Sofia Leung, Teaching & Learning Program Manager and Liaison Librarian at MIT.
The Radical Left’s pathological animosity toward Western Civilization and everyone of European descent, dead or alive, is having a destructive impact on our culture and institutions far worse than any single fire.
Rod Dreher yesterday lost his temper over two extreme, but entirely typical, examples.
this below is what it means to have barbarians march through our institutions.
The Teaching And Learning Program Manager at MIT libraries, Sofia Leung (“I believe that social justice work is library work and that we should all be collectively engaged in our liberationâ€), has detected impurity in the stacks. She writes:
If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of†that Harris describes in her article. When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,†it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. Collections are representations of what librarians (or faculty) deem to be authoritative knowledge and as we know, this field and educational institutions, historically, and currently, have been sites of whiteness.
Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries. They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives. In the case of my current place of employment, the university definitely makes money off of the prison industrial complex and the spoils of war. Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicates that we don’t care about what POC think, we don’t care to hear from POC themselves, we don’t consider POC to be scholars, we don’t think POC are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people. To return to the Harris quote from above, library collections and spaces have historically kept out Black, Indigenous, People of Color as they were meant to do and continue to do. One only has to look at the most recent incident at the library of my alma mater, Barnard College, where several security guards tried to kick out a Black Columbia student for being Black.
She hates old books because white people wrote them and loved them. That’s what it amounts to. This woman is not some SJW kook beavering away in the basement of Evergreen State, or a dyspeptic grad student in Grievance Studies. She is an important librarian at MIT. What’s more, the venerable trade publication Library Journal tweeted her blog entry. The blog entry in which she calls for the purging of library collections because white people wrote them and loved them and collected them. Their existence offends her sense of justice.
Do you not see what’s happening here? Those who control a culture’s memory control its people. Sofia “Social Justice Work Is Library Work†Leung wants to throw certain books down the memory hole because they are racially impure. If this catches on, then some sane institutions stand to inherit some valuable books tossed out by woke universities … unless Sofia Leung Thought requires the burning of those whiteness grimoires so they can’t pollute the minds of others ever again.
Why can’t universities simply expand their collections to include books and documents from a greater diversity of writers, scholars, and artists? If Leung was calling for that, who could possibly object? Not me. But she’s not calling for that at all. She’s calling for getting rid of books and documents that incarnate “whiteness,†whatever the hell that is.
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Or how about this thread of SJW responses to the Notre Dame fire compiled by Andy Ngo (of Quillette) on Twitter?
Steve Gregg
If all those books are written by white dudes, isn’t a librarian like Sofia Leung culturally appropriating them?
Mike-SMO
“Cultural Appropiation” misses the point. “Cultural Conquest” is her line of thought.
The work of ages will go to the shredder to make way for some trivia from the shadows, because, “White”. At least there will lots of space for the “struggle sessions”.
Seattle Sam
Even worse, most of those books by white men were written by heterosexuals.
Seattle Sam
I did some research and was shocked to find that none of the books at the University of Tokyo library were written by black people either. In fact they’re almost all Japanese authors. Maybe MIT could arrange to loan her to U of T so she could help them become woke, too.
Anon
So white men who have not ever colonized but by chance have the same skin color as some of those who did colonize must be punished. SO she is openly advocating racism against those not of her race. She is the Asian KKK.
Surellin
Dear Ms. Leung,
Writing as I am from my office in a major university library that makes MIT’s look like puke, I tell you… “SHHHHH!”.
Steven Wilson
That expression is one I associate with 5 year olds who are told to smile for the camera but have no concept of the affect they are presenting. AOC comes to mind as well. These people are on a spectrum of some sort.
gwbnyc
obviously, nothing short of genocide will suffice.
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