Irreversible Damage? Part One

In the 1970s, as Thatcherism constructed a right-wing “authoritarian populist” political bloc out of various ideological currents that had developed out of the combined social and economic crisis at the end of the 1960s and into the 70s, Stuart Hall criticized the media for their role in the construction of a “moral panic” around race and immigration that gave “ordinary people” someone to blame for the crisis, and a useful outlet for pent-up violence and aggression as the restructuring of neoliberal austerity picked up the pace.

The media, through the questions they asked, the language they used, the people they interviewed, and the way they constructed the interviews and debates, set up a view of race and immigration along a single set of problems: by starting with “the number of immigrants in the UK is too high, discuss” (the Enoch Powell position which came to prominence in his 1968 “rivers of blood speech”), the media set the terms of the debate in a way that prevented anti-racist activists from getting at other perspectives, other problems, other ways of seeing the changing face of Britain.

Immigrants, particularly Black West Indians, were set up as a demonized Other, legitimate targets of far-right violence and increasingly militarized police. People of colour were placed into a particular social position in order to soak up the tensions, contradictions, and violence of the enforced changes to the welfare state being pushed through, first by the Labour party, then by the Thatcherite conservatives. Hall describes all this in terms extremely familiar to anyone who has lived through the effects of the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, and in particularly the last five years.

But, Hall notes, Powell himself astutely saw that the problem was not race, the problem was the destabilization of the capitalist world at the end of the 1960s, for which race became representative. People of colour stood in for everything that was wrong with the crisis-ridden UK: “race is the prism through which British people are called upon to to ‘live through,’ to understand and then to deal with crisis conditions”. For Powell, Hall notes, "“the real problem was the great liberal conspiracy, inside government and the media, which held ordinary people up for ransom, making them fearful to speak the truth for fear of being called ‘racialist’, and ‘literally made to say black is white”. This too should sound familiar in the post-2016 Trumpian/Covidian days. Hall dates the origins of a truly “home-made” British racism (as opposed to the more widespread racism of settler-colonial capitalism at large) with the construction of anti-Black discourse in the 1970s.

Today, in addition to the Others constructed in the 1970s and 1980s (particularly Indigenous and Black people), trans people have been constructed as a quintessential Other, the target of new social tensions and contradictions, a new prism through which the anger and violence unleashed by social and economic crisis can be aimed at a defenseless target and thus redirected from the real architects of the changing (dying?) world: capital and the state. A secondary effect of this demonization is the increased militarization not only of the police but of public spaces themselves. The obscene equipment of violence used by police at Ferguson and in the BlackLivesMatter protests of 2020 are mirrored in the RCMP deployments against Indigenous activists in Canada and the US and - closer to home - in the police consultations into increased security at Winnipeg Public Library and the policing of peaceful protest at Toronto Public Library and elsewhere. The moral panic constructed by the media and the state - and, yes, libraries - has the effect of increasing the “law and order”-ness of contemporary society. The more an established “enemy” threatens the common-sense home truths of an ignorant electorate, the more policing, security, surveillance, and state violence can be deployed throughout “civil society” without challenge.

The CFLA Intellectual Freedom committee participates in this construction and maintenance of a moral panic centred around a demonized trans Other, as well as the increasing power of Law and Order in crisis-ridden Canadian society. The IF committee is selective - as it has to be - about which issues it concerns itself. It speaks out against any challenge to “gender critical” or transmisic content, but is silent with respect to the very real Intellectual Freedom violations at Winnipeg Public Library and Halifax Public Library. By constantly referring to the Charter of Rights and the criminal code, IF discourse in Canada automatically grounds any discussion of trans issues in criminality, law, and the police. Any attempt to challenge transmisic views is “always already” situated with respect to potential charter violations, and therefore always acts under the shadow of police violence.

In their recent statement applauding public libraries for resisting challenges to Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage - a book which sums up the transmisic moral panic in its subtitle - the CFLA IF committee participates directly in the construction of the same kind of moral panic aimed at people of colour in the UK in the 1970s. In the next blog post, I want to dig into some of the work that statement is doing to construct this moral panic. In particular, I want to look at the censorship angle (the idea that, by not including a book in their collection, libraries are silencing or cancelling an author through prior restraint), the question of liberal rights as inherently conservative and used as a mechanism to limit social activism, and the question of selection/selectivity, which has been a problem for Intellectual Freedom since the Berninghausen Debate of the 1970s.

What I want to end with here, however, is an avowal that libraries - like the media in Hall’s time - need to have a better understanding of the discursive and ideological role they are playing in people’s lives. We are only now seeing wider - but by no means hegemonic - acceptance of the fact that neutrality is impossible; that alone has taken the better part of thirty years to achieve. But that’s only the first hurdle; the next is to recognize and to really understand the role libraries play as signifying or representational systems for our users, enabling them to construct an ideology necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the social order: in the current conjuncture, this includes transmisia as a major element. Needless to say, all of this is very far beyond the limits of the hegemonic discourse of Intellectual Freedom, and beyond the capacity of the CFLA IF committee to deal with.