Motus Mentis

Over at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher comments on a blog-post by one Sofia Leung, who is “The Teaching And Learning Program Manager at MIT Libraries”.

Ms. Jeung writes:

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of’ that Harris describes in her article. When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,’ it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. Collections are representations of what librarians (or faculty) deem to be authoritative knowledge and as we know, this field and educational institutions, historically, and currently, have been sites of whiteness.

Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries. They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives. In the case of my current place of employment, the university definitely makes money off of the prison industrial complex and the spoils of war. Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicates that we don’t care about what POC think, we don’t care to hear from POC themselves, we don’t consider POC to be scholars, we don’t think POC are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people. To return to the Harris quote from above, library collections and spaces have historically kept out Black, Indigenous, People of Color as they were meant to do and continue to do. One only has to look at the most recent incident at the library of my alma mater, Barnard College, where several security guards tried to kick out a Black Columbia student for being Black.

Mr. Dreher notes:

This woman is not some SJW kook beavering away in the basement of Evergreen State, or a dyspeptic grad student in Grievance Studies. She is an important librarian at MIT. What’s more, the venerable trade publication Library Journal tweeted her blog entry. The blog entry in which she calls for the purging of library collections because white people wrote them and loved them and collected them. Their existence offends her sense of justice.

With her remarks, Ms. Jeung declares herself, in unambiguous terms, to be an enemy of white people and the civilization they created (which includes, of course, the institution hat employs her). That such a person should have any role in the stewardship of a Western university library — that she should have been given power over the transmission, to future generations, of the cultural heritage of a civilization she openly despises — is suicidal insanity. It is what Chiang Kai Shek called “a disease of the heart”.