SPEAKER_00 0:00

B E H D, the Frequency. Happy Friday, Boulder. Thanks for tuning in to the Boulder Frequency Bonus episode. We hope you're enjoying some more content from us on Fridays. This week we are featuring a film discussion of the documentary The Librarians. Thanks for supporting our show. We appreciate it and we look forward to catching up with you next week.

SPEAKER_02 0:33

So we have been joined by Michelle White, and she appeared briefly in the film. I hope you all noticed one of her comments. So uh Jenni, I wanted to kind of start very briefly before we get into the issues, with just a brief discussion about how you got involved with the film, how things progressed, and how you landed here.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yeah, thank you, and thanks everybody for sticking around. Director-producer Kim A. Snyder and I, and our producing partner Maria Cuomo Cole, we had worked together on a couple of other films all in the space of gun violence and school shootings. Us Kids was Kim's last feature film, and then Death by Numbers was a short that we were working on at the same time as the librarians, but navigating these spaces where there's a lot of trauma at play and where there's a community in the case of gun violence, like kids at school that are being wronged and youth voices not being heard and listened to in the issue. And with the book banning, at first that connection wasn't quite clear, but it ended up being a similar through line for projects that we had worked on together before. I'm grateful that Kim, like many good documentarians, was just up in the middle of the night and watching TV and saw a news report about the Krauss list, the first list that you learn about in the film, and these brave librarians, the first three who you meet, Nancy Joe, Becky, and Carolyn from Texas, who were organizing as the Freedom Fighters, F R E A Freedom Fighters in Texas. And she was like, huh, that's interesting. I'm gonna get in touch with them. Through a series of Zoom meetings, we established that relationship in late 2021, early 2022, and we were able to go to Texas pretty quickly. It seemed like something, it wasn't a historical documentary, it wasn't a research or essay piece, it was something that was happening really fast. And so we got down there in the beginning of 2022. We spent about a year on the ground in Texas, and you kind of see the people that we meet in the order that we meet them, and you're on that road trip with us, and it became clear, especially with folks in Granberry, they were saying, like, don't let this just be a Texas story. Don't let this just be something that's only in the South. We started having Zoom meetings with other librarians in other states, Colorado being one of them. We met Brookie Parks, who's here in Colorado. We met Michelle actually because she had escaped Florida as a librarian. So she's here in Colorado now, but she can share more of her story. We decided in those Zoom meetings in that fire spread section, as we were meeting other librarians, we decided it would not be right to not go to Florida and that Florida had to be part of this story. So we spent about a year uh filming and meeting different librarians and traveling around in Florida. We went to Louisiana from there. Every librarian you meet will introduce you to another librarian. They are a very well-connected community. And Martha Hickson in New Jersey was the last librarian that we met on this kind of Odyssey. And for us, we're based in New York and we're operating in a very kind of liberal bubble. I grew up in Vermont also, and very liberal Bernie Sanders bubble. And when we met Martha and went to a school board meeting with her in New Jersey, where that man is kind of erupting and yelling at her right in her face, it was so clear that not only is this not just a Texas problem, not only is this not just a southern problem, but this is really everywhere. Nowhere is immune from this. It takes so few people to instigate. And that was really important. And I feel like Martha occupies a really important space in the film because she's representing that kind of they're here idea that otherwise I think people would have still been left questioning or feeling immune from what is truly a national attack. So that's that's kind of where we started. We started with the Krauss list just like we started the film with the Krauss list, and it was the product of about three and a half years, late 2021, and we wrapped in 2024, a couple weeks before we had to deliver the film to Sundance, where we premiered last year. But I'd love, Michelle, for you to share a little too when we met you. Where were you and how you had gotten here?

