What Should Libraries Do?

A Banned Books Week conversation with writer, translator, and librarian Frieda Afary about how to use our civic spaces to combat disinformation with knowledgeable conversations

Image credit: KED 44/Shutterstock

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Banned Books Week was created by the American Library Association in 1982, and is supported by a coalition of organizations that includes: American Booksellers for Free Expression, Authors Guild, Children’s Book Council, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Freedom to Read Foundation, GLAAD, PEN America, and Penguin Random House. You can read more about it, and about what activists are doing to combat book bans and censorship, here.

State and local bans on books and controversial speech became a central feature of right-wing culture wars in the United States after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. Librarians have battled censorship for decades and are now on the front lines of a Republican-backed campaign to remove books from public libraries and schools in 23 states. States that have not passed these laws have still seen activist local school boards purge learning materials. Illinois, Maryland, and Minnesota have passed laws that prevent individual districts in the state from doing this.

Book bans have been in the news, but we talk less about how to use the spaces ideas inhabit creatively, particularly libraries, which are accessible to the general public in a way that schools often are not. This is why I sat down with Frieda Afary, a librarian, and co-chair of PEN America's Translation Committee (full disclosure: my sister is the other co-chair, which is how Frieda and I met.)

But we talk less about how to use the spaces ideas inhabit creatively. This is why I sat down with Frieda Afary, a librarian, Co-Chair of PEN America's Translation Committee. Frieda is an Iranian American author, t, translator, and writer. A public librarian in Los Angeles, she is the author of Socialist Feminism: A New Approach (Pluto Press, 2022).

 Frieda urges us to think more broadly about libraries as civic spaces for community discussion, as well as for cultivating critical thinking, continuing education, and humanities thinking. Yes, we need to read books, but we also need to talk about them. This is why she and her team at the American Library Association’s Social Responsibilities Roundtable created the Pathfinders project, which creates and disseminates guides for the difficult, well-informed conversations about current events that libraries can host in their communities.

This is what she had to say.

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Claire Potter: Frieda, can you begin by telling me a little bit about yourself and how you came to the Pathfinders project?

Frieda Afary: I am a public librarian in Los Angeles, and I've been a feminist activist for many years, and am very involved in international solidarity issues, with a focus on the Middle East and Iran in particular. My passion is philosophy, which I studied in graduate school, and I've continued my study of philosophy over the years.

I am also concerned about the rise of disinformation and the ways in which it is affecting the public, the way it is confusing people and in many ways making them vote against their own interests, not only in the United States, but internationally. I think that the most effective way that librarians could help change the ominous direction of the world is to help their communities address current world issues, especially the ones that have been weaponized to confuse people.

Why should libraries become the focus of this work?

Libraries are packed with information. I believe that if you really delve into an issue and address the facts and the various dimensions of any problem, you can have an objective understanding of it. You can get over any kind of bias if you have a holistic understanding of a topic.

Within the American Library Association, some of us who work with the Social Responsibilities Round Table thought that we could help both library staff and library patrons. What we could do is to pick certain hot topics that have been weaponized, and offering a couple of introductory paragraphs that introduce the issue. What is the issue? What are the main aspects of it, the key debates, key questions? We then offer several sources, trying not to bombard them, but anywhere from three to 10 sources: articles, and audio and video links to sources that are highly credible and respectable and are properly fact checked.

And we thought that if we could offer those to our library audience, we could especially encourage librarians and library staff to then use those guides as the basis for having current events discussions at their libraries. So, that's how we started: current events discussions and guides offered to library staff.

Then, we realized that it would be more effective for us to offer these guides as pathfinder brochures. “Pathfinder” is a library term. It's basically a guide that has an introductory paragraph and some sources that can be used for exploring a topic. So, we thought instead of having those one-hour sessions that we were encouraging librarians to take further, why not just issue these pathfinder brochures that librarians nationwide could use in whatever way they see fit?

We also have a colleague who's very artistic, and she came up with these beautiful, beautiful designs for the brochures. So at this point, we have nine brochures, but we're working on producing more. We have one on abortion and reproductive rights, one on global migration, crisis, gun violence, war in Ukraine, the Israel/Palestine War, book bans, African American history, and gender identity and sexual orientation. We just added two on the U.S. Education Crisis K-12 and the war in Sudan. 

So, you've identified a range of subjects (among them, the current culture wars in the United States) and created a factual basis for people having conversations about them. It also promotes the function of our library as a democratic and community space in American society.

Could you talk a little bit about your philosophy of what it means to be a good librarian, and what libraries should do?

Librarians are guardians of knowledge first and foremost. I believe that their role is to introduce the public to accurate knowledge, and at the same time offer tools that promote critical thinking. It is not enough to give people the books or offer them computer technology and ways of going to the internet and looking things up.

