How a conservative librarian stocks her shelves

I am a middle school librarian who leans conservative and even I put books on my shelves that conservatives might protest. Sometimes because I can't find books from the right worth shelving.

Apologies in advance to my two subscribers who may be expecting this week's essay to be about how we look for and find matriarchs in our modern world. I did promise that that would be my next post, but something happened recently that I am particularly qualified to comment on so I will detour.

In the last weeks the Free Press published a meaningful analysis by James Fishback of the book titles that are likely to be found in public school libraries across the country. Called The Truth About Banned Books, The political trigger for this conversation is simple: Different sides of the political divide are claiming that the books favored by their side are getting censored or banned. Fishback documents the availability of titles from the Left and Right—Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist vs. John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, for example—and finds that, surprise, Kendi’s book is in a majority of school districts and McWhorter is in a single district.

Of course, almost nothing is censored or banned in our culture today. Most people who use these terms are using them incorrectly and know that they are doing so, but simply don't care. As a librarian, I can tell you that the words matter very much. If we decide not to put that controversial book on our library shelves—usually because of frank sexual depictions that a middle school library just doesn’t need to provide to kids—it is still available for you to purchase on Amazon or ready for you to read or check out from our town’s public library, that is not censorship. It doesn't mean the book has been banned. It just means that a public institution with limited funds—and I promise you our funds are very limited—has chosen not to spend money on something that may not be of as much value to accomplishing our goals as another book that we will choose to spend that money on.

Ranting about this pedantically, however, is not why I am writing this essay. I am writing to explain why you will find more of President Obama's books on even conservative school library shelves than you will books by recent Republican presidents. And I am here to explain that this is the case for reasons which are, well, complicated.

First let me start by admitting that there is a lot of stuff on our shelves that is put there because some progressive do-gooder wanted it there. This comes all the way from the publishers, who right now, for example, are promoting one transgender youth title for every two books they recommend I acquire for my middle school library. One out of two. Two years ago, four out of five books they recommended were about black lives, racism, or slavery. This is by design. When you question whether we really need all those new books, you get called a transphobe or a racist. In reality, I ust want people to acknowledge that publishing, like all industries, passes through fads that we don’t have to buy into wholesale. Seriously, we have hundreds of books in our school district about slavery and racism. If we don’t buy the next five that publishers push on us, it doesn’t mean we’re racist. It means we’ve honored our students sufficiently with that content and we only have so much money to spend across a whole range of topics we should cover for them.

If you are a progressive, you think every righteous thing you do in service of your beliefs is justified and smart and any opposition to it is caused by evil forces or bad people. Fine, you are welcome to think that. Just as long as you understand that conservatives will do the same thing. They will try to put books on shelves that promote their values and think that your opposition is caused by an evil seed deep inside you. I personally don't care whether any of you is evil. This is the thing I came here to explain: I want there to be progressive titles on my shelves. I want there to be conservative titles on my shelves. It turns out, I’m getting half of my wish fulfilled. And Fishback’s article correctly points out which half of that wish is well taken care of.

I'm not a librarian just because I'm a bookish gal who loves to read. Though I am that. I am a librarian because I have a library science degree. And I got that degree because a librarian saw me in my college library looking up reference books for information about possible degrees and career paths for myself. When she finally asked if she could help me, and I explained I couldn't figure out what I should get my Master's Degree in, she laughed. Pointing at the stacks of reference books I had surrounded myself with to look at different facts about college majors, job opportunities, pay rates for different professions, she said, “I know exactly what you already are. You just don't know it yet. A librarian.”

That desire to pore over the stacks of accumulated knowledge is fundamental to the kind of thinking that makes for a good librarian. Or at least it used to be. In the library science degree programs of days gone by you learned the history of how knowledge is assembled and presented, you learn how to encourage people to enjoy the process of availing themselves of centuries worth of knowledge across multiple disciplines. This, by its very nature, requires an open mind. You cannot categorically exclude possible content from your search because to do so works against the very definition of library science. It is also diametrically opposed to enlightenment philosophy, science, and the general Western openness to discovery and the revelatory process of applying your intellect.

