James LaRue – On Censorship

Steve Thomas: James LaRue, welcome back to Circulating Ideas.

James LaRue: Hi Steve, good to see you again.

Steve Thomas: So this is your fourth appearance on the show, and I went back and looked at the previous ones and none of them did I ever ask you the question that I usually ask everybody to get started, which is, what got you interested in being in the library field in the first place?

James LaRue: Well, the origin story goes like this. I was six years old. I was playing baseball way out in right field. I was completely bored out of my mind. I saw this shimmering blue haze on the horizon and I just got so mesmerized, I walked right off the baseball field. I was not missed. And it turned out it was a bookmobile and I stepped up into this bookmobile and there was this Mrs. Johnson, the quintessential librarian, who looked at me like I was the man she had been waiting for all of her life. And she says, you know, “How could I help you?” And I said,” I’ve been reading all these comic books and I keep reading about the speed of light. How did they figure out that light had a speed? I thought it’d be like on or off. And then how did they figure out how fast it was?” And I had been kind of raised my father was a verbally kind of abusive man. And all my life I’d heard “You’re so stupid.” And I expected when I said this stuff about the speed of light that Mrs. Johnson, new person I’d met in the bookmobile, would be all abusive too, but her eyes got all aglow and she said, “What a fascinating question. Let’s find out.” It’s, like, libraries had me at hello.

Steve Thomas: When did intellectual freedom / censorship gel into something that was a thing for you, your expertise?

James LaRue: Well, you know, it was absolutely random. I was interested in intellectual freedom. It was a very hot topic when I was in library school, but most of the librarians I talked to really had never dealt with it and I never had either in my second full time administrative director job.

Then it turned out that just to the south of us was Focus on the Family, and at that moment, they were targeting libraries. And because we were the next library up, they picked us to be sort of a, “let’s try all this stuff out to launch attacks against a public institution because we were not family friendly enough.” Very shortly, I found myself getting like a challenge a week, and I was thinking, “What’s going on with this?” I was very baffled by it, and I thought this kind of intellectual freedom warrior philosophy I had been taught when I was in library school wouldn’t seem to work very well in a community that I was trying to make connections with people. You don’t make friends by yelling at people, right?

So I really had to dig in and think about it. I read all these books and I began talking to all the people on both sides and joining their organizations when they would talk about tackling the library. It became, like, a thesis for me in a lot of ways. It’s everything I thought about for about 10 years.

What I learned from this was that when I think I got to 150 challenges, I spread them all out on a big table. I said, “What’s the common denominator?” And it just jumped out at me that 99 percent of them fell into one of two categories: either they came from parents of children between the ages of four and six, or they came from parents of children between the ages of 14 and 16. And because I was also a parent, I go, “Oh I get it. It’s not about politics. It’s not about religion. It’s about the life transitions in the life of your child.” It was the end of infancy in the beginning of childhood, and it was the end of childhood in the beginning of adulthood, and parents freaked out about it. It was this kind of parental panic. “I want my baby back!” And it really changed the way I talk to people, that it wasn’t about trying to defend intellectual freedom. It was more about, “Good for you for bringing your children to the library, for reading to them, for noticing what they read, for caring enough about it to want to come and talk to the library. You’re not an enemy. You might be a friend.”

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And, it’s like, there’s almost the two levels of people. There’s the people who have those concerns and are like that, but then there’s the, what in the book you call The Surge, which is a distinct political movement designed to rile people up. So there’s people who have good intentions, even if we have to guide them to the library philosophy on this of how we feel collections should be, as opposed to just we’re targets and ” Let’s call them pedophiles so people will vote for us.”

James LaRue: To boil the whole book down, I guess, the way I think of it is that there seem to be 4 reasons that people censor:

The first one is some kind of personal prejudice and it’s something that you walk into a library and it triggered you for whatever reason, usually it’s some kind of childhood trauma, and you just flip out and yell at the librarian and there you go.

And then the second one is that parental panic that I talked about. This is what happens in the life cycle of your children and every parent goes through it.

