Anniversary Special: How do we fight fascism?

relentlessly

Happy first birthday to Dispatch from the Sunroom! Thanks to those of you who have read from the beginning, aka my Grandma Phyllis, for whom this newsletter was created, and thanks to those of you who have joined along the way. I appreciate you reading these essays about rare books, librarianship, and info organization with thoughtfulness, attention, and care.

To celebrate, here’s an essay adapted from a final paper I wrote a few months ago in response to the prompt "What is your philosophy of special collections librarianship?" It was relevant then and it is more relevant now. In the coming weeks, I will write more about the destruction and protection of archives and manuscripts on an individual and systematic scale. For now, here’s a treatise against fascism:

Fighting Frauds

In one of our first reading group discussions last term, the Society for Rare Books and Manuscripts examined how and why rare book practitioners steal from collections and defraud people of their cultural heritage. In the weeks after our discussion, another barrage of stories emerged about the horrendously exploitative, colonialist, and fraudulent practices that built the collections at Hobby Lobby’s Museum of the Bible. Erin L. Thompson’s article in Slate, delightfully titled “That Robby Hobby,” makes the unmistakable point that Hobby Lobby’s owners, the Greens, set out with a clear, unwavering mission for the museum: to prove that the word of God is materially immutable from Abraham to now. In short, the Greens sought material that affirmed this concept and excluded materials that detracted from it. To reach that end, they stole thousands of artifacts. At best, this practice amounts to confirmation bias. But the Greens deceived further by falsifying thousands more artifacts. Thompson, a professor of art crime, concludes:¹

The Greens wanted to prove that human fallibility hasn’t stood in the way of God’s word. But scholars know that this text has changed over time. In the end, the Greens have only proved their own fallibility, time and time again.

The Museum of the Bible committed material obstructionism that amounts to theft three-fold: theft of countries’ heritage, theft of honesty and integrity, and theft of humility, the key requirement to work with material history.

Hobby Lobby is a prime example of how misinformation and material obstruction can advance a Big Lie: not necessarily of the word of God, which I’m less interested in, but more so the notion that humans haven’t erred in any way as they’ve attempted to record [the word of God, or anything else for that matter]. That there is some way to confirm one person or idea has been right all along, and we can prove it through material history.

We are at an inflection point in the United States; we must remember that the same people who seek a White curriculum, a White library, a White government, and a White country rely on a White history to advance their truth.² The practitioners of material obstructionism and misinformation have already set their sights on public and school libraries, kicking up dust in nonsense moral panics to cover their tracks as they root out works that diverge from the White status quo. In recent weeks and months, we have heard bombastic and fascistic assertions from elected officials about arresting “offending” librarians—that is, librarians whose refusal to capitulate offends them—and burning disagreeable works—that is, works they disagree with.

In my Curatorial Philosophy paper, I posed the question, “What is our interest in controlling these materials?”³ I asked this question to provoke how we might disperse and distribute power over material heritage, possibly through joint ownership of collections, repatriation, and post-custodial stewardship. Information control is central to public suppression and to advance this radical extremist agenda. These fascists will seek to consolidate power over these materials so they can solidify their argument that there is no wrongness in the history of the United States, that genocide and mass enslavement are not the building blocks of our economy and national psyche, and that a White Christian reign over this country is a God-given right.

These extremists will conduct this remaking by building their own special collections libraries and destroying all others. Consider another infamous example of theft and fraud: in the 1980s, Mark Hoffman forged documents relating to the gospel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and generated competition between two church factions. One faction was willing to pay huge sums of money to acquire Hoffman’s forged documents that affirmed their interpretation of the gospel. The other faction was willing to pay even more to suppress those documents.

Controlling material heritage is key to controlling public history and the stories we tell about ourselves. Too often, that control is an exercise in fraud and theft, no matter the cost. There will be no special treatment for the materials in our institutions; we too will endure the straw-man scrutiny of politicians flailing for power. In this dire moment of material obstructionism, we must treat attempts to obscure history as attempted fraud and theft.

