⁓
When I worked at the Brooklyn Public Library (known locally as the Crooklyn Pubbic Liberry) our Soviet-born alcoholic supervisor shared without reserve her implicit distrust of Blacks and how stupid she thought they were. This extended to her denying services to Black patrons (as she did to Hispanics as well) and calling the then Mayor of New York City (NYC) David Dinkins ”Mayor Dumb-dumb” which she supplemented with a laundry list of complaints. While she justified her position by simply pointing out that in Russia, there were no ‘Blackskis’ as she called them — ”In Russia, we no have these Blackskis”. My initial reaction was disgust.
More than twenty years later, I see where NYC’s newest Black mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by the FBI on serious offenses. As if the disgrace of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s legal troubles and Trumpism were not bad enough, this adds to the city’s ongoing recent problems: urban decay, violent incidents in public transportation that are too numerous to name here but well documented if you read the New York Daily News, confrontations with abundant and unwanted migrants and Adam’s efforts to send them to Canada which were not appreciated on this side of the border, aggressive Venezuelan illegal immigrants who intimidate and threaten the police unabashedly, con artists in Times Square who pose as celebrities to collect money from tourists, hate rallies held by hyperactive terrorist sympathizers who threaten Jews and museum curators alike.
Forgotten in all this is the merger of NYC’s three public library systems which was expected as of 1898, the year the city’s boroughs merged. No, that’s not a typo. All three distinct library systems including Queens’ Public Library, New York Public Library and of course good ol’ Brooklyn Public Library pre-date the merger of New York’s five boroughs into one city 126 years ago, starting New Year’s Day in 1898. They were never merged and there is no sign of their merger on the city’s radar (called ‘agenda’ in the bigger towns). That’s how backwards New York is, still clinging to institutional idiosynchrocies (usually more ‘idio’ than ‘synchrocy’) like three flies preserved in amber from the paper-and-ink era of the 1890s rather than harmonizing the level of public service given to all library users including Blacks, Hispanics, Jews and even Lebanese bloggers.
How does a Black man or Black woman find any respect while living in ‘US & A’, as Borat called it? Sometimes, you almost have to get murdered just to get people to notice you. At least, that’s what happened to George Floyd. Mr. Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis May 25, 2020 and the ensuing torrent of riots and rage upturned the country. The library workers at Free Library of Philadelphia (a grand old venerated institution I learned about in ”liberry skewl”) complained they had been mistreated for years by managers with condescending or otherwise disrespectful attitudes towards Blacks. Bless her heart, former Brooklyn PL Director Siobhan Reardon, having relocated to Philadelphia, heard the call at the Free Library and decided to resign her executive position as a show of support and respect. She never did as much in Brooklyn, New York and nobody ever has secured respect for library workers there. At least Reardon’s actions are a start — for Philadelphia — but how is a wisened Canadian librarian lacking the social prestige of George Floyd to get an even break when he (or she) is being disrespected in any one of New York City’s rinky-tink dysfunctional institutions on the verge of collapse, eh?
Frederick Klein
October 9, 2024