Week 7 Prompt Response

The CNN Business article about Roxane Gay's protest of Milo Yiannopoulos's book is a good reminder to those of us in positions of power to carefully consider the effects of our actions. Gay and Simon & Schuster both made a public and conscious choice to refuse to indulge Yiannopolous by giving him a platform (S&S went on to deny his book publication). Gay and S&S are a private individual and private corporation, and are well within their rights to protest the book the way they did (and I applaud them for it, actually). But does their protest mean that we as libraries should refuse to purchase the book, which has now been released under an independent publishing label?

I said "those of us in positions of power" earlier because I think that our role as librarians puts us in a position of power: the power to influence the flow of information. Whether we do so in a reference, technical services, or readers' advisory capacity, we have an obligation to critically examine the media and information we make available to our patrons. And we belong to an altogether different type of institution than a publishing house. We exist not to make money and sell books, but to peddle the free exchange of the widest possible variety of information. However, I don't think we can be neutral about it. We need to take a stance on material like Yiannopolous's book, not in a political sense of left or right, but in an informed sense of "this is helpful" or "this is unhelpful." Are there patrons who may benefit from this book if it's part of the collection? Does this book present misinformation or warp reality (more than other books in the collection)? I think we owe it to our patrons to be informed about the items in our collection, especially hot-button ones like Yiannopolous's book.

If some random person self-published a book full of vile and hateful comments about minority groups of people, I wouldn't think twice about excluding it from the library's collection (well, maybe I'd think twice, but certainly not three times). But because of Yiannopolous's celebrity and public recognition, I think we owe it to our patrons to make his book available so they can come to their own conclusions. Of course, we shouldn't add it to the collection in a vacuum--for every Milo Yiannopolous we add to the collection, we should add a Roxane Gay, a Ta-Nehisi Coates, a Zadie Smith, a Susan Sontag, and a Slavoj Žižek. (And we shouldn't stop there - those are just some I could come up with off the top of my head.) Then when we end up doing readers' advisory work, we have a much more varied and robust body of cultural criticism available to someone interested in the topic than just Yiannopolous's book. And if his book is right for the reader we're working with, we have an obligation to let the reader know about it, whatever our personal feelings on the book may be.