I know a thing or two about struggling to achieve access to knowledge. As a girl raised in a small town in a conservative political and religious environment, I had to spend my younger years developing the courage to look beyond the small list of approved readings that people in my community felt were appropriate. I am not joking when I say that to read The Grapes of Wrath in ninth grade, I had to get administrator permission for it to count for my summer reading project. Because several parents in my community had lobbied to ban that book from the curriculum, even though it was still technically in the library. (A distinction which at the time I did not understand.) I got permission and when I read the poignant closing scene of that book, with a tear in my eye, I understood the power of literature to educate, but also saw that it could enrage.

I hope it's okay to spoil this, but the end of that book involves a poor young woman providing sustenance to a starving man using the only resource she has, breasts swollen with milk after the loss of her infant child. It is a beautiful and inspiring climax to a deliberately bleak book. And I almost forget that it was written by a man in a time period where such magnificently maternal poetry would not have been widely appreciated. The fact that it was the women of my community who most objected to that so-called “obscenity” being available to 15-year-olds is not lost on me. You can blame their religious upbringing, you can think you are in a scene from Footloose where the ignorant Christians are about to burn Catcher in the Rye, but in reality these are just people whose minds are not particularly open, trying to preserve a way of life they feel is under threat from sources of opposition which they deem as evil.

I provide all of that background to suggest that I am now experiencing, nearly weekly, that same phenomenon in our school district. I sit on a committee that oversees book selections across our entire district. So while I supervise our own book selection process for the middle school I am also exposed to the decision process that is applied for our grade schools and our one very large high school. I can tell you that the same fear that the women in my community felt towards the words of Steinbeck not to mention people like Kurt Vonnegut, is the self same fear that is being expressed when people on my committee try to prohibit the Harry Potter books from being shelved in our libraries.

I did not approve of it when I was fifteen and I do not approve of it now. But what is my role? Should I be standing up and advocating for the acquisition of conservative-leaning books to compensate for the overwhelming left-lean of our libraries? In truth, I probably should. But first I’m focused on reducing the erosion of the existing selection of books that we already own but which some want to label as “problematic.”

It’s not censoring, it’s not banning, I’ve already established that. When a childhood favorite of mine, The Indian in the Cupboard, which we had many copies of in our district, is suddenly being removed without discussion or fanfare, it’s not a budget decision. There’s room on the shelves. It’s a political decision. At least with that one the claim is that the book is harmful or traumatic. Because lately I’ve had to deal more with the removal of books because somebody doesn’t like the politics of the author or the fact that the author is liked by someone whose politics are suspect.

Exhibit A is J.K. Rowling. I will die on this hill. Because the Harry Potter books harm no one. There is nothing in the content that is objectionable. I maintained this when several Evangelical Christians in our town first tried to remove them from our school libraries more than twenty years ago. They opposed the normalization of witchcraft and wanted to remove the books for that content. That was at least a complaint against the content of the books. Later, other Christians tried to remove Harry Potter from our libraries because J.K. Rowling admitted that the mentor of the series, Albus Dumbledore, was gay. They felt betrayed that she had planted a sympathetic gay character in her very popular book series and wanted to remove the books for content that wasn't even in the books!

I was embarrassed for my fellow Christians at the time and my agnostic peers in the school district were positively disgusted at the claim that we should remove a book for something that’s not even in the book. Yet today, those same librarians, egged on by concerned parents in our community, want to remove the Harry Potter books, again, not for anything in the books themselves but because of their interpretation of something the author has written on Twitter.

I will categorically refuse to play that game. What I learned from my ninth grade English teacher, who supported my reading of Steinbeck, I am committed to today. The more books the better. The more discussion about them the better. We accomplish nothing by hiding from other people’s thoughts. If those thoughts are good, we can learn from them; if those thoughts are bad, we can still learn from them.

That’s just about protecting books we already have on the shelf, though. If you want to suggest that for every left-leaning book we have on the shelf we have to have an equally conservative leaning book on the shelf, I have to acquaint you with my dilemma—there really aren’t as many good conservative books on the market. Other than the thriving market of explicitly Christian books focused on religious and socially conservative themes, there just isn’t a lot out there. This is for three reasons that combine to tilt the balance away from the right and toward the left.

