Library Decolonization:
Banning the Classics and Promoting Racism

By now, everyone is aware of “cancel culture,” or the current practice of marginalizing and/or silencing anyone who dares speak out against the progressive left’s prevailing dogma. But perhaps more ominous than the censorship of high-profile comedians and celebrities is the less-well-known effort to re-stock and re-catalog our nation’s library shelves.

The term “library decolonization” has been in use since about 2016. “Decolonizing the library” is a deliberate reference to the great age of exploration whereby Western civilization was spread around the globe by brave adventurers and explorers. The goal is to minimize access to classic works, not only by removing books from library shelves, but also by changing library cataloging practices, which will ensure that classic works are less likely to be read by casual inquirers. (See Decolonizing the Library of Congress in this issue of Education Reporter.)

Decolonizing the Library of Congress

Perhaps the most ominous sign of the current ongoing cultural shift in America is what has been called Decolonizing the Catalog, which was described in the November 2021 American Libraries Magazine. The concept was covered in a webinar titled “Decolonizing the Catalog: Antiracist Description Practices from Authority Records to Discovery Layers” by the American Library Association’s Reference and User Services Association.

The general theme of this effort is to persuade libraries, including the Library of Congress (LC), to change the usage of key words in text summaries and subject headings in cataloging books, with the goal of ensuring that titles favored by the progressive left, such as The Bluest Eye (mentioned in Library Decolonization) by Toni Morrison are easier for searchers to locate than less preferred titles.

Newsela: Supporting Common Core Since 2013

Parents may be interested to know, and many likely do not, that a popular school program masquerading as a reading aid might be teaching your children to interpret the news from a leftist point of view.

A little-known EdTech startup company called Newsela was founded by Matthew Gross and Dan Cogan-Drew in 2013, although some sources trace it back to 2012. Newsela supports Common Core’s reading and “English Language Arts” standards, hence the “ela” portion of its name. The fact that it was financed by Silicon Valley money — Zuckerberg Investment Ventures for one — is no surprise. Toss in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as donors and you’ve come full circle, since Gates was a key player in the development of Common Core.

CRT Ushering in Chinese-Style Marxism

In recent years, awareness of the disastrous and harmful doctrine of Critical Race Theory (CRT) has grown across the U.S., and many concerned citizens, parents, and state and local government officials have endeavored to rein it in. Countless news items have shed light on the extensive scope of CRT in American education, government, business, and culture. Now, at least one survivor of the Chinese cultural revolution is warning that CRT is taking America down the same path as Chairman Mao took her native country of China.

Xi Van Fleet is a Chinese American citizen residing in Virginia’s infamous Loudoun County. She is also a mom and a survivor of the Maoist purge in China during the 1960s and 1970s. She was just six years old when the purge began, but she escaped to the U.S. in 1986 at the age of 26.