#sometimes i feel very bleak about the present & future of the public library. especially youth services

[girderednerve]

im mad

so the state of florida passed a law that went into effect on the first of january which says that it is illegal for public buildings to allow regular sleeping by unhoused people, & if the law is not enforced local citizens can sue for damages. this is an evil law. my friend who works in a florida public library had another staff member tell her that he had been instructed to photograph library patrons who rest on the benches outside, and when my friend was like 'under no circumstances should you do that' and escalated the situation to library management, she found that no one in management was aware of the law or had any guidance for library staff at all. i will be very surprised if she ever gets a solid answer, much less an actual defense of unhoused patrons' right to use the library. when she was telling me about this situation, i asked her if the waiting list for public housing had reopened after its brief open window (only for seniors, mind) a few years ago, & she said not only has the list remained closed, they have demolished some public housing. i know what she will do if she gets any say in the matter because i have watched her insist repeatedly in the face of opposition that the library is for everyone, but most of the people who have decision-making power in that library system are convinced that their jobs & the funding for the library as a whole are on the line & they will fold like paper.

in 2023, the state of florida passed a law making it illegal for trans people to use restrooms in publicly owned buildings. when i asked my manager what the library's response plan was, she was unaware that such a law existed and had no guidance to offer; she got advice from the county security adviser, who made a series of transphobic remarks & suggested that while library staff cannot police bathrooms, other patrons are permitted to do so. the matter was dropped. and then i fled the state a month later

anyway my point is that state violence happens in the library & as much as i might like to imagine that libraries are all the nice things people say on here—bastions of the public spirit, socialism in action, whatever—in practice they are institutions with vaguely nice intentions, & those nice intentions usually hold very little substance. i salute the library workers who have resisted attempts to expurgate library collections & have suffered personal consequences as a result, but i will note that a) it is easier for librarians as a group to articulate resistance to 'book bans' than it is for them to argue in favor of actually including marginalized people in the library's physical spaces, both in the sense that the ideal of intellectual freedom is a prominent part of the field's self-identification & in the sense that it is easier to get liberal support; and b) there aren't that many of them. book bans come from the same ideological impulse as laws that persecute trans & unhoused people, but the approach to intellectual freedom in libraries for decades has refused to consider the content of book challenges in favor of a 'neutral' position which emphasizes only that all ideas are equally welcome in the library's collections, which is analytically empty. meanwhile, book bans are actually part of an effort to control public space & undermine public institutions of all types, but this isn't how librarians tend to conceptualize book bans & it isn't how they conceptualize themselves (i.e., as part of a broader network of public service; libraries are unique of course!).

anyway this has been another very long post which reads: libraries aren't distinct from broader society & acting like they are leaves us unable to defend either libraries or each other from revanchism. okay have a nice day