This past week, (on thursday and friday), my school’s library put on an interesting event. The idea behind it was really neat, actually–people who belonged to a variety of marginalized populations volunteered to make themselves available to answer questions people might have. It’s a cool way of educating folks, and since it’s all volunteer, you don’t run into that horrible thing where privileged people are like “I DEMAND YOU TEACH ME, SINCE I CAN’T TEACH MYSELF”.
But the way it was concepted, and the language they used to advertise it, were…problematic. Extremely so, I thought.
Let me introduce you to The Human Library.
The main page doesn’t get too much into weirdness. It speaks of “people meet[ing] face to face to engage in open conversation about these challenges [ie, discrimination]“. That’s really fantastic! But then you look down a bit and see this:
“Check out the catalogue and come by the Human Library reserve desk in the Williams Coffee area of the McLaughlin Library to reserve a spot with one of our ‘books’!”
And, bam. You aren’t talking about people speaking as equals any more. You are demoting the marginalized people, the educators in this situation, to the status of ‘books’. It gets worse when you actually click through to the ‘catalogue’ page. Because all of a sudden, the dehumanization becomes even more pronounced.
Pre-reservation of the books in the Human Library is now closed. Many of the books still have available timeslots. To check availability of the books and to make a reservation[...]
I’m sorry, what? What happened to ‘people’? What happened to ‘open conversation’? You know what you do with books? You read them. They are a thing which you have total control over. This is something that is–or should be–strikingly different from the way you interact with people, actually!
Like…reducing the people who have come in, who have volunteered their time to educate others and challenge misconceptions, to “books” to be “reserved”, that’s…not quite on. It’s demeaning, dehumanizing, and especially worrisome due to being within a context that is supposed to be about building understanding of marginalized people as human.
The event, as far as I can tell, is supposed to lead to greater empathy for marginalized folk. It’s a worthy goal, and I think the way they’re doing it–face-to-face conversation–is a good one. Too bad it’s totally undermined by the language they are using to talk about the project.
I’d be very curious to know what the representatives of marginalized populations who volunteered for this project thought about the advertising and whether they were consulted about it at all.
The framing of the Human Library project, which I’ve seen done in other places, fascinates and horrifies me. Like you say here, books are things you control. But they’re more than that; books are things you take from. They are things which are designed to be consumed and then set aside. They are things you talk about, not with. They can be the centre of a conversation, but they are still objects.
What’s interesting here is that this is the way in which many people living in marginalised bodies are treated, even by supposed allies; conversations happen around/about us, but not with us. This project kind of seems to be reinforcing the idea that this approach is good ally work.
You’re right: It is incredibly dehumanising.
Yeah, the ‘take from’ is something I meant to mention, but missed. It’s interesting, because the framing seems to flip back and forth–in one breath they’ll be talking about “face-to-face conversations” and “exchange of ideas”, which are awesome! and good! and things we should be aiming for!
And then they start referring to people as books, implying, I guess, that they solely exist for you to, like, SUCTION KNOWLEDGE OUT OF. Which is considerably less cool.
I would too! I thought about signing up for a timeslot/conversation thing, but I didn’t, because a) the idea of “reserving” a person makes me CRINGE SO HARD, and b) I honestly didn’t really have time.
Yikes!
Since their intention seems to be good, I assume it’s a metaphor taken much too far: “We’re a library, and people come here to learn from books, so if we call our specialists ‘Human Books’ then we’ll imply people can learn from them too!”
And then somebody else in the brainstorming session says “How about, just like books, you can reserve them!” and they all love the clever idea, and nobody thinks to say “Wait a second…if we want to put a human face on marginalized groups, maybe we should play up the ‘human’ part instead of the ‘inanimate’ part?”
It does seem like a brilliant idea. I think they just need to have the “I am not a passive object that people can browse and spill mustard on and then throw away” concept explained to them. Gently.