's significant that the quest starts with children's books since the naive juvenile literature version of religion is the one most people know. The realization that the children's books don't tell the whole story leads to an informative though biased Internet search and onward to more in-depth and well documented research in library books. 

     The search sows seeds of religious doubt, but the outcome is to reaffirm Jewish identity, and surprisingly, to reaffirm the way the family is already celebrating with an emphasis on presents and chocolate gelt.  The author jokes "at the end of the day, it's all about beating Santa,"  but for the writer it's all about  forming a religious identity as an assimilated Jew celebrating "the possibility of light in dark times and importance of even the smallest miracles."

[1] Transported; God is Going to Have to Forgive Me (Christian); Go and See 'Jane and Emma' This Weekend (Mormon); Transported (Jewish). 

God is Going to Have to Forgive Me

Elizabeth Dias. “‘God is Going to Have to Forgive Me’: Young Evangelicals Speak Out,” (Election 2018 The Voters),  New York Times, November 2, 2018, P. A13.

     I was pulled out of Smith College in 2015 when I told my parents that I was rethinking the legitimacy of anti-gay theology. I thought, “God is going to have to forgive me. I am not going to die in this culture war.” I was Republican like them. Before, I supported whatever my church told me about candidates and issues. I never questioned or read outside material on these subjects. I secretly started borrowing books from the library. I gave a communion message in 2016— it was, “Our God chooses to die the death of all these marginalized people. He dies like Matthew Shepard, like a kid at the hand of the state. He was a refugee.” My church reprimanded me for “abusing he pulpit.” Other members used it to openly stump for Trump and say hateful things about Muslims and L.G.B.T. citizens.

COMMENT

     I used to teach an online course on how to do library research. My students had to select a topic for a final project bibliography.  Occasionally I would get a student who tried to challenge me by picking an overtly religious topic like “the truth of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.”  They thought I’d tell them no and then they could complain about being persecuted by those godless liberals at the University

     But I always told them, yes, that’s a great topic. The only problem, I’d say, is it’s not focused. I advised them to imagine that they were writing a sermon. Perhaps they could focus on the meaning of some specific teaching of Jesus? Or on how Christian theology informs some particular moral issue? The students who proposed religious research were always surprised to find out that there is a vast body of scholarly literature about theology and the Bible.  They thought the people at their church were the only authority. 

  The 22 year old woman in the article describes growing up in a culture where disagreeing with church authority was actually dangerous.  She was pulled out of college for questioning a quasi-biblical teaching and shamed by other members who ignored her message of Christian compassion.  What does it mean that she used the library and  not the Internet to start questioning the politics of her church?  Perhaps in such an intellectually repressive environment her home didn’t have the Internet. Maybe she used the library because she didn’t want anyone looking over her shoulder during her secret reading. Or maybe the Internet just doesn’t work well for this kind of questioning because online information has a tendency to amplify what you already believe. In any case, the young woman in the interview says she is still a Christian but she has changed her party affiliation to Democrat. 

     

Well Read, Well Known

Concepcion De Leon, "Well Read, Well Known: Glory Edim's Well-Read Black Girl Community is Growing Beyond a Book Club," New York Times, Oct. 26, 2018, p. C15-

     She comes from a family of readers; her mother was a historian before emigrating to the United States and often took Edim and her younger brothers to the library, where they would stock up on books.  That's where she discovered Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."
     "I remember my first book report on Maya Angelou. I had an A.P. English teacher really critique her and be like, 'She's not a good writer,'" Edim recalled, "He was looking at syntax, he was looking at grammar, he was looking at her completely different structure." But these weren't the elements that appealed to Edim.  She was drawn in by Angelou's descriptions of her relationship with her brother, which reminded Edim of her own, and said Angelou "changed my thinking about literature, who can write and whose voice is important."

COMMENT

     Many years after finding Maya Angelou in the library, Glory Edim founded Well-Read Black Girl, a book club to read black women authors. If it had been up to her A.P. English teacher, though, she might never have discovered Angelou. In fact, the teacher's overt dislike of Angelou's writing demonstrates why diversity in collections is so important.These days there are MFA programs for people who want to be writers, in effect creating new rules about who can write and whose voice is important. Angelou never went to college. She made herself into a writer by using the language she heard in her community.

