Reheated (122)

Presumably, these other middle-school librarians didn’t find anything inapt about 11-year-olds learning about the glories of prostitution and its general awesomeness. Because “high-end escorts” can “pull in half a million dollars a year.” Though it seems to me that an 11-year-old “sex worker” would be an abused child, a child being trafficked. Not an ideal aspiration for the pre-pubescent. But maybe that’s just me and my uptight stuffiness.

Something-something “white supremacy” something-something “privilege.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.

But really, it’s the same doctrinaire horseshit we’ve seen a hundred times. And according to which, the world will be enormously improved by the “abolition of policing in all its forms.” If that isn’t sufficiently unambiguous, our Ivy League librarians insist that their “ultimate goal” is, and I quote, “the complete abolition of law enforcement… everywhere.” Because “a world without policing” will somehow, rather conveniently, be a world without crime.

And because helping people find the books that they’d like to borrow is just too boring and insufficiently high-status for minds such as these.

Ms Leung airs her distaste for “white men ideas” – as if they had been uniform across continents and throughout history – while reminiscing about attending a “white AF conference” two years earlier. I was unsure what the “AF” might refer to and searched for some literary or scholarly explanation. It then occurred to me that a “white AF conference” is, to borrow the woke vernacular, a white as fuck conference. Which is how not-at-all-racist academic librarians convey their thoughts, apparently.

Readers may also wish to ponder the implications of a librarian and self-styled educator, schooled at the University of Washington and Barnard College, New York, and who is offended – something close to enraged – by the existence of “white ideas” and the “so-called ‘knowledge’” of “white dudes.”

Having dismissed as tiresome the entire breadth and history of “white men ideas” – from Ptolemy to Babbage, Tesla to Solzhenitsyn, Turing to Shakespeare – these “white dudes” and their “so-called ‘knowledge’” – Ms Leung then makes clear the kinds of feedback she is willing to entertain: “I still have some thinking to do around this topic, but curious to hear what others think. I’m less interested in hearing that you don’t buy it, so don’t bother with those types of comments.”

That Ms Leung’s overt racial animus and eye-widening ignorance haven’t been mocked out of her or resulted in any kind of censure or career impediment – indeed, quite the opposite – suggests that she’s not entirely without the “privilege” she denounces in others, based solely on their melanin levels.

I’m now trying to imagine a white librarian, employed by MIT, mouthing comparable noises about the history and literature of non-white people, and their obviously malign inclinations, and surviving the day with the approval of their employer, and their peers, and their job, intact.