SPEAKER_04 5:39

So we actually had a Zoom call, and I had been in Colorado really just a few weeks, I think, at that point in time, and it was all pretty raw. I gave pretty probably basic information. I always needed to put some things behind me, um, give you my story, and even give you a full family history. We've been in Northwest Florida for about 200 years. I have deep roots in that place. So to pick up and leave and move across the country, that was no small feat. Same for my husband's family. I've been, this is now my year of 29 as a librarian at all ages, K 12, college, public schools, public libraries, private schools. This is my life, it's my passion. And I had gotten to really the pinnacle of school librarianship my last four years, and I was our district library administrator. And up until my last year and a half, it was it was the dream job. We had 40 schools. I I knew all the principals, I knew all my librarians, I knew many of the teachers because I'd been there that was in that district 13 years and worked multiple roles, and I had a good trust, I had a vision. We were going places, and my life got flipped upside down in the spring of 2022. Yeah, 2022. A high school English teacher had a fit because she pulled a book to do a novel study with her class, Into the Wild. And true story. You know, it's a it's a true story. This was his life, and well, it's how they backtrack how he got there. And it has, you're in the backwoods of Alaska. You've got language, you've got crotchetal men, you've got all its real life, and she was appalled that we had this book. Never mind that she had not read the book, she did not have lesson plans. She simply bought the audiobook, passed out the books, and pressed play. So so many things were done wrong in this, but it's our fault because we bought the books. And at that point, our my email is blowing up, our high school language art specialist email is blowing up, the superintendent, the school board, who bought this book, why is this money being spent? This is horrible, on and on and on and on. And when they she wasn't going to take our answers of yes, this actually all of the novel studies went through a process, and she had a point in time in selecting the novels that she could have said no and redlined it and could have been done, or you could have done the process of planning around it. That's a side story. But here we are. And I said at that point, I'm like, if you really feel that you the best option is don't teach it, or give students the opportunity to opt out if that's not going to meet their family's desires, those options were always there. Then the if you feel like this is something that should not be allowed, the only thing you can do is submit a challenge, and it goes through a full review process. That's that was where my life then would pick up as you go through the review and let it play out. We finally had a one-to-one meeting, and I asked her about the book. Do you plan to submit a challenge? And she said, No, it's a fabulous book. My kids love it. I'm just gonna mark out all the dirty words. Okay. So then she but she goes, she's got the bug, and now she's on a hunt. And that's typically a lot of times what happens is they find the one and then they're on the hunt. So the next book was Perks of Being a Wallflower. And that one did go through the full challenge process as a high school senior level novel study. Again, optional, the parents can opt out, you can choose to teach or not teach it. So we went through a process. We have policies, and the first process was a school committee. The school committee passed it. District committee passed it. It goes to the board. The board overrules. Now we've really got the book. That was now June. In August, she submits a hundred challenges. One of them being Tango makes three.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

I think she became one of like the preeminent book challengers in the country. Bruce Fate Freedmen, who Julie talks about, and Vicki Baggett, the villain of Scambia County.