    Angelou's writing is notable for using patterns of African-American English, though she herself rejected the idea that Black vernacular (a.k.a. Ebonics) should be considered a separate language. Angelou saw language as a tool of power and believed that learning Standardized English was a way for Black people to get access to power.  Nonetheless, as Edim says, writers like Angelou change the rules of power by redefining who can be a writer.
 
     Librarians have a challenge to find up-and-coming writers who are outside of the approval-plan.  A few years ago I started hearing buzz about a young Somali-British poet named Warsan Shire. The humanities librarian refused to purchase her obscure books for the library collection, so I requested a purchase for my own use in order to sneak her books into the collection. Not long afterwords,  Beyoncé used Shire's poetry in her album Lemonade. We librarians like to talk about diversity, but we also need to pay attention to what diverse communities are reading and be ready to spend money on it.  In a way, it seems too bad that a well-read Black girl like Glory Edim is not a librarian.

Go and See 'Jane and Emma' this Weekend

Holly Richardson. "Go and See 'Jane and Emma' this Weekend. Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 13 2018. p.A11.

Tamu has shared her own painful experiences encountering painful experiences encountering racism in the church.  The first time she was called the N-word was at a church school.  Not surprisingly, it shocked her and then rocked her.  She needed to know if there really was a place for her in "God's choir." A teacher sent her to the college library to research black Mormon pioneers and that is where she "met" Jane and changed her life.

COMMENT

I've lived in Utah my whole life and I had no idea that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (a.k.a. Mormons) was radically anti-racist. The contemporary LDS  church has yet to live up to Joseph Smith's vision, "All are alike unto God".  Up until 1978, black men were forbidden to hold the priesthood (women still can't).  I've often wondered how black people could be persuaded to convert to Mormonism.

Two  black Mormon women, Tamu Smith and Zandra Vranes collaborated on the script for the movie Jane and Emma (2018) (In Utah those names don't necessarily sound black, but they definitely sound Mormon).  At a point where she was feeling doubt, Tamu went searching for black Mormon history, where else? In the library.  There she found a history that indicated having a  black Mormon identity is not an impossible contradiction.

Later in the essay Richardson writes that she has a teenaged daughter adopted from Ethiopia.  After the family watched Jane and Emma they started a conversation about racism.  Richardson's daughter admitted, "That's happened to me." Someday Holly Richardson's daughter might go looking for black Mormon history in the library herself.  I like to think that when she does she'll find her very own mama bear standing up for radical inclusion. 

Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like 'New Genocide'

Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londono. Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like ‘New Genocide,” New  York Times, September 14, 2018, p. A4. 

“It’s the museum that’s on fire!” Said Jose Urutau Guajajara, a member of the Tenetehara-Guajajara tribe who had been researching his people’s heritage in the archives of Brazil’s National Museum for more than a decade.  “We can still manage to put it out with buckets.”

    By the time they reached the centuries-old place , home to the world’s largest archive of indigenous Brazilian culture and history, flames had butted the building’s core and a dense column of smoke towered above it. 

…

“This is like a new genocide, as though they had slaughtered all these indigenous communities again,” Mr. Gajajara said. “Because that was where our memories resided.”

COMMENT:

The grief of cultural loss is unbearable.

Libraries and archives preserve textual information, which means they privilege textual cultures whether they mean to or not.  Artifacts and texts that describe pre-genocide indigenous cultures were often collected by cultural outsiders. Yet those scraps of information are often all that’s left to reconstruct cultural memory.

In the University of Utah Marriott Library there is a truly beautiful artwork [1] that incorporates textual excerpts from the library collection of  Mormon pioneer diaries. The library is justifiably proud to highlight this special collection.  Still, the diaries tell a one-sided text-based story. The Mormon pioneers didn't move into an inhabited place. They settled a cultural landscape that was already occupied by Ute, Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo people. The diaries don't record non-textual cultural memory that is embedded in Utah’s desert landscape. That failure of information has real-world consequences. 

