I returned from Denver, Colorado where I attended ALA’s Midwinter 2018, which was my first time. It’s hard to reflect back on the conference now when so much is happening in the world and when it coincides with the Parkland High School mass shooting where 17 people (mostly children) were killed and more were injured. I keep trying to reflect on one but the horror of war machines exploding outside and inside classrooms in our country keeps reverberating.
With both in mind, I’m reminded of Junot Díaz’s words on Saturday on libraries and their importance in our society and specifically on his life. How instead of getting into trouble he would skip school to go and look for books at his local library. “Who the fuck does that,” Díaz punctuated.
It’s stories like these that remind that me what we do is important because somehow we may be the only escape or resource that a young working class, latinx male can find. Someone from the audience later asked what are some of the things librarians can do to help urban young men from the horror that they might see in neighborhoods as per gangs or bullying. Diaz said (and here I’m paraphrasing based on my own tweet) that we have to defeat the hyper-masculinity that exists in our society.
And maybe in discussing the Parkland, Florida High School shooting we need to discuss not just the guns, more security, or mental health issues. But what about the hypermasculinity that permeates so much in our culture online and in real life? Where males feel entitled to feed their anger and frustration and unleash it the only way they’ve been taught.
Nikolas Cruz, the shooter, and killer in Florida, is nineteen years old. He was probably born in 1999, the year of Columbine mass shooting. Two years later 9/11 blew up the skies of New York, DC, and Pennsylvania. The United States has been in continual wars since then. Shooting after shooting, drone strike after drone strike, enhanced surveillance, and fully armored police forces who freely shoot men of color, especially black . . . violence and violent culture have been the solutions to conflicts.
But somehow, when we discuss hypermasculinity we only refer it to Black or Latin men. The gang culture, the machismo, the bullying on the streets ‘in da ‘hood’. And if you look up hypermasculinity in google, you’ll see images of black men pop up quite like the same searches that Safiya Noble produced while researching searching black girls in for Algorithms of Oppression. (IEEE History please don’t, Just Don’t).
Why don’t we talk about hypermasculinity when it’s expressed in White men, white supremacist or not. It’s infected our society that has forgotten to teach kindness, collectivity, love. Instead, it’s everyone’s out for themselves, “I gotta do what I gotta do.” And quietly, drone strike you in the middle of the night for national interests abroad. Hypermasculinity is now celebrated and validated because of the Trump Administration and his tough guy, eat steak with ketchup, sexual predator treatment of women, deporting immigrant ways.
We've seen how the movement of capital has left many without a home, a job, or a sense of being. Advancements in technology have not brought us closer together but have isolated us more by the drive to not make these technologies more social but make them more profitable. Racism and sexism are the cleverest of tools ever created to keep humans apart from recognizing their class solidarities. Shit has intensified.
Can libraries counteract hypermasculinity? Of course, because we in the library world do every day. But we must express our values consciously so that we fight against the violent individualism of the market economy. Fighting imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy is the struggle many of us are engaged in and much more are needed. The opportunities are there at the reference desk, in our collections, online chatting, and in our events. We're here to express hey we're here for you, if you have some questions, we can help and if we don't have answers, let's figure them out.
In “the Are Libraries Neutral” debate, R. David Lankes said, “libraries are about communities trying to find meaning.” That’s what Junot Díaz found in his public library in Old Bridge, New Jersey by finding a librarian who was there to help him find the information he was searching in the shared collection of his community.
It's much too simple to say that a killer like Cruz needed a library but what he did need was a society that cares (mental health or health care, a society that cherishes life over freedom of gun ownership, an anti-racist, anti-sexist society just to start). Luckily, libraries still stand as an expression of that. We're hopefully here to try to find meaning in a mad world.
No comments:
Post a Comment