Unruly Conversations

Recently my workplace administration announced that staff needed to stop doing a particular thing. It doesn’t really matter what the thing is; it’s pretty inside baseball and not very interesting to non-librarians. It is however a thing that all staff do every day and is a regular part of workflow. Not doing it creates a lot more work for a lot more people.  The reason offered by admin for not doing it anymore came down to sometimes some staff do the thing wrong, and when they do it creates work for other staff and delays for customers. 

The reaction against the directive has been strong and my workplace is still sorting it out. After 27 years working in libraries though, I immediately recognized what had happened.  Instead of speaking directly with individuals who were doing the thing wrong and telling them to stop, the library decided to just make a blanket rule that no one could do the thing anymore.  It’s not the first time I’ve seen this. I’ve even been guilty of doing it myself. 

The truth is human beings don’t like having difficult conversations and human beings do like making rules.  Libraries really like making rules, especially ones we can put on a big poster or hand out to people in flier form.  Instead of having to say to someone “You need to stop sleeping in the library” you hand them a flier.  It’s not me presenting this information, sir, it’s the flier.  The flier says you have to stop doing this. I’m as much a victim of this flier as you, sir. 

I’ve been thinking about using rules to avoid conversation a lot lately in the face of the recent epidemic of book banning and curriculum policing.  You may think this is a bit of a jump, but bear with me. Every book being banned right now has one thing in common: they all cover topics that certain parents don’t want to discuss with their kids.  Firing staff and banning kids from seeing Renaissance Art is parents insisting on a rule instead of having a conversation with their child about what a penis is. 

I actually have a fair amount of experience with this parental impulse. For many years I was responsible for selecting all the movies and music in my library’s collection.  And that meant I was also responsible for answering letters from customers who were angry about movies or music they had found in our collection. Many of those letters came from parents or grandparents. Many of them insisted that the item that offended them needed to be removed or have a label that warns parents that Here Be Dragons! And nekkid people! And swears!

My job was a diplomatic one. I needed to let the unhappy person know ultimately that what they wanted wasn’t going to happen. The item was in the collection because we’d deemed it had value and interest to our customers. We don’t label things because where to start? This family doesn’t want their child to see nudity. That family doesn’t want their children to see people eating meat. The family down the street doesn’t want anything that suggests evolution is real.  There isn’t a warning label on earth that can adequately communicate the ways in which you might be offended by something.  And if there was, we’d have to put it on every item that we own. 

Reading hundreds of letters over the years made it clear that often what was upsetting to the letter writer was often just the surprise of it.  One lady wrote in horror that she had checked out a DVD “about Barbie” only to find it was a documentary about Barbie FANS, which is a very different sort of film involving strippers and gay people and drag queens and plenty of other people too from all walks of life who bond through their shared obsession with Barbie.

I obviously have all my own feelings about this, but I understand being an adult suddenly confronted with having to have a conversation with a child about something you weren’t prepared to discuss.  I remember being a college student home on break when my then three-year-old sister asked me how the baby in our neighbor Melanie’s belly was going to get out.  I was frozen. I didn’t know what my parents did or didn’t want her to know about the birds and the bees. My brain was spiraling in panic. Then my sister scrunched up her face and raised her hands up like she was a squirrel and said “Will it nibble its way out?”  I laughed and told her that we should go find out from Mom and that was that. 

But we’re almost 40 years later and I still remember that initial feeling that if I didn’t say the right thing would ruin my sister’s life, enrage my parents and maybe disappear into a hole in the ground.  And even though I’m not a parent, I can certainly imagine that, for the woman complaining about the Barbie DVD, having a conversation about homosexuality wasn’t in her plan for the day. I can sympathize even if I personally believe a conversation about homosexuality should not be a big deal. But her solution, asking the library to remove the film from the collection, is where we start to have big problems.

There were lots of options available to the letter writer. She could have actually read the DVD box, which very clearly describes what the documentary is about. She could have said well, that’s on me. I’ll be more observant about what my kids check out.  More importantly she could have had an uncomfortable-to-her conversation.  She could have explained as much or as little about the content of the documentary as she was comfortable.  She could have navigated her child’s “why” questions.  She could have accepted that the world throws things at us when we don’t expect, and a parent sometimes just has to roll with it.

What she did instead is blame the library. She blamed the library for having the movie. She blamed the library for not putting a huge label on it that said WARNING THERE ARE GAYS JUST HANGING OUT BEING GAY IN PUBLIC AS IF THEY ARE JUST NORMAL PEOPLE IN THIS FILM. She demanded the library remove the film to save other children from seeing it, although it seemed as if what she really wanted was to save other parents from having to have that uncomfortable-to-them conversation. 