SPEAKER_04 10:54

Whenever I watched the film, I could say yes, yes, yes, yes. We had Bruce Freeman that you saw, that was my Vicky Baggett. She would submit 20, 30, 40 challenges at a time. There's no way to even keep up with our policy. So at the time, our policy was a book stays on the shelf until the review is complete. Parents are having a fit, the board's having a fit, so fine. The policy was changed. If it is a challenge is submitted, is pull from the shelves until the review is done. Then the Bible gets challenged. You see where this is going. And I follow policy. Pull the book. Because that's where I have to live. The only thing I can do is follow policy. I pulled the book, and then I'm the demon. And so then we get a better policy that if it is challenged for sexual content, it is pulled. Better. Not really. So then we are now forming committees that have parent representation, they have teachers, they have administrators, they have community members. And I would meet with them, and this is similar to across the country the process of you. I meet with the committee, and I would lay out here's what the statute actually says. Here is what our policy says. Here is how a parent can opt out. Parent rights, parents have always had that right. Here is the professional review. Here is National Council for Teachers of English, how you could use it in the curriculum. Here is the challenge. I would have all of these pieces laid out, and they read the entire book. And then, so they would take all of that information and the book, and then we would come back in two to three weeks and have the most powerful discussions about the books and the characters. Some would be crying. I mean, it would be there's power in words. The most that would happen with moving books is we might move something from elementary to middle or middle to high. I always said that that's reasonable, that's going to happen. The only book that a committee decided to fully pull was part of the Avatar series. Okay. But then every book that went back to the board, they removed tango next three. New kid could only be in middle schools and high schools. I can't remember the ones at the very first batch that was completely banned. Just gone. And they didn't even make the distinction of not elementary, but maybe lower high. Just gone. And we would be in board meetings until one o'clock in the morning. Because we had the Southern Baptist pastors at the front, you should have a lowest stone on your neck and one in the river. I mean, that would that we had out in the parking lot with the megaphone. And then the left is we had a Methodist minister come and he he was ever one from Jacksonville that you saw. He was just like that. He's like, I'm here with the kids. And he would speak to the power of the words. So we did have those that would come speak out again and again. I didn't know. And at that point, how long can I do this with what I believe is true? And I started after that first night where I saw they all got pulled, then I pulled in, I I contacted our local ACLU person. I contacted the Ministers, I contacted other people in the public, and we had meetings in my house. Like, here's the information that you can share and speak to. But then I also saw statutes being written, then no work coming down. And the next one that passed in the state was House Bill 1069, and it was if a book has sexual content, it could be challenged and removed, and put that as the basis. And depending on what district you're in, some took that as if it has it, it's gone. Other districts still looked at it as because in the statute it has age appropriate. So if you put a district right next door, it sits there unless it's challenged, and then it goes through the court process in my district. I turned in my notice in February, bought a house in March, I got a job in May, and moved in June. I couldn't, I wasn't gonna do it. And then I think I helped you in probably August or September at that point. So being here in Colorado, there are pockets. There's pockets here just on the news Elizabeth School District. They had been sued for removing books, and they decided to not do the final appeal. But there's pockets, but there's so much more openness and acceptance of literature and life experiences that I just wasn't going to get there and I couldn't do anymore.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

It sounds like this is a system in the process of being overwhelmed and not having the right response mechanisms for you guys.

SPEAKER_04 16:43

And it's on purpose. It's on purpose. They they submit the 100 at a time, or Bruce Friedman has got his 3,000 list at a time. Because at that point, trying to do it in the way that restarted a school, if you've got 40 schools when that challenge has been submitted at 40 schools, or you let one school decide for the whole district, that's not right either. So they they overwhelm on purpose. And they have systems in place, it's not book books anymore, but something similar, where they have the split sheets, and they don't read the book. She hadn't read 100 books when she submitted them. But it has where they pull out these passages out of context and they just they ride the system over and over again.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

You haven't seen any elements like that in Colorado's processes, have you? As far as I think just like the default behaviors, if they're gonna overwhelm the system with these appeals, then the knee-jerk reaction to pulled books as opposed to reviewing them.

SPEAKER_04 17:43

I can't say one way or the other, because I haven't I have not seen it. But just seeing what happened in Elizabeth School District, where it's pretty much the same thing of we're just gonna restrict access to these books. So it's not as rampant here. And what happened in Florida was there are now laws that really encourage that behavior. The very first law was written as if anyone in the country could challenge a book in a school in Florida. They did say that you had to be a resident in the state, but you didn't have to be a parent to challenge that book. And I think across the board, the book challengers in Florida, they're not parents, or they're not parents with schools in the system, just like Weston Brown's parents. She homeschooled those kids the whole time. This wasn't a factor for you. And in in Florida, it was all about parental rights.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Parental rights is like you always had the right. Yeah, or like Adrienne says, parental rights for who is always her point. The protocols are in place to protect everybody's parents from having a few make the decision for them. And we see nearby now in Utah they have statewide bans. Some of you may have seen recently in the news one of the books that was added to the state ban list is Wicked. Both banners love a movie adaptation because they don't read the books usually, but they'll see the movie and then they'll say, that movie was a little spicy. We should probably ban the book, Perks of Being a Wallflower movie, into the wild movie, wicked movie. They don't like breathing.

