It has long been clear that the Progressive Left believe everything is racist (or sexist or homophobic or &c.). Yes, even libraries are tools of racist oppression!
“If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of” that Harris describes in her article. When most of our collections filled with this so-called ‘knowledge,’ it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. Collections are representations of what librarians (or faculty) deem to be authoritative knowledge and as we know, this field and educational institutions, historically, and currently, have been sites of whiteness.
“Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries. They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives via the prison industrial complex, the spoils of war, etc. Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicates that we don’t care about what POC think, we don’t care to hear from POC themselves, we don’t consider POC to be scholars, we don’t think POC are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people. To return to the Harris quote from above, library collections and spaces have historically kept out Black, Indigenous, People of Color as they were meant to do and continue to do. One only has to look at the most recent incident at the library of my alma mater, Barnard College, where several security guards tried to kick out a Black Columbia student for being Black.”
This insanity did not spring forth ex nihilo. Indeed, this crazy person’s little rant actually outlines how he/she/it “connect[ed] all these dots in a coherent way”, which provides an incite into how these monsters are birthed within the mind of the oh-so-woke Left.
Pictured: White Supremacy in Action
Of note, this would have just stayed sub rosa from most people if it were not for a (now deleted) tweet promoting it from Library Journal.
First, one must recognize that all this is precedented on the worldview that everything in society is based on heirarchical systems of power and privilege.
People are positioned within these systems by their status in society which is tied to their identity and power works through them at all levels through discourses – ways of talking about things and being in the world. It is hard to spot this because it is so natural to us.
— Helen Pluckrose (@HPluckrose) April 21, 2019
It's very much a form of magical thinking. Reading into things for precisely the kind of significance one wants and then finding one's beliefs justified. This is why we called this approach "grievance studies" because its purpose is to start with a grievance & find cause for it.
— Helen Pluckrose (@HPluckrose) April 21, 2019
In the aforementioned rant against libraries, the author demonstrates how the conclusion was reveled through “mind-mapping”, which is like smoking chronic weed laced with bath salts through a cough-syrup bong without the benefits of getting stoned.
During this intermittent stream of conscious incoherence of the author, the following six aspects came together with all the well thought-out rationality of the Munich Agreement:
- Inspiration from the Shinto-inspired “organizing” specialist Marie Kondo who is “anti-clutter”.
- Swedish death cleaning in which those who aren’t lucky enough to have private insurance just give up and prepare for their (White) death.
- An “instruction session” for “Reading and Writing Autobiography” involving “mind-mapping”.
- A “librarian of color” who declared that books written by straight white men are a physical manifestation of white men ideas, like some grimoire involving the Great Old Ones or something.
- The belief that the concept of property was invented by White oppressors in order to enslave and oppress the “noble savages” outside of Europe.
- A group chat with other woke librarians.
Aside from the fact that the anti-clutter/minimalism movement is “classist” and doable only by the already well-off, the constructed argument/excuse is that because most books are written by White men, that those books then perpetuate the Whiteness of those White men, meaning that any library collection (beyond presumable a tiny and vetted “woke” library) is White Supremacism incarnate.
As is become so common-place as to be expected, those who we expect to be curators and keepers of wisdom and knowledge, are instead using their institutionally privileged positions with all the institutional power that comes therewith to instead destroy that knowledge and wisdom because they see said knowledge and wisdom as being but vectors of oppressive power and privilege, and thus the root evil which must be destroyed with any other outcome being a victory for the “systems” of oppression.
While some fools have stated this is a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater (nor bothering to realize that the root problem will just find another host to feed off of), it is a reminder that if we truly want to win back the culture, it is necessary to counter-infiltrate these institutions and professions. That is how you fight back as they fought.
