Public Libraries Should be Safe Spaces for Racial Minorities

Understanding why CRT has become such a significant issue means realizing what it is and is not.

Some Americans want to relive the horrors of the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow was a time when lawmakers openly codified racism into many states’ legal practices and customs. Minority groups were threatened and intimidated with impunity, and lynchings, other violent crimes, and terrorism were appalling familiar.

Sadly, today’s public libraries and dedicated staff face unprecedented challenges due to extremist rhetoric, intimidation tactics, and sometimes direct threats. Certain people and groups seem to want books that reinforce their agendas.

Much censorship threatening today’s libraries is unconstitutional and an outright travesty. The Constitution’s First Amendment provides freedom of speech and the press, and a crucial role of public libraries is to protect those rights. Yet the pressure to ban books is unrelenting.

Sign the Petition: Don't Ban Books in the United States

What Is Critical Race Theory, Why Are Some States Banning It?

In the words of Ishena Robinson of the Legal Defense Fund:

Recently, Critical Race Theory (CRT), an academic concept mainly taught to law students, has been catapulted into the public dialogue, becoming the catch-all phrase of those seeking to censor educational discussions dealing with race or racial justice in American schools.

Understanding why CRT has become such a significant issue means realizing what it is and is not. On the one hand, opponents are concerned that CRT blames all white people for being oppressors while considering Black people as oppressed victims. But, on the other, a more down-to-earth perspective holds that narratives about CRT are glaring exaggerations of a progressive theoretical framework.

What we consider a more realistic view of CRT holds that U.S. social institutions like the criminal justice system, educational institutions, labor and housing markets, healthcare, and (of course) public libraries are caught up in racism-embedded laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differing outcomes due to race.

But what is the democracy our ancestors fought for if not a society that welcomes and advances diverse perspectives? Isn’t that one of the many roles of public libraries?

Today’s Reality

All racial groups and other cultural minorities deserve to learn from one another. But, unfortunately, this can’t happen when books about different lifestyles are targeted for removal.

What a sad irony that statistics from PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans show that in the past year:

• 659 titles (40 percent) contain protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.
• 338 titles (21 percent) directly address issues of race and racism.
• 141 titles (9 percent) are either biography, autobiography, or memoir.
• 64 titles (4 percent) include characters and stories that reflect religious minorities, such as Jewish, Muslim, and other faith traditions.

Data may reflect what takes place in school libraries and classrooms. However, public libraries serve many of those same students when they search for books that differ from what they are assigned for school.

Marginalized children and young adults who frequent public libraries are often eager to seek new information and insights.

And why not? With patrons of all ages, genders, racial and ethnic groups, religions, and various other identities, public libraries are some of the most diverse and democratic institutions anywhere. But how much longer can this status last in a time of censorship?

Sign the Petition: Don't Ban Books in the United States

Who is Harmed, and How?

People of color are further marginalized if their experiences can’t be replicated or retold authentically to those from other cultural backgrounds. But isn’t that what historical fact and fiction are all about?

Some of history’s most celebrated authors and their landmark books, including Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, were challenged in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Yet volumes like these “speak truth to power” when addressing what the African American experience has been historically.

Moreover, certain challenged books are the same ones children and teens go to when things aren’t okay at home or school. As Kate Messner, author of The Seventh Wish, put it, “When we say ‘This book is inappropriate,’ we’re telling those children’ your situation … your family … your life is inappropriate.”

And recently, South Carolina’s Charleston County Fraternal Order of Police vowed to “put a stop” to the sentiment behind Angie Thomas’s young adult novel The Hate U Give, urging the book’s banning from a summer reading list; the story follows a black teenage girl who takes up activism after a white police officer pulls over the car she is riding in and brutally murders her childhood friend in front of her.

And now there is growing concern that publishers are consolidating and growing more risk-averse — which we assume means fewer controversial books on library shelves and fewer opportunities to help kids and teens navigate a confusing world.