From Library Babel Fish, November 25, 2014
It was what I expected. All the signs were there. A state of emergency declared days in advance. An unusual grand jury process that was essentially a one-sided trial. Months of peaceful protest followed by a week of officials setting up barriers and laying fuses. A decision to wait until dark before making the official announcement – and that, after nearly ten minutes of rambling self-justification.
The prosecutor (in the Mike Brown shooting case in Ferguson, Missouri) has released documents to justify the lack of indictment, unusual in a grand jury proceeding. Included is testimony from the officer who could not be indicted describing the man he shot and killed: “It looked like a demon.”
It.
It’s impossible to grasp. Yet all of this is to be expected. We know our society is deeply unequal. We know that in many communities the militarized police force serves and protects people of property, not the poor. We live in a messed-up world. It’s tempting to simply say “no words” because really, there are none that can explain any of this.
So I’m going to retreat into one little part of this messed-up world I inhabit to think about one little thing I try to do, though without any compelling proof that it works because, well, I’m old enough that I remember Life magazine photos of the snarling police dogs and the bombed church and the burning cities and I still can’t understand how we are here, again. And again.
The little question I’m retreating to because the others are just too impossible to even frame sensibly right now is “what can academic librarians do to prepare the students we work with for this messed-up world?” We want to help our students think about information – how to interpret it, how to see it in context, how to create it, how to understand the social and cultural practices that influence it. This is not something librarians teach. It’s something we (and the faculty in the disciplines) see as fundamental as breathing – trying to use our minds and hearts to makes sense of the senseless. To decide what to do.
This kind of learning asks a lot of our students. It takes a mind and heart open enough to pay attention to things that are hard and painful and a willingness to avoid the easy answers that put our minds at rest too soon. It takes using our imaginations to see the world from an unfamiliar perspective, to have empathy, to let our assumptions be battered and sometimes discarded along the way.
It means learning history. These events cannot make sense without knowing what Ferguson was like before #Ferguson, without knowing what role race has played in all of American history.
It means understanding economics. The murder of Mike Brown happened in a place where fast food workers went on strike because our cheap hamburgers are subsidized by wages so low that corporations count on their employees receiving federal food assistance. It happened in a city that issued three warrants per household because