And then the third one was something that was like a demographic panic. When I was working at the Office for Intellectual Freedom, first thing I did when we got there was, we were rolling out the “Top 10 Most Challenged” and it had been obvious for about three to five years that again, there were two categories, but there were different categories. It was anything that was by or about LGBTQ issues or anything that was by or about people of color. And when that becomes clear, it’s just as we had parents who were freaking out, now we have people who used to be the central narrator of the national narrative. And it was all about that. And it was about identity. Suddenly they weren’t at the center. We were writing about other people. And they freaked out. And I realized that all the focus of challenges in public libraries in America and school libraries seems to be around those two issues. It’s a white majority that’s afraid of losing its central place.

You can kind of understand that, like you can have some human sympathy for each of those first three. All of us have had childhood trauma. Many of us have had that deal about how do you respond to changes in the life of your child. All of us have had this thing about, “Gee, who are we as a nation and am I all that significant in it?”

But the last one I think is pretty deliberate. I have found that it’s not usually that people truly believe these things. It’s just, rile it up and tear it down and make a grab for the power.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I mean, it’s the January 6th type people, just tear it all down.

I did like one of the quotes that we don’t need to child-proof the world, we need to world-proof children.

James LaRue: Yeah, that was brilliant. One of the challenges I got was to Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, and in the first version of it, Sarah Brannen wrote it about gay Guinea pigs. They’re just charming illustrations, really beautiful. And I thought, who could get mad at that? But when I responded to the challenge, much to my surprise, it got picked up in the blogosphere and people were citing it all over the place. Neil Gaiman mentioned it. 500 people came in to comment on it. Some of those folks were really sharp. That comment that stayed with me was that when someone comes in and says, we just need to preserve the innocence of our children and hide everything so they never need to know about it, they’re not doing their children any favors because now they’re going to just roll out into the world and discover all those things on the street for the first time.

And so that phrase about yeah, you can’t child-proof the world. Let’s world-proof the child. I thought that was brilliant.

Steve Thomas: You mentioned you were at the Office of Intellectual Freedom. What were some of the bigger challenges that you faced in that role? And I don’t mean challenges as in book challenges, just challenges in general. I know that that’s a big role and it’s a hard role.

James LaRue: I think the one that I found most interesting was you know, first it starts off where I remember we got a call from the New York Times. It was probably about three weeks after Trump had been elected. And their comment was, “are there any records of hate crimes in libraries?” We went back and searched our little database and said, well, there was one about three years ago where someone at a university library put up swastikas.

But within eight weeks of Trump’s election, there were eight instances of hate crimes in libraries, and I thought that was really fascinating to say that there was, again, this evidence of a shift in the way we talked about things, this kind of sharper, meaner feel to American politics. That was one big thing.

The other one sort of came from within librarianship, and that was where the Intellectual Freedom Committee, which has been around for a long time, reaches out to its constituents and says, “What are the issues that you’re dealing with?” And one of the things people wanted to know, practicing librarians, was we’ve got a group here that I think might be a hate group. Do we have to allow them to use a meeting room?” And it turns out that’s absolutely settled law. The answer is you don’t have to provide meeting rooms at all, but if you do, you have to provide them to everybody under the same rules. I was astonished to see this kind of flare up of angry librarians articulating the social justice thing, and it seemed like we had these two values, intellectual freedom, social justice, coming into conflict very sharply. It was almost generational. That was a fascinating thing to watch from the inside at ALA.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and that’s obviously something that just continues on, and I know people have tried to think of ways around it, because like you said, according to the rules, so maybe you can write the rules in a way that I hate group can’t do it. Obviously, those kinds of things need to be going through your attorney, but that’s always a hard thing because we want to protect the people that are in our building and make them feel safe while balancing that against constitutional rights. It’s like filters on computers is the same thing of like, who wants children to see hardcore pornography?

And if we can bring it back to banning books, they’re saying, “Oh, there’s this pornography!” There’s no pornography in any library in the children’s section anywhere. Nobody does that. There may be something that you think is pornography in the building somewhere, but in the children’s collection where we are featuring it, this is where you should take your children, there may be a biological discussion of sex or there are characters who are LGBTQ, but there’s no Fifty Shades of Grey kid’s version.

James LaRue: Exactly, exactly.

Steve Thomas: But that is always hard, and you also did the quote that you gave a good response to it, “A truly great library has something in it to offend everyone.” I always kind of roll my eyes at that be, but I do follow it up usually with what you follow it with, “but libraries don’t buy books in order to offend.” I feel like some librarians take that too. Like, Ooh, I should buy stuff that offends. It’s like, you don’t have to be like all punk librarian and like, “I’m intentionally offending people!”