The wry twist of horror here, of course, is that special collections libraries are already well-poised to advance White history, little assembly required. Many of our “leading” institutions were built with extracted wealth and house disproportionately White histories, even as best practitioners seek to ameliorate these legacies with thoughtful acquisition, repatriation, and reconciliation.

Moreover, as Fobazi Ettarh argues, the perception of librarianship as necessarily a moral vocation—that is, a spiritual calling and a bastion of democracy—obscures how libraries and librarians alike can reinforce white supremacy by assuming their service absolves them of bias or violence. If we absolve ourselves of responsibility simply because we are in proximity to democratic opportunity, we risk exploitation, then destruction. Jorge Luis Borges warned that the library is a monstrous thing but attempts to destroy it may set aflame a conflagration that lasts for eternity.⁴ If it burns out, something worse—already metastasizing in elected offices, on school and library boards, in Facebook groups—will take its place.

Too Much to Do

Special collections librarians work at the nexus of storytelling that has profoundly mis/shaped this nation, and we are amidst a remaking. Still, placing this responsibility on our profession, underpaid and overworked as we are, feels a tall order. I wrote about the tensions in the demands on our time and labor in my newsletter issue, “Week 31: How do you make good change?”, intertwining the arguments of Ettarh’s article and Michael Suarez’s 2017 keynote address “Historical Scholarship 2.0.” While the two pieces seem at odds, they advance the same goal: advocating for ourselves and our profession.

Drawing the two together, I wrote:

We are in service, but we are not servants. Librarians deserve dignity for our work, and we have a responsibility to imbue dignity into our workplace through reconciliation with and reparation of deep, scarring inequities.         

Consider combatting fascism as the work of remaking. This work begins with repairing the harm and violence in our collections and our workplaces. This remaking begins as Suarez does in his keynote, stating that “the library is a sacred place…where I go to situate my humanity.” He continues, “It is where I go to recognize those who come before us…and to know myself as belonging to a continuum, sometimes noble, sometimes profoundly ignoble.” Our remaking begins not by hiding—or, even more grotesquely, reveling in—this ignobleness, as white supremacists want to do. We leverage the violence in our records as proof of that ignoble continuum. Should we fail to reckon with the violence of our collections and our institutional histories, those materials will be weaponized in service of continued harm. By situating our humanity and humbling ourselves to that continuum, we demonstrate that we needn’t fear the truth.

We can materially remake special collections, rectifying the losses of manipulating collections with single-minded purpose—a theft of curiosity that renders white supremacists vacuous and evacuated of imagination. John Carter wrote in Taste and Technique in Book Collecting that “it is often of genuine public interest to collect something which no one else collects, provided it is worth collecting.”⁵ A few months ago, I understood this as encouraging creative deviation from established tastes, such as collecting young adult fiction or romance novels instead of focusing exclusively on Western high-spots. In these roiling fascistic waters, I understand this statement in service of a historically and culturally literate populace. It is in our interest to collect that which no one in power does or wants us to. Carter ends that statement with a flimsy, subjective phrase: “provided it is worth collecting.” As special collections librarians—humbled by our ignoble history and emboldened by our potential as resistors—we are equipped to shatter pre-existing notions of what is “worth” collecting. We are positioned to demonstrate the strengths of honesty, curiosity, and humility by moving beyond the status quo. We make the library a place to situate our humanity by accounting for the many human presences and the meaning of deliberate absences in our collections.  

This work is daunting. How are we to do this when we are asked for so much already? We return to Suarez and Ettarh’s intertwining arguments: To situate ourselves, Suarez suggests that we establish an “ethics of reading” that understands there is not one human being in the text, but whole communities. I apply this ethics of reading to Ettarh’s ethics of labor within and beyond librarian communities. We must understand the whole communities at work in the library and at work in this remaking. Ettarh writes that librarians need one another to resist job creep; we also need one another to resist.

