I'm a Black Librarian. We're Being Threatened
criminalize librarians for putting certain books on the shelves. Nuisance lawsuits and fights over book bans are draining librarians' time, energy, and resources.Nobody becomes a librarian to become a pawn in the culture wars.
But from book bans to bomb threats, we librarians are on the front lines of critical battles over who gets to control information.The pursuit of happiness goes hand in hand with the pursuit of knowledge and information, which, in turn, is central to what libraries are all about.
This goes to the heart of our jobs as librarians. We will keep up the fight, because it is access to information, not censorship, that fuels a healthy democracy.I am proud to be a librarian—and rare.
Less than 7 percent of librarians in the U.S. are Black. For Black librarians like me, libraries also symbolize the literacy that was denied to so many of our ancestors.For our enslaved forebears, something as fundamental as learning to read was illegal and dangerous, but they did it anyway.