James LaRue: Well, that’s right. I remember the first time I had that conversation in a serious way was with the Daddy’s Roommate, and this just generated extraordinary anger. It was a story about a man who left his wife and young child to go live with another man, Daddy’s Roommate. And boy, people were angry about this. And they’d come and they’d rip the book into thirds and they’d throw it on the floor of the library, and I was writing a newspaper article about this, and I said, “Well, here’s why we bought it. We didn’t buy it in order to make anybody mad. We bought it because a woman came in who said, my husband left me for another man. And I’m trying to talk to my six year old son. I hear this book is out there. I’m probably not the only person.”

And so it’s one thing to say, well, of course, a public institution goes out of its way to reflect the needs and interests and information questions of its community, but it’s something else to confront this behavior where somebody else is so angry at the institution that they don’t want that other person to have access to those resources. That’s why I think we’re at a point where we have to have this discussion with our communities. “Who are we? Do we just want to go around shutting everybody up because they don’t agree with what we think?”

Watching this current kind of surge of challenges that I’ve had at my own library, when the press and even a sympathetic press comes in and they want to summarize, they go, “50 people spoke up to speak for greater access, for ensuring that we have access and opposing censorship.” And five people show up to say, “We don’t think these LGBTQ books should be physically accessible to children.” And then the newspaper gives one quote from each side. I felt like we have to figure out a better way to do media because it’s not proportionate. And really the depth of this discussion, if we really want to understand the topic, it can’t just be the two extremes. It has to be the bulk of the community that’s somewhere in the middle.

And I think the other thing I’ve learned is that ultimately the best way to respond to this stuff seems not just to be ” library sits behind its policies and refuses to move.” It has to be engaged the community. What kind of library do people want? I was so heartened by this case that I touched on briefly in the book about Wellington, Colorado, where a pastor’s wife shows up with 19 books that she demands the immediate removal of. The next meeting, a bunch of people show up to speak on the other side, and then the board thinks about it, and they vote to ban banning. And I thought remarkable, because they said, ” How do we want to see ourselves as a community? Something that goes through and hides books from children, or do we want to be a community that pays attention to what’s happening in the world and welcomes everyone to the discussion?”

Steve Thomas: I don’t know the details of it, but I think Illinois just passed a law recently…?

James LaRue: They did, yeah, so that was the new Secretary of State, pushed that one through, and good for him, and after that, California adopted one. I know that Delaware is working on one, Colorado is working on one, Wisconsin is working on one, so I think this is the appropriate response to those “anti-critical race theory” books, the “don’t say gay” books, those kinds of legislation.

Steve Thomas: It’s obviously a coordinated movement at this point. Moms for Liberty is one example, but there’s lots of organizations like that that are national. Since these are different than people that are just parents who are concerned about their kids, how do you deal with them differently when you get their challenges?

James LaRue: Well, to walk through what we did at ours, as is often the case with a surge, you don’t hear about it where somebody just complains and fills out a request for reconsideration. Your first clue that this is going on is 5 people, 15 people, 20 people show up at a board meeting and then kind of swarm the public comment section. They make all these wild accusations. They read with great relish the naughtiest bits they can find. And I mean, with great relish.

The first response is to counsel the board to say public comment is not a time when you argue with people. It’s a time when you listen to them. But we did adopt a couple of things that I pass on to any library that has these kinds of public commenters. Do take a look at your public comment process. We would say you have three minutes, and we bought a clock that counts down from three minutes and then buzzes. Then we would say, “A reminder that you are speaking to the board, you’re not speaking to the audience, and we are not engaging in conversation, we’re not making any decisions tonight. The purpose of public comment is for the public to comment, and for the board to listen.”

And then I adopted something else that I think was useful. If somebody would come and spray this whole list of things that were just flat out false, I would use the beginning of the next meeting to say, “We’ve had a chance to think about what’s said, and I just want to correct some things for the record. For instance, it was said that these books this manga series involves man boy pedophilia. No, it does not. Everyone in this series is over 18. Everybody. You should have a sticker on the cover. Every one of these books has a sticker produced by the publisher that says parental advisory right on the cover. This book should have always been a cataloged as adult. This book always has been cataloged as adult. So just to try to straighten up the public record.