SPEAKER_04 19:40

It's like the full context of the whole story arc. And usually I remember reading Perks of Being a Wallflower. And as I'm reading it, I'm like, really? Did we have to do that? Okay. And by the time I got to the end, I'm like, yeah, you did. You had that, those characters had to do that full journey to get there. And my mom's a retired school librarian, and she had read it, and she called me, and she had been up speaking at all the board meetings, and so she called, she's like, I just don't believe this. I just don't understand. I'm like, oh no. Where are we going with this? She said, There's no there, there. I said exactly, there's no there, there. And after she read um All Boys Aren't Blue, she said, I've learned so much. She said, I don't, I grew up in a time that you you didn't talk about these books.

unknown 20:36

Like, I have so much more understanding. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 20:41

But that's what they're scared of, yeah. That's what they're scared of.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

That is one of the things that I was struck by in the film is a lot of the side that's calling for the book bands just smacks of fear. And I know that this is just a small representation, but that's also the sense I get from a lot of people I talk to when they are talking about censorship. Is that there's a real sense of like fear and almost weakness in what they're trying to fight about.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Yeah, and it's a fear I think that really creates a very dangerous ripple effect where it's like the top-down architecture pedals in fear. If you can successfully create fear among everybody in this room, we would all be more apt to do the thing to stop what we're afraid of, right? Whether we we know exactly what it is or not. But fear mobilizes people, fear keeps a group of people at the ready, so that if you're figuring out what your next agenda item is, like with Vox for Liberty starting with masks and anti vaxxing, and they had to move on to something else to keep that group of parents really mobilized. So the books were the next thing, and then going after education. Going after public education, it's hard to go after and convince everybody that every single teacher in your school is bad. There's a lot of teachers. There's teachers' union in pretty much every state. Teachers are united, teachers are strong. Librarians are sole practitioners. Librarians are the one in the school. And it's a lot easier to attack one person in the school and see that fear that the school is now a place where we should be afraid that something's wrong. Courtney Gore, I think, is such an important person in the film, the school board member who flips. Like when you were saying there's no there there, it's funny because whenever Kim talks about Courtney, she always says, and then she saw there's no there there. But she opens up that space to be someone who was afraid and who was manipulated by fear. We had a really powerful screening recently in Granberry. Monica Brown, the book banning crusader in that town, she actually made a run for school board in the last election cycle in November. And Courtney and Adrian, the hairdresser, who's saying, You're a fascist, you're a fascist. She and Courtney, um completely opposite sides of the aisle, right? They're working together now because they've seen how the town has been manipulated, how people like Courtney have been manipulated to follow out with this bigger agenda coming after the schools. And Courtney was brave enough to say there is no there, there, and I've had, I've seen myself and I'm changing my mind and I'm speaking up about it. And they invited us to go screen there before the election. So we were able to have this amazing town hall conversation, filled an opera house on the town square. Over 270 people came, and they had two days left to vote. Monica lost, which was great. So did the other two book banning candidates. The three who got their seats are pro-education, which is what I would hope is on every school board, but what is not what we're seeing nationally, not in Florida. There's been successes in the last cycle, and it's something we really hope that we're able to effect change with bringing the film and having these kinds of conversations. Like in Michelle's story, I was hearing so often it like came back to the board that the policies were in place, but then when it got to the school board, they could kind of just overrun the policy.

SPEAKER_04 24:44

There's so much power in local politics. We were just talking about it in the back of and especially for schools, it lives in the school board, and and what this is what they have done because they were constantly having to overturn the decisions, they start stacking the committees, and they each school board member got to appoint a person to represent them on the committee, and if there was ever a talk, that person decided. So policies can work for you or against you, and now they have rewritten the rewritten policies like every three or four months. The latest policy, if a book has been banned in another district, it is automatically removed. They just removed 500 books cart launch because of a Bruce Friedman in Clay County had it removed in his district.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

Can I ask the audience? I'm curious, how many people have attended a school board meeting? And then how many people have voted in recent school board elections? You guys have really good turnout here because the national average is only six percent. But I still see half the room who could vote in the next one alongside those who raise their hands. It's only six percent, and I think a big reason is that it takes really active participation before voting to know who's running. Like we can't just vote. If you're somebody who just votes down ballot, you can't just vote down ballot. We have to actually know who the candidates are and what they're interested in, but I can't stress enough. It's the one unifying thing. If I learned anything on the years of working on this project that can actually make a difference, is is the school boards and library boards, city councils. You see Suzette at her county commissioners, is where those decisions were being made in Lanlow. It's one of the things that really deeply affects our everyday lives and kind of sets a culture in a town.

