Never judge a book by its cover
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Emily Drabinski — is it rude to call her a commie rat?
An organization with an innocuous name like The American Library Association sounds like a harmless, even useful organization, but is it? Well, maybe not, at least, for children
American Library Association president says libraries, public schools need to be ‘sites of socialist organizing’
The American Library Association (ALA) president said Sept. 2 at the Socialism 2023 Conference in Chicago that libraries and public schools need to be sites of socialist organizing.
A self-declared communist, as she described herself in 2022:
And this past September, this:
Emily Drabinski, who also is an associate professor at Queens College [Critical Pedagogy Librarian, CUNY] got in line at the microphone and introduced herself as a librarian during the question-and-answer part of a session called “Freedom to Learn: Black And Asian American Solidarity Against Attacks on Antiracist Education,” according to undercover journalist Karlyn Borysenko.
“I just want to say thank you for bringing up libraries and classroom libraries, but also school libraries of all kinds, public libraries and high educational libraries who have been under attack in similar ways,” Drabinski said, according to an audio recording captured and posted by Borysenko.
“I think your point that public education needs to be a site of socialist organizing,” Drabinski added. “I think libraries really do too ... I haven’t seen that working in libraries. But I think there’s real opportunity here to both connect with happening in public education, what’s happening in libraries, but also we need some help in the libraries. We need to be on the agenda of socialist organizing.”
The panel’s presenters, Wayne Au and Jesse Hagopian, had discussed how to incorporate Critical Race Theory (CRT) into the classroom, calling it “fugitive pedagogy,” according to Borysenko.
Boryseko told Campus Reform she has watched several webinars where Drabinski skirts around the issue of calling libraries “a site of socialist organizing.”
“She’s very smart about what she says publicly, and so to hear her to come right out and lay her agenda on the table is surprising, but not surprising within the context,” Borysenko told Campus Reform.
“In that environment, she was surrounded by socialist activists,” Borysenko told Campus Reform. “She was surrounded by her people, and she didn’t know she was being recorded. For her to say something like that in that type of environment makes complete sense because she thought she was going to have friends that weren’t going to release it to the media. But it was still pretty shocking to me to hear her so blatantly say that she does want libraries to be ‘a site of socialist organizing.’”
Several state libraries in Montana, Texas, Missouri, a local library in Midland, Texas, and another local library in Campbell County, Wyoming, announced this summer that they have left the ALA, the Associated Press reported.
Lawmakers in at least nine other states — Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming — demand similar action, the AP reported.
Lawmakers in these states have left or want to leave the ALA after Drabinski called herself a “Marxist” on X, formerly known as Twitter, in April 2022, and because of the ALA’s defense of books that have LGBTQ and racial themes targeted for censorship.
The claims that banning books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and people of color are at an all-time high and that new restrictions on K-12 school curricula has been disproven, according to The Daily Signal’s analysis of a PEN America report that claims 2,532 books were banned in the 2021 to 2022 school year.
”A more realistic description of the situation is that classic works of literature continue to be available in the libraries of virtually every school district while we have some disagreements over a limited number of graphic works,” according to The Daily Signal’s analysis. These works either contain images of people engaged in sex acts or graphic descriptions of those acts.
Books unable to be found in card catalogs were works like “Gender Queer,” “Flamer,” “Lawn Boy,” “Fun Home,” and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health” that either contain images of people engaged in sex acts or graphic descriptions of those acts.
I firmly support individuals’ freedom of speech, freedom of association, and personal sexual preferences: none of these should be subject to governmental control, but I do object to the indoctrination of children by “progressive” school teachers and librarians. The ALA encourages it, and our own library shares that goal.
Greenwich Library is a member of the ALA. In fact in 2006, the then Director of Greenwich Library, Mario Gonzales, was elected to the ALA’s board of directors. He retired from our library in 2009, but the institution remains a member and still promotes its agenda.
Here’s one program the library ran this past May:
VIRTUAL – Bee Parks and the Hornets Band (Cos Cob Library)
Wednesday, May 19, 4 – 4:45 p.m.
Move and groove with the indie pop-rock band Bee Parks and the Hornets! You’ll sing, dance, and play as you learn to become an honorary bee right from your own hive. Bee Parks and the Hornets combine rockin’ music, puppetry and audience participation to inspire young people to get up and move — both with their feet and in their communities. Their all-original songs promote kindness, equality, self-confidence, social justice, environmental awareness and dancing your heart out! Don’t miss out on this rockin’ good time!
There’s nothing wrong with exposing a child to the troubles of another culture; they might learn some empathy and compassion, but how about a story told from the perspective of, say, a child of the slums who sees his local playground, the only one he can walk to, taken away and converted into a tent camp for those new immigrants? I’m sure no such book exists — no publisher would touch it these days — but it couldn’t be too hard to find an articulate teen willing to come up from the Bronx to tell the tale. It would provide another valuable lesson: actions, no matter how kind they may appear on the surface, have consequences.
At the very least, Greenwich parents might want to closely examine what the library intends to teach before entrusting their child to the tender mercies of local communists.