Amherst Library Won’t Move Tintin In The Congo

This seems a fairly self-explanatory article: a library in Amherst won't move Tintin In The Congo from the kids' section to another section or into a non-section filing strategy. On the one hand, parents have complained that the book is super-racist because, I'm guessing, that book has super-racist stuff in it. On the other hand, the librarian points out difficulties in moving material out of sections due to complaints because of slippery-slope notions. It's hard not to see both sides of this, depending on one's personal constellation of beliefs and values. I know that when I was a kid I read a bunch of weird stuff in the kids section of my library because it was available to me in the kids section of the library, so there is sort of imprimatur provided to material just by virtue of something being on the shelves of certain sections of a library. It's almost more an indictment of our inability to stick to principles and not press an advantage to whatever purpose, because I think that's a legitimate fear by the librarians that you get a bit of removal fever, even as, again: that book's imagery is awful and really hard to contextualize in a way that doesn't overwhelm anything else about it.

It's an interesting issue, deeply problematic, and one with no end in sight as a lot of 20th Century material becomes canonized entertainment. My hunch is that the eventual solution is to directly engage the problematic material in some way, but I think we're a long way from getting there.
 
posted 4:15 pm PST | Permalink
 

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