SPEAKER_04 27:02

And Colorado is especially unique because it's so local control. How many of you know that most of our schools in Colorado don't have a school library or a school librarian? Denver public schools, 200 plus schools, they have 12 librarians. My district is we're small, we have I think 12 schools, I'm at three elementary schools. And that's new. They didn't have that.

SPEAKER_02 27:33

What region of Colorado did you land in?

SPEAKER_04 27:35

Windsor. So under four columns. I'm running at three elementary schools, and that is a new position. That's local control. And I was at our state library conference in the fall, and we had a guest speaker from every library. He was powerful. He was congratulating Colorado on a bill that recently passed about what school library policies should have, and they're strong, they're a great foundation. And he's praising us for it. Yes, that's great. Coming from Florida, that's fabulous. And talking about how strong our public library system is. Fabulous. We don't have school libraries. We don't have school libraries. And so I raised my hands and then I started with Florida's AP here. As backwards as Florida was and is, there's a statute that every school must have a library. Not that they had to have a librarian. Then a more recent statute was school library books must be selected by a certified librarian. Doesn't mean you have one in every school, but it started connecting the dots. There's nothing in Colorado about that. So I started digging in, and I was starting to start talking to our state library, and I was like, I'm trying to wrap my head around this. And why we talk about the importance of education and literacy. We see that in the governor's platform.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

This sounds like a perfectly inductive thing for a police to tackle.

SPEAKER_04 29:13

That would be fabulous. And it comes down to local control. And because I was trying to dig through and find the statutes that I would be more familiar with that would line up, and I said, I'm not finding it, she's like, because it's not there.

unknown 29:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 29:40

Well, I want to say welcome to Colorado. I hope you're enjoying it. Welcome all free speech refugees. Should we open this up to some questions from the audience? So, did you get any like threats or backlash from right-wing groups through this documentary at all?

