About Us
The short and sweet version:
We are a network of librarians who are committed to protecting vulnerable members of our communities from violence and intimidation by organized fascistic groups. We created this website so it's easier for people targeted by fascist violence to locate libraries which have explicit policies against these groups using library space to organize, and/or policies against using hate speech and other tactics of intimidation against marginalized people.
The longer version:
Safer Library Spaces was created by the Antifascist Library Network. We are an organized network of librarians, library workers, information professionals, and LIS students in United States with a common goal of creating safer library spaces that center the needs of marginalized and vulnerable communities.
We believe first and foremost that intellectual freedom and information access in libraries is only possible when our communities are safe. Feeling in physical danger when you enter a space, being targeted or harassed, and hearing bigoted slurs all contribute to an enormous barrier to access. In addition, when we allow fascistic ideology to have an unquestioned and unchallenged platform in a community space, this makes it impossible for targeted people to speak freely and express their own ideas. Therefore, to defend the human right to safety, intellectual freedom, and access, we believe it is vital to protect spaces from fascistic organizing.
In The Anatomy of Fascism, historian Robert Paxton defines fascism as:
x
...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion (pg. 218).
In Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, historian Mark Bray states:
The Second World War erupted after the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 (though combat in the Pacific Theater had begun earlier). Over the next half decade, the Nazis and their allies killed roughly two hundred thousand Roma, about two hundred thousand "disabled" people, and thousands of homosexuals, leftists, and other dissidents, while Hitler's "final solution" murdered six million Jews in gas chambers, with firing squads, through hunger and lack of medical treatment in squalid camps and ghettoes, with beatings, by working them to death, and through suicidal despair. Approximately two out of every three Jews on the continent were killed, including some of my relatives.
When we speak about fascism, we must not drift too far away from thinking about the people who collected the hair, the gold teeth, the shoes of those they exterminated. When we speak about anti-fascism, we must not forget that, for many, survival was the physical embodiment of anti-fascism
(pgs. 36-37).
We take care to recognize broader historical definitions and realities of fascism, as well as be specific to what fascistic ideology looks like here and now. As information professionals, it is our duty to make sense of a discourse flooded with misinformation and distortion. Contemporary United States fascism is a unique force, and to identify and protect against it, contextual specificity is vital.
Our definition, for the purposes of our own organizing within the United States library and information science field, and for the purposes of this website, is as follows:
Fascistic behavior includes organizing under the ideals of historic fascists (e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet), intentionally using the symbolism of historic or contemporary white supremacist movements, or openly espousing-- including through the use of well-known dogwhistles-- the ideologies of white supremacy, white nationalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or eugenics.