[1] Paul Housberg, Another Beautiful Day has Dawned Upon Us (2008). Handcrafted, kiln cast colored glass silvered on the back. Selected diary passages, from the Library’s private collection about the westward migration, are included in the four unique murals. The work was commissioned by the State of Utah as part of Utah’s Percent-for-Art Program, 2008.

Transported

Ruth Franklin. Transported: How should children’s books deal with the Holocaust? New Yorker, July 23, 2018, 64-69. 

I was fourteen when “the Devil’s Arithmetic” was published. Although it won numerous awards, no teacher or librarian ever gave it to me.  I wish someone had, because the book speaks in a profound way to the painful paradox I felt then and still feel now: how to be an adequate witness to something I haven’t myself experienced.[p. 66]

COMMENT

In this anecdote the librarian has failed, probably without ever knowing that this student needed to learn about the Holocaust.

Franklin writes that as a child  she had relatives with tattoos on their arms who had survived the Holocaust, but she had little information to understand exactly what it was they had survived. She was given “The Diary of Anne Frank," an excellent book, but one that stops at a confusing place. An adult would know the implication of the Frank family being sent off to Nazi death camps. To a child the ending conceals the true atrocity.

Children are often aware of horrifying world events, but lack vocabulary or background knowledge to really understand the truth of what happened. Adults want to protect not only kids but also themselves from facing the full horror. They end up either refusing to talk about it or offering information so thoroughly sanitized that it doesn't really make sense. 

 “The Devil’s Arithmetic” uses fantasy as a frame to help children cope with emotionally difficult information. Some adults didn't like the use of fantasy for such a serious subject, but Franklin thinks it would have worked well for her 14-year-old self.  In the documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” Fred Rogers uses hand puppets to address children’s fears after the assassination of President Kennedy. Through the voice of Daniel Striped Tiger, Rogers timidly asks Lady Aberlin, “What does “assassination” mean?”

Probably Franklin never asked for book suggestions. If so, what could a librarian have done? It might have been hard to guess at this particular information need. An astute librarian who knew that there were Jewish families in the community might have made a selected list of Holocaust books for kids-- something that a kid could pick up without having to ask a scary adult. [1]  But often, kids find the kind of books that adults don't quite like through word of mouth. 

[1] A letter to the editor in the August 6 & 13  issue of the New Yorker says that quite a lot of Children's literature about the Holocaust was written in Yiddish but for the most part it was never translated.

Donald Trump Would Made a Terrible Navajo

Sierra Teller Ornelas, "Donald Trump Would Make A Terrible Navajo," New York Times (Dec. 2, 2017).

In elementary school, I wanted to do a report on them [Navajo Code Talkers], but when my dad took me to the library to do research we couldn’t find any books that covered their achievements. This was before the internet, and I didn’t have any code talkers in my family, so my search ended there. I remember how angry my dad got, driving us back home empty-handed. 

COMMENT

     I empathize with the anger of the father at finding nothing in the library about his heroes. In the 1990s I was a librarian at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado which offers free tuition for Native American students. As a a consequence, about 10% of students there were Indigenous people. The college is located close to  the Navajo Nation so a lot of students were from "The Rez." The library had a Southwest Room where we kept special collections of materials about the local area under lock and key. Anglo students (as we called them) would come into the library to research the usual undergraduate topics-- abortion, gun control, medical marijuana, doping in sports, and so on -- and we'd have plenty of material for them. But when Navajo students wanted to learn about code talkers, uranium mining, downwinders, the Long Walk, or what the heck was going on in complicated tribal politics they had to use the Southwest Room with it's shorter hours and non-circulating books. By categorizing certain materials as rare and valuable, we librarians were inadvertently forcing students who were already educationally disadvantaged [1] to do graduate level research just to write undergraduate papers about their own history and community 

[1] Ben Meyers, "Who Lives in an Education Deserts? More People than You Think," Chronicle of Higher Education (July 17, 2018). 

Our analysis showed that 29.5 percent of all Native Americans live more than 60 minutes’ drive from a college. Compared with white Americans, Native American adults are more than five times more likely to live in an education desert.