SPEAKER_01 29:56

During filming, we were concerned about that sometimes in certain school board meetings where we were at in rural places late at night in the dark, and it's Kim and I with one other person. We thankfully never had any issues while filming, other than like outbursts like you saw in the that school board meeting, or just kind of loud, aggressive people. Monica with her cell phone, she must have hundreds of pictures of us. I don't know what she does with them. And then afterwards, we also haven't been sure what the threat level is. Martha has active stalkers and people who, even though she's retired now, even though she's moved to a different town, people who have tried to dox her or harass her. Suzette Baker, the librarian in Lanum, she now is working at a hardware store in town and she has people still come in and yell at her at work. Some of the other librarians have faced similar things. Grocery shopping at Walmart, and a woman comes in and is yelling at her about the books. And so a lot of this kind of rage at the librarians, it really has not gone away. In many ways, it's escalated over the last year. And for the film specifically, I don't even want to say his screen name because I don't want him to get any more hits, but there is one man online who loves to say weird things about it, and he only gets like 200 views. I see screenshots, so I don't have to look at his page. But it seems like right now, I hope that we don't walk out tonight and have more of that. It seems like there's just one man online who keeps talking about this being American Library Association propaganda. But otherwise, what has been really heartening since we we launched in theaters in October last year, we've managed to reach over 200 theaters across the country. Iowa, Dallas, Delray, Florida. We even played in Escambia County, Florida, where Michael left. In Iowa, we played in an area where the library, public librarians told me they had panic buttons installed at their desks because they're terrified of physical violence. They've had bomb threats and they're terrified of physical attacks in their libraries. But in that same town, we had a sold-out screening. People are coming together to have these conversations in Pan America, who we work with, who's a great resource for everyone to know about when it comes to censorship and book bans. In their recent report about book banning, they found that 76% of Americans don't agree with it. So you have these few very loud people instigating these challenges, overwhelming, creating fear, shaking up the school, attacking librarians personally, but it's not what everybody wants. And I think that in theaters, too, that's what we've been seeing. And I it's one of the things that in the last year has really inspired me that every time we've hired private security, when we've had some of our librarians who are receiving death threats for a screening, thankfully it's been okay. And those theaters are sold out, and people are coming together and hungry for this conversation. So it's something that gives me hope looking ahead that there are not as many book banners as there are people who believe that censorship is un-American and not right. Have you seen any signs or anticipate public libraries being attacked as well? Yes, definitely. Suzette Baker in Lano County, the Army veteran, who speaks up at the end and says this is not a communist nation, you do not get to decide what we read. Her case is a public library in Lano. We've seen in Alabama public libraries were recently defunded. In Mississippi, there was a mayor who refused funding to a library unless they removed specific materials. And one of the biggest escalations that's happened recently that folks should keep an eye on is when the county commissioners took books out of Suzette's library, a bipartisan group of citizens organized and waged a case, a civil case against them for violating their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. That case went to a judge in Texas who said, put the books back. This is not right. And they referenced the PICO case that you saw in the film where moral objection was not a reason to remove books from a school library. They applied that logic to the public library, which makes sense because grown-ups should be able to make their own decisions. It's a voluntary space. Nobody's assigned those books. That was appealed. It went to the Fifth Circuit Court in Louisiana. In that case, the ruling did something that's dangerous that we've seen in Florida that said the books, because they are paid for with taxpayer money, they are government speech. Government speech has no protection under the First Amendment. So if let's say in the Fifth Circuit, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, if someone in the government said, we don't want to talk about or think about or acknowledge slavery anymore, and we're going to remove every single book to do with slavery, they could do that. The only thing to stop this now in those states would be for the Supreme Court to hear it. But just recently, the Supreme Court said we're not going to hear it. So it has left these three states essentially as censorship states. And three states in our country now where those citizens do not have the same right to access information or the same protection that the information will remain available to them. And the only thing that could change that would be if another circuit, like if South Carolina has had very similar movement, or Utah or another state, if they were to bring a similar case, it would compel the Supreme Court to take this on. But in until that time, unless the public infrastructure, unless the school board, the local library board, the city council, and commissioner, unless the community is strong and saying no things not happening here, they could have their libraries decimated.

SPEAKER_04 36:45

And that's the same case that my prior district is making is government speech. They have two lawsuits sitting there. And the briefing was well, this is every every library gets to decide what they keep and don't keep. Yes, we do. Based on our collection development policy. So then write it in policy, I don't want slavery. Write it in policy, I don't want LGBTQ. Write it in policy, I don't want this. Then you're in compliance. It's wrong, but you're in compliance. That is true collection development. And as a librarian, you look at your policy, you look at the books as a whole, you look at your community, and you buy books to live within that policy. That is how we decide what to bring in and what to take out. Not based on my personal values. And that is what is coming into play as government speech. And yes, they are coming after public libraries. In my prior district, the public library system, they are quietly removing the books.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

The chilling effect, it's something that in the documentary that we saw a lot of, but it's really hard to show. It's hard to show the silent ripple effect and the fear that has been seeded, and the way that censorship like chips away, the more it spreads, the more it chips away at your personal integrity, no matter what we do. I'm sure that many people you may have gone to write a text or a Facebook post about something, and then thought, is that what I want to say and have that written down? I maybe not everybody in this room, I think about that sometimes now, though. I'm like, is that what I want on my phone when I go to the airport tomorrow? Because all of this is being looked at. So librarians are having to make these really tough decisions where if they bring in this new book that they believe should be there, is that gonna be the one book that sparks this? Like everything is fine. So do I want to bring that one book in that's gonna start this fire in my town? And I think we're seeing that in curriculum development, we're seeing it moving up even into universities now, but there's this silent chilling effect that is continuing to take root, or people who are removing things without talking about it.

SPEAKER_03 39:19

How do you make the argument from a basis of shared values? Because until we can somehow align around that, it is unlikely that we seem liable to resolve this question.