So, we are also a site where the whole concept of critical thinking can be taught and promoted, both through what I just described--current events, discussions on various topics related to local national, international issues related to historical issues—because in general, libraries are a site for promoting continuing education.

I don't know if this is a global phenomenon, but unfortunately, what has happened in the United States is that librarians have been pushed more and more in the direction of being social workers. Let me say: I have all the respect in the world for social workers. We need social workers, but librarians are not trained, and should not be limited to, providing resumé workshops, or helping people with the finding places to go to if they have a drug problem or if they're homeless. We gladly do those things. However, as guardians of knowledge and as promoters of critical thinking, we must do much more. And I'm afraid that those critical tasks and responsibilities are just being pushed aside.

I love the phrase you use--guardians of knowledge—and one of the things that I think many people in the United States may misapprehend as we think about censorship is that we think about censorship as characterizing the political culture of nations like Russia, China, Iran, and Afghanistan. However, the United States has a long history of censorship. That was lifted through Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and 1960s, but now we're seeing it again at the state and local levels.

Why do you think the United States has been so prone to cycles of censorship?

Well, I think as members of an advanced capitalist society, the philosophy of which is accumulation of value and pure self-interest, Americans are not encouraged to pursue critical thinking.

So, the idea of the life of the mind, of really exploring issues and thinking things through, discussing them, debating them, addressing various sides of an issue, and not just pros and cons, but the whole of a topic--to us as a culture, it seems foreign and academic. If you discuss that, Oh—you're an academic.

Yet, being a responsible and civic-minded human being means that you must have knowledge of local, national, and international issues. You have to have a deep understanding of history, not only United States history, but global history. You have to have an understanding of what debates matter in the world of ideas. You have to know science and economics. This is what is required of a responsible citizen. But in an advanced capitalist society such as the United States, we are so pushed in the direction of accumulation of value and pure self-interest that we sometimes forget what it means to be a good citizen.

I often think of citizenship in relation to certain kinds of functions like—you're a good citizen if you work, you're a good citizen if you help people, or if you vote. What you are saying, however, is that it's also an aspect of being a good citizen to be informed and cultivate a critical perspective.

So, let’s push this a little: how, specifically, does being informed and cultivating a critical perspective enable other forms of citizenship?

First and foremost, it enables empathy. I owe this idea to Maryanne Wolf, a professor of education at UCLA, and who has written the book, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World (Harper, 2018). Wolf discusses the connection between critical thinking and empathy, and that, when you do not engage in deep reading or critical thinking, you also do not try to address the whole of a topic or delve into contradictions and difficulties and questions that arise in facing a problem. You become very mechanical in your thinking. You become very transactional in your relationships, and you lose the capacity for empathy.

And when we lose the capacity for empathy, we cannot possibly be good citizens.

I was thinking as you were talking earlier about capitalism, that one of the great promoters of libraries in this country was a man named Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate who earned what would be today billions and billions of dollars from exploiting his workers. Then, he started building public libraries all over the country. One of his friends said to him at one point, Mr. Carnegie, why don't you just pay your workers more? I mean, why are you building libraries in their communities instead of paying them the wages they want? And Carnegie said, well, if I paid them more, they would just spend it all on drink and pleasure and all kinds of terrible things. But if I put a library in their community, it gives them the opportunity to transform themselves.

Is there something in that? I mean, we'd like to have bread and roses too, but is there something in that approach that pouring resources into the capacity for human transformation should be as much a priority as forms of social justice that are more clearly economic?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Because when you pour resources into libraries and educational settings that are not for-profits--I stress that because public libraries are free--you create the possibility for people to not think of pleasure simply as entertainment, drinking and getting high, or going out at night and being wild. There is pleasure in the act of exploring, reflecting, reading, thinking things through, and a process of reflection that deepens one's knowledge. Thinking things through calms people down and helps them relate to each other better. It prevents violence.

I like what you're saying about how thinking things through calms people down. I was thinking about a feature I saw on the PBS NewsHour recently: a young man had decided not to go to college, in part because he was simply overwhelmed by the project of what it meant to go to college. He said: I don't know why I would be there.

Do libraries give young people a sense of why they would take the next step in their life?

I wish I could tell you that the public libraries in the US do that. Some of them have very dedicated librarians who really promote continuing education and have a variety of programs, not just cooking and gardening, resumé writing and computer technology. Again, I'm not downplay the importance of that, but they should support people in delving into the complexities of life and history.

I would say most public libraries in the US don't do that. They're either really understaffed or just don't think that the priority is to do continuing education. But yes, I think that if libraries in the US really focused on having discussions about current world events and on promoting continuing education, and on really delving into the humanities, we could confront the wave of disinformation and confusion that is poisoning people’s minds.