First is the point I hinted at before. Publishers are overwhelmingly progressive in orientation. They jump all over every left-of-center trend, buying up new manuscripts regardless of quality, because they genuinely believe these are the “correct” books that the world needs right now. But one reason they are reinforced in this belief is that the library profession also leans left. That is the second reason for the left-tilt of our inventory. The leadership and membership of the American Library Association probably considers the Democratic Party to be dangerously right of center relative to their own social and political goals. This is the organization that promotes the outrage over Banned Books. Look at their list of most banned or “challenged” books, and you’ll see all the liberal books they bother to track. But not a single mention of Harry Potter. But ask your child’s librarian if they carry Harry Potter and see what they say. Right now the ALA’s most-challenged book, Gender Queer (yes, that one) has only been challenged 151 times and is still in 25% of school districts sampled. It’s easier to find this supposedly banned book than it is to find one of Thomas Sowell’s most acclaimed books.

That’s the fault in the system. But the third reason conservative views aren’t featured in many libraries or in representative volume: Conservatives don’t publish many works intended to reach a mass cultural audience. Sure, why would they if publishers won’t promote it and libraries won’t buy it, I get that. But honestly, as someone who has tried to find books that would represent right-leaning views for a middle school library, it’s really hard to find many. Don’t get me wrong, conservatives are really good about writing to themselves—Christian publishers can really clean up in part because other publishing houses ignore the market—but when writers on the right want to critique the culture, they often do so through direct criticism rather than writing books that sensitively invite children and youth to understand life in a fuller way.

It’s basically the legacy of Rush Limbaugh vs. NPR out there. You can disagree with NPR’s heavily left-tilted content, but you have to objectively admit that NPR stories are more thoughtful and just plain intelligent compared to the combative style of Limbaugh’s many successful imitators. Careful, reasoned analysis or bombastic, offensive rhetoric. We conservatives often lose on the main stage because so many of our cultural creators are losers and they are losing the culture battle at the ground level. So while you find books in Kindergarten classrooms that normalize being raised by two mommies, participating in a pride parade, and feeling different about your gender, there really aren’t many (good) books that celebrate having a mommy and daddy who love each other, having lots of siblings in a large family, or participating in the kind of community service that conservatives actually do more frequently than liberals do.

Basically, liberals are really good at making their case to other people’s children. Conservatives seem to only want to persuade their own children.

So yes, the deck is stacked against conservatives. Though, every once in a while, publishers accidentally tap into this market. I have accumulated a few friends in book publishing circles over the years, and I will share with you that when Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand became a runaway hit, the publisher’s marketing team was baffled. They did not know how to explain why this book was outselling their expectations, which were already admittedly high because of Hillenbrand’s prior success with Seabiscuit. I talked to one of the members of the marketing team that was trying to figure out how to take advantage of this moment, to pinpoint how they could to ensure that another million people would read that wonderful book. She said they didn’t get it.

Exasperated, I finally said to her, “Do you not realize that the redemption arc of Louis Zamperini leads him straight through a personal conversion to Jesus Christ that heals his unthinkable wounds and radically changes his life forever?” She blinked in surprise. I’m not sure she understood or believed me. (By the way, that was the same part of the book that was left out of the movie because Hollywood is even more blind to conservative interests than the Manhattan publishing scene.)

I don’t expect it to get better, at least not without getting worse first. Many of my contacts inside of publishing houses report that their colleagues are leaning even more dramatically to the left, now openly supporting Hamas terrorists which, puzzlingly, is now evidently required for continued membership in the left-most circles. Which is strange because publishing is an industry bursting at the seams with intelligent and energetic Jews; I can’t even imagine how they’re navigating those conversations today. Hopefully getting to this unexpected low point might trigger an overall reevaluation of publishing priorities. It’s a similar shift in thinking that is behind The Free Press’s founding and editorial strategy, which is what triggered this rambling essay in the first place.

There is hope for us yet. But only if we read more. I sincerely believe this. And we’ll only get more people to read more if we publish a wider variety of offerings and put them on the physical and digital shelves in front of them. That’s my job and I commit to do it well. You can apply pressure to librarians and publishers, but I have a hunch we’d be more successful if we tried to persuade more writers and illustrators to write books that promote the kind of healthy, happiness-promoting values that conservatives believe in and that the most elite liberals themselves live. I’ll keep my eye out for those voices and make sure they get on my shelves. Will you?