And then we wound up doing something else that I was very nervous at the time where, at one of our meetings, there were so many folks who wanted to speak, and we said, we limit our public comment to 30 minutes, but there were so many that we couldn’t get through them. I said, we will sponsor an event where I’ll do a 20 minute overview of where our policies come from, and the whole rest of the time, there are two microphones. One of them says, more restrictions, and the other one says broad access. You just line up, you say your name, where you live, you’ve got three minutes, go. And at first, I thought, boy, am I playing into the controversy by having just these two sides? But I found that people on both sides were better than I expected. There was a core group of, I will call them zealots, who wanted to really remove things. But even on the ones that wanted more restrictions, they all began by saying, I love the library, but… I’m just so concerned about this. And then on the broad access side, people would say, yeah, the world can be scary, but as a parent, I would rather be around when my daughter discovers this, so we can talk about it. And it wound up being a more nuanced conversation than I’d expected.

One of the things I say in the book is that you get the censorship you deserve. You get the library you deserve. And so if it’s just the library and somebody who’s shouting at you whether it’s in the mayor’s office or county commissioner or newspaper, it helps to invite the broader community in because we tend to be more sensible than we might otherwise believe.

My take is that if the only people who are coming in and saying wildly sexual things are the people who want to stop it and there’s putting placards in front of children to say children shouldn’t be able to see this, It starts to look a little extreme and they out themselves to the community.

Steve Thomas: You have mentioned a theory of librarianship in the book. Can you talk about what that theory is?

James LaRue: Yeah, so all this began when I had this guy where he was complaining about the pride displays, pride month, and he says, “How come you don’t ever put books on display of just dating and raising kids and all that stuff?” I thought, well, that’s like the whole rest of the library, but then I took a couple of these terms and went in and really tried to get a sense of what did we have about dating, coming of age, heterosexual, the whole continuum of sexuality, I discovered that about 3 percent of our collection fell into these previously marginalized voices. And that was when all of a sudden, I realized that the library, it should have been obvious, of course, but we are not a static collection. Books are coming in and out all the time on the basis of A, what gets published, B, what gets used.

So what that means is that libraries are a mirror to our culture, and as a consequence, we’re always looking backward. We reflect the choices of publishers over the past 50 years. Although for most public libraries, it’s probably like 3 to 10 years is the average life of one of our books, and in that time, we’ve gone from the five big publishers that mostly reflect that white heteronormative perspective, and that’s what the books have been about until within slowly over the past 10 years, we’ve begun to see this increase of books of people of color and people who have more diversity in their neurology and LGBTQ on that continuum. And so that 3 percent is coming out.

What libraries do is we track social change. And so, of course, change doesn’t come from the mainstream, otherwise it wouldn’t be change, right? Has to be coming from the fringe. So we bring in these things and the people in the middle go, “What? What? I didn’t want this. I didn’t know about this. I don’t like this. I want it to go away.” And even though I want to be clear that it’s disproportionate, most of the challenges do come from the right. Most of the challenges that say, ” Fend off this 3%, preserve the 97%, let’s go back to 100%. That’s where I felt comfortable.” And then on the far left, you have people that say we are tremendously underrepresented with 3%. It greatly expand that to reflect the true diversity, the demographic shifts in our society, and while we’re about it, let’s go back and take a look at all those older books that have what is problematic or unacceptable today, and let’s just quietly remove those books from the shelves. So my take is no, but we’re going to fight off the censorship from both sides of the spectrum, and we are going to continue to tell the story of our culture, which is a culture in change.

Steve Thomas: You do mention the book of George Washington’s slave Hercules, that someone

James LaRue: Oh, yeah, yeah. A Birthday Cake for George Washington.

Steve Thomas: Right, right. Basically the outrage about it stops the publisher. They published it, but then they pulped it. It was not distributed ever, and that you fell on the side that that’s not censorship. It’s right up there maybe on the line, but it’s not censorship.

Recently they’ve been talking about the old James Bond books and the old Agatha Christie books and they’re rewriting them to make them, since they’re British, mostly it’s taking out offensive language toward people from Southeast Asia or from Africa because there’s lots of “Hercule Poirot goes to Egypt” so it’s things like that, they’re taking out those certain kinds of words. Since it’s done with the permission of the estates, I guess that is not censorship, or is it…?

