Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

I've been reading the coverage of Maggie Tokuda-Hall's fight with Scholastic over removing references to racism in Love in the Library. It should go without saying that I'm immensely impressed with Tokuda-Hall for making the fight into national news. And it's important to cover the story in light of the ramped up culture war against books and libraries.

It's also true, though, that most of the coverage, such as The New York Times's "Asked to Delete References to Racism From Her Book, an Author Refused", present this story as

an example of how the culture wars behind a surge in book banning in schools has reached publishers

And that's all true but... Scholastic has always been this way, and it's always been extremely damaging. In 2009, they told Lauren Myracle to remove the lesbian parents from Love Ya Bunches. Myracle refused, there was an internet outcry, and Scholastic agreed to sell the book but not in elementary schools. This is Scholastic: they have immense market power in the US, and they use it to force vanilla conservative values down people's throats.

And the current fight is obviously more important. The culture war in the US is existential and life threatening. I get it! Nevertheless, it's annoying to see Scholastic's long-standing love of censorship framed as somehow the fault of Ron De Santis and Greg Abbott. When this nonsense is over, if there's still a children's book public industry left standing in the US, if there's still a US, we need to fight the censorial urges of companies like Scholastic anyway. The GOP is ginning up a culture war out of pure unadulterated awfulness, whereas Scholastic has only ever done it for profit, but that doesn't make it okay.