I think librarians have a critical role to play in that.

Well, every time we think things are getting bad in this country, they get worse. In June, South Carolina, already a leader in book bans, passed the most stringent censorship law for schools and public libraries that we have in this country. It included eliminating a range of classics from the library shelves, including Romeo and Juliet and The Canterbury Tales, which is beyond extreme—and the opposite of the humanities knowledge you advocate for.

So how are we going to get out of this place? It began with the low hanging fruit of, Okay, nothing about LGBT people, nothing about racism, or Black people. And we've quickly ended up with banning Romeo and Juliet,probably one of the few pieces of literature almost everyone has in common, because it is almost universally relatable among 12 and 13-year-olds who can be persuaded to read it because they, too, are all hopped up in hormones and at war with adults more generally.

How can librarians move the needle—other than the ways they have persistently resisted these changes?

I think we must really promote high-quality programming at libraries that's free of charge and find new ways to engage the public, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. First, the pandemic really did a lot of damage to the United States public that has barely been acknowledged. Over a million people died, and so many young people lost relatives. The whole period of isolation--which was very much needed because of the pandemic, I'm not denying that--did a lot of harm to the psyche and traumatized a lot of people; a lot of students, especially at the elementary school level, fell behind.

So, we have a lot of work to do, and we must accept the fact that we also have a declining population of college students. I think it was 19 million before the pandemic, and now it's about 15 million It's a huge decline in the population of college students, partly due to economic issues, and partly because in general, we've had a population decline in the United States.

But that makes new sites for learning ever more important. If they are offered ways of continuing their education without having to pay for it, people are usually interested. We librarians must find ways of doing that, both through having discussions about books and current events, and by reaching out to university and college professors, asking them to come to the library to offer their services for free. If faculty offer classes and discussions, we can make sure that these events are thoughtful, and knowledge based. That, in turn, requires people who are experts in various fields.

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Historians at work fighting censorship and intimidation:

• On July 11, 2024, a group of distinguished members of the American Historical Association did a Congressional briefing on academic freedom. You can see it here.

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Short takes:

• At The Liberal Patriot, Ava Kelley argues that Republicans’ anti-institutional politics may be the deciding factor in a November victory for Kamala Harris. The Democratic and Republican parties both responded to third-party challenges that intensified towards the end of the 19th century by strengthening the party machinery capable of getting voters to the polls. “Though Republicans have an Electoral College advantage today, so-called “Institutional Democrats” have a different advantage,” Kelley explains. “They have proven more adept than Republicans in their organization. This is evident in at least three different ways for the Democrats: (1) their ability to neutralize third-party candidates, mostly nullifying what some analysts last year projected could be a major disadvantage for Democrats against Trump; (2) their decision to associate themselves with abortion-related ballot measures that favor their party; and (3) their work to turn out the vote via early and mail-in votes.” (September 23, 2024)

• You have probably read about North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s gross activities on porn sites: it was an early October surprise in a race where Robinson had been closing the gap with Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein. But who supported this weirdo in the first place? We can begin with the Republican Governor’s Association, which has spent $17.3 million saturating the state with ads. But where does the RGA get its money? “Much of it comes from major corporations, which can donate unlimited amounts to so-called 527 groups like the RGA,” Judd Legum reports at Popular Information. “While corporate donations to federal candidates come from voluntary contributions from employees to corporate PACs, corporate donations to 527s come directly from the corporate treasury. In other words, the revenue these companies receive from customers is being diverted to bolster Robinson's candidacy.” Here are the companies Legum identified in descending order: DoorDash (which claims to be an LGBT+ ally—seriously?—$625,000), Google ($585,000), Walmart ($570,000), CVS ($550,000), Microsoft ($550,000), Travelers Insurance ($460,000), Amazon ($450,000), Deloitte ($400,000), Charter Communications ($385,000), Oracle ($325,000), Pfizer ($300,000), Coca-Cola ($250,000), The Motion Picture Association ($250,000), and Wells Fargo ($250,000). (September 23, 2024)

• You might want to lay off attacking posts on X that spread disinformation, something I routinely do. According to a new study by John Blanchard, an assistant professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor from Swarthmore College, argues that the “disputed” label persuade Trump supporters that the posts are true. “The study found that Trump voters who were initially skeptical about claims of widespread fraud were more likely to rate lies as true when a `disputed’ label appeared next to Trump’s tweets,” Nick Robbins-Early reports at The Guardian. “The findings meanwhile showed Biden voters’ beliefs were largely unaffected by the `disputed’ tags.” On the other hand, “Third-party voters or non-voters were slightly less likely to believe the false claims after reading the four tweets with the tags.” (September 20, 2024)