America’s Top Librarian on the Rise of Book Bans
About this episode
Guest host Tressie McMillan Cottom speaks with Emily Drabinski, president of the American Library Association, about libraries as flashpoints of the culture wars. With a record 1,269 book challenges logged in 2022 — disproportionately targeting books by or about LGBTQ people and Black, Indigenous, and other people of color — Drabinski explains the patterns behind the bans and defends children's right to private reading lives. She describes her scholarly work on critical librarianship, showing how classification systems encode power, and reflects on the backlash to her own celebratory 'Marxist lesbian' tweet. Libraries, she argues, are shared public infrastructure — and the attacks aim not just at books but at the institutions themselves.