James LaRue: Well, yeah, I mean, that’s a beautiful example of the gray area, right? And so on the one hand, the original works, whether it’s Agatha Christie or it’s Lord Peter Whimsey, are historically accurate for the language that was used at the time. On the other hand, if you are the owner of the copyright and you say, “You know what, it no longer is a good mesh for today’s sensibilities because times have changed.” It wasn’t the conscious intent of Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, if they were alive today, they wouldn’t say, Ooh, I really want to use those words, they were reflecting a time.

So, I don’t know. I guess I think that my point about that and about Scholastic as the copyright owner of the George Washington book, if the public doesn’t like what you want, do you have the right to change your own writing to reflect it? Well, sure you do.

Steve Thomas: Some of those, I know Agatha Christie, I think even within her lifetime, she was changing things, like, some things were plays, and she turned them into novels, and then she did this. I mean, it’s movies, but, you know, being the age that I am, I hate George Lucas for changing the Star Wars movies, but he owns the Star Wars movies, so he’s allowed to change the Star Wars movies and say, oh, the special effects were bad, so I’m gonna update them. Again, morally, do I agree with that? But it’s not about a moral issue or again, to bring it back to the books, it’s not about the morality of it. You can be morally offended by all these books if you want. It’s just, you’re not allowed to be morally offended for every person who lives in our community, and push that on everyone.

James LaRue: Yeah, that’s right, and I feel that with so many of these things, it’s when somebody says, “This person shouldn’t be allowed to state it like this.” Part of me really wants to say, ” Then write a better book.” If you’re deeply offended by a book, and you just want us to make all these changes, show us how it’s done. Write a book that captures all those things that you want, and we’ll add it. If you’re a member of our community, absolutely. If it’s decent, and it scans, and it’s not riddled with grammatical errors, and it has a cover on it that doesn’t look too terrible, we’ll probably buy it. So I really do want to see how do we shift our culture from this angry consumerism, where you don’t like something and you want to silence someone else because of the way it made you feel, to a society of creators, where we say, okay, if I believe in something, I’m not just going to try to tear down something else. I’m going to try to build up something new, and I’ll show you how it’s done.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Make it better. You do talk about the role of the citizen at the end and seven things that people can do. We won’t go through all of those. The book is fairly short, so probably in our time that we’re speaking here, I could probably read the book. I wanna leave some stuff for people to read the book, but I did wanna kind of twist it a little bit since the audience here is generally more librarians, what would you see as the role of the librarian in this? In the way that you talk about the role of the citizens, what are things that librarians can do when faced with challenges like this?

James LaRue: One of the big themes about this one is that I do feel that just as libraries are under attack as public institutions, schools are under attack as public institutions, it’s part of a much larger framework. One of the things that I got into in this book is I happened to pick up this 1951 publication by Eric Hoffer, the True Believer. I had read it like years ago in high school and was very taken with it. He was trying to figure out in the aftermath of World War II, how did it happen? How did the world go crazy? And why was there this sudden rise of totalitarianism in Russia or the Soviet Union at that time with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini. And now today we have that same sort of rising authoritarianism around the world, and many of these kinds of frustration and ferment and anger that was happening in the United States in 1938, it’s happening again.

And so one option is that we’re libraries, and it’s just all about us and we stay in our little buildings and we hope nobody yells at us too much or cuts our funding, or you do everything that it takes to preserve democracy. So you say to the community in the newspaper, this is an issue that’s surfacing and these are the players and these are the issues, and we’d like to invite you to come in to talk about this. You participate in letters to the editor. You make sure you are building relationships with people of power so that you can say, “What do you think about this issue and what’s another side and how do we represent your viewpoint?” In essence, it’s part of this larger shift that I’ve seen in the course of my career from being library centric to being community centric and trying to articulate the values that we depend upon for democracy and we depend upon for strong libraries.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, without the community, we aren’t really much of anything.

Jamie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about your book and these very pressing issues. I’ve unfortunately had to do more episodes about this topic than I would probably prefer, but it is an ever present thing, and I think it’s great to have all kinds of views on it.

James LaRue: It helps us position ourselves for a future that’s always unknown. So let’s keep our options open.

Steve Thomas: Yep, absolutely. So thank you for coming on.

James LaRue: Congratulations on 250 episodes, that’s just amazing. I’m proud of you.

Steve Thomas: Thank you so much. Bye.

James LaRue: Bye bye.