Things I Never Learned in Library School: That Time Someone Asked for Help Printing out Swastikas

These are charged political times. A little over a week ago, a group of white supremacists walked down the streets of an American town carrying Nazi flags. As a counter-protestor, Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist who drove his car into the crowd. The events of Charlottesville are being discussed everywhere, as they should be. But I was in no way prepared for the text I got from my co-worker the other day: I just had to help an older gentleman print off a bunch of swastikas.

My knee jerk reaction was: Wait – do we have to do that? Followed by, I imagine it’s a 1st Amendment issue. It’s a question I haven’t really stopped thinking about in the current context. And make no mistake, context is everything.

So I went to my friends on Twitter to get a feel for the crowd and the responses ranged from everything to:

1. No, I would no do that.

2. Yes, I would do that because I am the only white person at work and I would not want to make a poc co-worker be put in that position.

3. Yes, I would do that because it’s a free speech issue.

4. No, I would not do that because hate speech is not protected speech.

5. Can you ask them why they need it? (The answer to this question is that no, we can not. We don’t ask patrons why the are requesting the information they are requesting. It crosses important ethical boundaries regarding the freedom to seek information without judgment.)

Let me be clear here, my co-worker did help this patron. And I think in the end, it was probably the right thing to do from a librarian standpoint. And it’s not the first or last time a librarian has had to step outside of their comfort zone to help a patron. For example, I have had to hand many a patron the book Baby Wise which advocates baby training in a way that has been linked to the possible death of some babies. I personally loathe and detest those books, but I still have to help patrons find them in the library.

As a private citizen, I am staunchly anti-Nazi and white supremacy. But what are the professional boundaries we must follow? I have a personal answer to this question, but I am not sure what my administration would say. It’s not a conversation we’ve ever had to have before in our library. And make no mistake, Nazi flags and symbols are hate speech. They are symbols used by people to denote the superiority of the white race. Nazis literally support at a minimum the violation of the civil rights of people of color, people of non-Christian faiths, women and people with disabilities. In the extreme, they are advocating for genocide. These symbols make many people in our community unsafe and legitimately terrified, especially when they are used for anything other than educational purposes such as a lecture on these are what Nazi symbols look like and mean.

But as I mentioned, we have no way of knowing what a patron’s intent is. And does intent matter?

In many other countries, Nazi symbols are explicitly outlawed. That is not the case here in the United States.

This is entirely new territory for me, and I have been a librarian for almost 25 years now. It’s a question I’m personally wrestling with. And I am going to my administration to ask for clarification on what any future actions moving forward should be. I think we should all be having these discussions as we move forward and get all staff on the same page.

Filed under: Things I Never Learned in Library School