SPEAKER_04 39:39

Often it comes down to having choice and having voice in what you read and don't read, and having representation. Trying to get that across for someone who's just not in that headspace is hard. It is very hard. With Vicki Baggett, when I was having that one-on-one conversation with her about Into the Wild, and at the same time I was doing a summer reading program where we had purchased almost$300,000 of books and created a free book fair. Every student walked away with three to four books, and heaven forbid, I had a same-sex book. And she's like, Why? Why would you have that? I just don't understand. This this is just wrong. Why would you have that? And I said, Okay, I'm gonna ask you if this was the same book and it was because there was no sex at all in this book. The only problem was same sex. I said, if this was a male and a female character, would you have a problem with the book? She said, no, not at all. I said, then I I don't know how we can have a conversation. And I just I said, I'm really I'm trying to understand why this is such a line for you, but I know in your school you have these students that this is their representation. I can't take that away because it makes you uncomfortable. And I think we need to be okay being uncomfortable in situations. And I I tried really hard to get the board to understand that's what young adult literature is all about. It wasn't even young adult literature, it wasn't even a thing until the 70s. You had children's books and you had adult books. There wasn't, they weren't seeing themselves as teenagers going through the angst and the identity and figuring out who you are, the language, and I would tell my committee members, I said, if you would walk down a hall and hear it and see it, you're gonna read it. Because this is their life. It has to be their voice and authentic to them. And there is a lot that is happening in those ages that we may not want to see that it is, but they're they're not in a bubble. They live in this world, they have it on their phone, but that's not the argument that we can make. So I don't I I don't know the answer to it, other than having those really frank conversations when you have a chance. And and when it comes down to that, isn't the only issue with this because it makes you uncomfortable. That's not a reason to not have it. And it really just having the open communication is one of the best things that we can do.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

I think too that the attack so often it hasn't actually been about the books, right? The attack on the books has always been about more than the books and the people who they represent. But when it comes down to it, if the conversation is about the books, I think that more often than not, it is a shared American value that we should have freedom of speech and we should have freedom of choice. Nobody likes to be told what to do, and that has been one like common denominator in conversations that I've had. And the fact that Amanda is saying she's lost over 12 students to suicide in her town because they were ostracized and made to feel other, I think that's another thing that usually can bring people together, and that these are voluntary reading materials. When they're talking about books in the libraries, always reminding people that libraries are spaces of free choice and not places of prescribed reading. And those are a few things that I have seen break through whatever noise is clouding the choice of reading material that they're making for themselves or for their household.

SPEAKER_04 43:50

And a good library is gonna have something on the shelf to attend everyone. You're gonna have a book on the files.

SPEAKER_03 44:01

It's an admission statement, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04 44:03

I mean, it is. That's what we do. And there's power in that. I have a family member who is very religious. That's their strong belief. And I don't know if you remember, there was a case where the coach was bringing the team and having prayer on the field. And she said, that's right, that's okay. And so my husband said, okay. We've got the next coach, and he lays down the prayer rug facing east. She said, no, she's like, no, no. She's like, this right here is okay there. Sometimes just understanding that because now you have a certain group empowered that feels empowered, remember you were given that power by these laws and these judges that gave that to you. It could just as easily go the opposite way to you. Are you okay with that? Because you better be. Because that's what you're saying you're okay with because it follows your beliefs. But if you're gonna give that much control and power to one system, you better be okay if it flips the other way. And sometimes that breaks through.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

It's not quite a segue, but one thing that I do advocate for is um the same way that we've kind of entered this culture of snitch lines and hotlines and reporting DEI when we see it, reporting censorship when we see it is also a thing. And there's resources that we have on our website. If folks are interested, just remember three words the librariansfilm, and you're gonna find us on social media or on our website, thelibrariansfilm.com. And we have a resources page that has information about reporting censorship when we see it. Pan America and ALA are gathering that data, and we can't fatigue of it because if we try to push back or we try to protect our library collections, museums, universities, and access to our archives, we need to know where and when it's being erased. Resources there also on having these conversations with people dispelling misinformation as it's being released and different ways of getting engaged in school boards, library boards around the freedom to read. So I hope that you guys will check that out.