i love libraries but i wish ppl would stop acting like they’re a utopia that exists outside the bounds of oppression except for when it helps tbh.
i have only ever felt welcome in libraries where the staff looks like me, and that’s including when i WORKED at a library as a student volunteer at age 14/15 when one of my grown as fuck 40+ white colleagues refused to be alone in a room with me because i made her uncomfortable by virtue of being Black :) wouldn’t even sort magazines standing next to me, at that, because i was such a threat to her apparently.
this whole “uwu librarians are just such sweet people! librarians become librarians because they love people! we exist to support the community!” shows me very clearly where people are coming from and it’s not my reality. libraries should be that but don’t pretend those are things that can be assumed lmao.
it’s like a very specific brand of white women librarians who make these kinds of posts and it aggravates me because they are absolutely the ones who call the cops on people who fall asleep, on the adults with learning disabilities who want to participate in children’s storytime (because so many libraries pretend illiterate adults don’t exist to begin with, or just any adults who would like to be read to???), who make stupid rules about who can use the community meeting spaces and for what even tho ur district tells u it’s supposed to be for anyone fitting x y z standards some Sally or Jane always has “it’s just our preferences here at [branch]!” to say about it, who will tsktsktsk at the white boys who come in clearly high but tell you to “keep an eye on” the group of all brown kids because they look like trouble… who huff and puff and get annoyed when they have to explain something multiple times to a patron with a diff native language than English or taking a few extra steps to serve patrons w disabilities but has nooooo problem excitedly repeating information over and over for the abled english-speaking people, cuz you know, they DESERVE help! they’re not a nuisance!
like fucking… miss me w all this nonsense honestly it’s fucking infuriating the more i think about it. if you pretend we already live in a world where “if only libraries had funding, they’d be havens!” then no one is going to have the motivation or even knowledge to push for that as a reality. and the reality is libraries for many of us are just another site of surveillance and violence by the same group of people in a different outfit.
I will never forget the time I had a man cry while I was serving him in the library where I’ll work.
He was a regular, but didn’t often do much other than sit around and enjoy being here. One day after coming back after my lunch break, he came to the helpdesk and since my other colleague was busy, I stopped shelving and went to help. I’ll be honest, he has learning difficulties and unfortuantely he isn’t very clear when speaking, but we eventually worked out that he wanted a book (through me guessing and him pointing at multiple people reading). After narrowing down what he wanted to read about, dogs, I stood up to go get some examples before he stopped me to say “I can’t read very well.”
In that instance, I felt so sorry for him. It was clear from his expression that he was ashamed, and I have no doubt half of that shame comes from other people’s usual reactions, but I just nodded, told him to wait there and went to go find some books. Bringing back a handful of different books, from picture books to children’s non-fiction, to dyslexia friendly and giant print books, we had a look through them together while I asked him what books were good and what were bad, so I knew what I was looking for, and it became clear that what he really needed were essentially picture books with at most a sentence per page.
That was simple enough, so I took him to the children’s area and we looked through some books together, ignoring the Karen-mom clearly glaring from the sofa she was sat on. A little later he’d chosen a handful of picture books and was grinning from ear to ear. We went back to the desk and I issued them for him and he was ready to go, before he started crying, explaining he’d never been able to choose his own books before. He learnt pretty soon that I was, unfortunately, the only one of my colleagues who had the patience/human decency to serve him, so he’d usually come at that same time once a week to change his books, always immediately looking for me so I could help him.
This is just one example of one customer dealing with what is practically bullying from adults, who should know better. He just wanted to read and was belittled so much that he was embarrased to say so. Please, please bare in mind that if you serve customers in a shop or library or any customer service role- it shouldn’t even have to be a second thought to just.. not be a dick. This is just one example. but c’mon, please just be decent to other people.
This made me so angry and sad. So many people need to take a long walk off a short pier. Thank you so much for being kind i.e a decent human being.
god this is so important and it’s one of the aspects of “vocational awe” that we don’t talk about nearly enough in professional library circles.
There’s a bunch of talk about how vocational awe means that library admin will argue that since it’s a calling, library staff should do more with less, resign themselves to being paid less for their labor than they ought, things like that.
There’s not NEARLY enough talk about how library staff will hide behind the “inherent goodness of library work” and ignore the ways in which they perpetuate systems of oppression.
Librarianship is EIGHTY PER CENT WHITE. That number goes up when we’re talking about library administration. And despite the fact that librarianship is overwhelmingly female, library leadership is overwhelmingly male. So we have a majority-white profession headed mostly by white men. Do the math yourself for what kind of service that results in.
Look at the Code of Conduct in a lot of libraries and you’ll see how damaging it is to homeless patrons, mentally ill patrons, patrons of color, patrons with trauma… I did a whole paper in library school on how public libraries can better serve patrons experiencing homelessness and let me tell you we are NOT THERE.
There’s a lot of work being done right now in libraries to try to undo some of these institutional issues. There’s work around divesting from police in libraries, work on not making POC on staff responsible for “cultural sensitivity” or “diversity” training, shit like that. It’s a long road and we’re definitely not there yet and it pisses me off so much when people pretend that libraries, by virtue of being what they are, are somehow exempt from all the bullshit. They’re not. We’re not.
