Meet Emily Drabinski: Self-Professed Marxist and President-Elect of The American Library Association

You may not even know Emily, and yet you'll already be quite familiar

Our largest and most influential association of libraries (our gatekeepers of knowledge) with a membership of 50,000+ just announced its president-elect for the 2023-2024 term: Emily Drabinski. And who is Emily Drabinski? A self-described Marxist who ran on an openly socialist and revolutionary platform and was profiled in Jacobin, of course.

Emily is a lesbian mom too! Don’t want to leave the important stuff out.

Emily is starting to feel familiar, isn’t she? Yep, I know the feeling. What else do we know about this person who will hold a position of great influence in America this next year, one that serves in a top-down modeling, guidance and gatekeeping role for our children? It doesn’t take much poking around to learn a whole lot about Emily…

Drabinski ran what Jacobin magazine called an “openly socialist” campaign, with a platform of “collective power for public good.” Her platform called for “reinvestment in schools, libraries, and communities, economic and racial justice for library workers and the communities in which we live and work, environmental sustainability, and collaboration and cooperation beyond our borders.”

Drabinski’s platform expanded on the need for “Social and economic justice and racial equity,” explaining that this “requires that we make a material difference in the lives of library workers and patrons who have for too long been denied power and opportunity on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, national origin, spoken language, and disability.” As president of the organization, she said, “I will direct resources and opportunities to a diverse cross section of the association and advance a public agenda that puts organizing for justice at the center of library work.

It’s already quite clear what leadership goals will be under Emily's watch, right? She does the opposite of hide it. In fact, check out her own words after her new position was announced:

Well! She deleted that later, of course. Because when sunlight hits this shit it immediately wilts and the ideologues are forced to retreat. Retreat on Twitter, that is. She won’t be “retreating” anywhere in her institution. She runs that domain now.

I walked down her Twitter page (edrabinski) for all of 2mins and any guess what I saw?

Boy, what a surprise. 🙄 How about her website and publications? Think they’ll be The Same Thing?

https://www.emilydrabinski.com/publications/

Does a bear shit in the woods?

Her scholarship has included work on applying queer theory to library cataloging and library spaces, including a 2014 paper in which she critiqued how gender is identified in library cataloging rules, and a 2008 paper in which she explored some implications of a Florida county’s negative response to a library Pride exhibit. While her stated goals for the ALA go beyond just censorship and queer issues, clearly she has thought deeply about these matters and will bring that experience to bear.

“Applying queer theory to library spaces” That's the focus of the person now in charge of our libraries. 🚨

Any guess where Emily lands on this issue? 👇

TIME @TIME

TIME spoke to "Gender Queer" author and illustrator Maia Kobabe on about eir work, the efforts to restrict access to eir writing, and what ey make of the current cultural moment

ti.me‘Gender Queer’ Author ‘Relieved’ After Court Rules Book’s Sale Can’t Be Restricted in Virginia’It’s important to not lose heart,” Maia Kobabe says

These are pages from “Gender Queer”:

That’s the book Time Magazine was profiling up eir. ☝️ The one ideologues like Emily think need to be in our libraries and grade-schools so they can “queer” the spaces and our children. They openly state this; they don’t hide their intentions; and Emily is not a bug, Emily is the code…

The ALA has long championed freedom of expression, helped raise awareness of censorship, and elevated LGBTQ-inclusive books. Drabinski’s election seems not to represent a sea change in that regard. Yet her socialist/Marxist approach clearly resonated with many, suggesting that they feel she can be even more effective in addressing the problems libraries face today, including the record number of challenges to books with LGBTQ and other marginalized characters across the U.S.

You keep turning over rocks and everything just becomes so… familiar. 💡 This is from Emily’s mission statement on her own website:

Man, that is quite an expansive scope and revolutionary track for libraries! How ‘bout that.

We get it, Emily, we get it quite clearly.

I guess it’s at least good to know who is in charge. 🤷‍♂️