I responded to hundreds of letters over the years expressing some version of this story. So many of them boiled down to “My child saw or heard this thing and now I have to talk with them about something I don’t want to talk about. How dare you?” As I see states banning everything from the accurate teaching of the history of the American chattel slavery system to girls acknowledging they have periods to that big ol’ nekkid David statue what I see is whole swaths of society that don’t want to have real honest conversations with children about their beliefs.

Talking with kids about things is really one of the main jobs of a parent.  Sometimes it’s delightful, and sometimes it’s a drag. It’s never straightforward. They’re always asking pesky follow up questions. Most kids are lucky to survive their “WHYYYYYYY” phase.  (Why? Because it’s aggravating. What’s aggravating? This. This is aggravating.) Most conversations are about pretty basic stuff, like what’s for dinner, why can’t we have a dog and can I please tell you 1001 facts about Minecraft? 

There’s also more complicated stuff, like “What is death”? “What is God?” “What do you mean we’re going to eat Henrietta the chicken?” “Why is that person sleeping outside?” These are hard questions and they don’t have easy or pat answers. Any conversation one has with their child about these topics is really just the beginning of a lifelong conversation. Good parents are willing to have these conversations with their children, and embrace the opportunity to share their own beliefs and values.

Every idea that bothers your sensibility as a parent is an opportunity for a conversation with your child; a conversation about your beliefs, and the world view you’d like to share with your child.  When I see communities going to such great lengths to avoid these conversations with their children, I have to wonder why?  Are they so insecure in their own beliefs and values they can’t communicate them to a child? 

The American Library Association reported 2,571 different books were targeted for banning in 2022, the highest number of challenges ever recorded by the Association.  By comparison in 2021, 1,858 titles were targeted, which was considered high at the time.  Many of these banning attempts are backed by organized groups which provide lists of books for people to challenge.  These groups do an excellent job of tapping into parents’ fear that books will show their children a world parents don’t want them to see. Except the world these books show is the world; the world in which their children live and will presumably grow up into adulthood. 

These bans against books and ideas assume that children are empty vessels just awaiting knowledge to be poured into them.  If you can completely control every bit of knowledge imparted to them, they will grow up perfect and unblemished by “evil thoughts”.  But children aren’t empty vessels. They come with their own minds, feelings and orientations.  Removing all mention of LGBTQ people and issues from a child’s life won’t make a gay or trans child any less gay or trans. It will make them feel isolated and alone. It will trigger depression and suicidality.  We know this to be true because for years, maybe centuries, this was the reality of life for LGBTQ people.  

The same goes for all topics that are triggering conservatives right now.  Florida’s current desire to ban any discussion of menstruation in schools will not stop girls from menstruating. It will create an environment of confusion and secrecy around a perfectly normal biological function that happens to 50% of the population.  How do you internalize that as a child entering puberty? This thing that is happening to me is SO HORRIBLE it cannot even be spoken of. It alienates young women from themselves, from their own bodies, and makes them vulnerable to all kinds of misinformation. 

Flashback to another memory of mine. I was a kid, maybe 9 years old, and I had received the best Christmas present EVAH! It was the soundtrack to the movie Grease. We were spending that Christmas at my great aunt’s house, and she had stuck me in an upstairs room that had a record player so I could Grease out to my heart’s content.  After listening to one of the songs, Beauty School Drop Out, I found myself playing it again.  There was something in it that confused me. The second listen didn’t help. So I walked out to the stairwell and yelled “Moooom!” “Yes, what is it?” asked Mom. “What’s a HOOKER?”

I heard the sharp intake of breath. Then I heard my Great Aunt Bunty start to laugh.  My Mom answered “Um, I will tell you later.”  And, she did come up in a bit and ask me where I’d heard the word. I explained about the sad Beauty School Dropout and that no one would come to her unless they were a hooker.  And my Mom told me what a hooker was.  There was no fuss. No pulling of hair or destroying the record. No washing my mouth out with soap. No starting a letter writing campaign to the movie studio. And, this is perhaps the key takeaway, despite repeated listening to the Grease soundtrack album in my childhood I did not grow up to be a hooker, despite knowing what it was. 

Every parent has the right to teach their children their world view.  Every child has the right to grow into an adult with their own world view.  It’s not easy.  A parent may well not want to discuss our country’s history of slavery and systemic racism.  It’s hard, and sad, and enraging and it cannot be told simply. But it is a reality of the world in which we live, and sometimes the job of a parent is hard.  A desire to have the state step in and ban any topic one would prefer not discussing with one’s child is madness, yet here we are.  It is the worst kind of dereliction of duty as a citizen and a parent.