We need our colleagues in school and public libraries. We need our advocates on library boards. We need to extend those boundaries to other anti-fascist organizers—labor unions, climate advocates, land and water protectors; doing so distributes responsibility and reveals the human presences in this work. Suarez calls upon us to build bridges, and so we must divest of the very notion that threatens us: that there is any sort of singular genius at the heart of our work and that we alone, as special collections practitioners, are capable of combatting white supremacy. When we make the community of our materials and our work visible, we resist the notion the there is only one public, one history, and one source of power. 

Put plainly, combatting white supremacy is not just about collecting more widely and more diversely, of having material evidence of non-white people in our collections. Good, powerful, necessary change in librarianship requires changing the fundamental theories of collaboration and community that build and maintain our collections. This change is as simple as saying “here are all of the people and processes that contributed to this item.” It is as humbling as being asked to admit that “we have exploited our workers, and we owe them justice.”

Humility, honesty, and curiosity

When I encounter a new book, I do my best to set aside my ego about what I think I know and humble myself before the object. There is more than the eye/I can see, and there is plenty that has gone missing. As I consider the challenges our field faces—a field historically riddled with self-absorption and self-importance, over-inflated egos and over-inflated pockets—I continually return to the necessity of humility. We combat the desire for unilateral power with humility, or the willingness to set ourselves aside.

Humility is not submission to power; rather, it is the power to be wrong about our preconceptions, to be humbled by the stories our material heritage tells us. Imagine the profound story the Museum of the Bible could have told if they relinquished their conviction that the word of God is immutable and instead examined the persistence and transformation of a narrative across time. It’s a story of religion and ritual, of violence and suppression, of geopolitics and national identity, of transmission and transgression. It’s a brutal history, but it reveals far more than a lie manufactured from falsified documents, stolen artifacts, and manipulated materials. Humility combats the shame central to power trips: the nagging fear that if you turn inwards, you will be disgusted with what you see. Humility allows us to reckon with what we lay bare.

As we remake ourselves, we must return to Suarez’s “ethics of reading” to seek out the community in the book and the community in this work. There are no lone book workers, and there are no lone librarians. These communities are made visible depending on how hard we look and the questions we ask of the materials and ourselves. Humility is knowing that I cannot do this work alone. When I have felt uncertain or intimidated by colleagues, I set aside my ego and reach outward, not inward. These choices have resulted in scholarship and, more importantly, friendships beyond my imagining. When we practice the richness of community in our book work, we see how poor and isolated white supremacy has rendered our opponents.

Forgive me my loftiness as I offer this philosophy of special collections as a scaffold for fighting fascists: practice access through tool-building and service; confront white supremacy in our behaviors, policies, and materials; engender curiosity and wonder through teaching and sharing; challenge notions and aspirations of collecting and possessing. In this extreme environment of mass disinformation, outright attacks on heritage and learning, and threats of burning books, these tenets meld into a more urgent belief: special collections librarians must mobilize and advocate for ourselves through advancing an understanding of our centrality to democracy, civic health, and cultural stability. Humility is not quiet toiling in our work, never seeking to be noticed. Humility releases us from shame and ego, the conviction that our work is meant to be elite or exclusive. Humility reminds us that there is power in sharing and setting ourselves aside. Libraries have long been an arm for nation-making and information-wielding.⁶ We are amidst a remaking: pick up your s/words.

More later.

1. Preceding this section, Thompson writes, “The museum wants to tell a story about the inerrancy of the Bible. The idea is that when we flip open the Bible, what we’re reading came straight to us from God’s lips—not through a millennia-long game of telephone played by storytellers and then scribes.” I quite liked that final turn of phrase.

2. Drawing from Eve L. Ewing’s guidance, I capitalize “White” because I want to emphasize the racialization of Whiteness in these projects.

3. I adapted my “Curatorial Philosophy” paper, my final project for my Rare Book Curatorship course, into a newsletter issue.

4. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory (New York: Penguin Books: 2007), 93.

5. John Carter, Taste and Technique in Book Collecting (London: Private Libraries Association, 1970), 89.

6. Melissa Adler and Greg Nightengale, “Books and Imaginary Being(s): The Monstrosity of Library Classifications,” Proceedings for the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Document Academy, vol. 7, article 6 (2020).