 There has been a lot of diversity in different ways on the stage today, but there are a lot of perspectives that are not represented, and I think it just bears noting, for instance, that I don't think we have anyone from the Latina population on the stage today. So we're going to depend on audience members to bring your experiences and questions up as well. So we've had a little bit of an intro, and I'm going to just kind of start with an opener question that's going to allow just whoever wants to jump in first can go first. But I thought I'd start with the question that was originally proposed to the panel to kind of get the juices flowing. It's a little bit of a tweak on the title there, which was specifically, how do librarians evaluate books for cultural accuracy and authenticity? And there's a couple of different ways you can take that question. If you actually ask how do we do this as librarians, you might ask, well, what has been the status quo methodology by which we select books? And that method of selection can very easily fall into a gatekeeping model, although that may not have been its original intent. For efficiency, when we're selecting books for library, we rely on trusting review sources, trusting the editorial and acquisitions processes of big business publishing. And I think we've already talked today about those industries as being inherently problematic while maintaining a veneer of neutrality. We could also take this question to say how could we evaluate books for cultural accuracy and authenticity, as Matali has just been prompting us to think about. And I think that's probably how the question was actually intended. How especially considering that librarianship is predominantly white and female, how can white female librarians evaluate the accuracy and authenticity of a book about an underrepresented community? And how can we, as a community of colleagues, inform each other in that process? So each of us might want to take that question in a totally different direction, and I welcome us to do that. Is there anybody who would like to start first? I should have arranged that before we got up on stage. Okay, I'll start. I'll be brave. Okay, so I think one of the things we heard a lot today was the word privilege. And not only, it starts not only at the beginning of the publishing process, but it starts with us, actually. Not only who we're comprised of, but how we view the world. So I would challenge all of us to think about when you do your selection, what do you bring with you? Who are you inside and how do you think about things? And as a director, I can tell you that one of the things that's the hardest for me to do is to stay out of that process and let my team do it and invest in them. No, that's true. But it's also to give them a little bit of my voice and my vision on how I'd like to see it done, what I want them to include. Which means, actually, if you go back to your tech services division, selection begins there, but it also ends there. So one of the things that happened, how long do your international language books sit there on the shelf waiting to go back out? How long does it take? Why are the things that are rushed not representing our own people within the community? If you're going to be buying for 15 or 20 branches, do you only buy four copies that represent a certain community because you believe they go there? What does that neighborhood privilege kind of look like for you? So I want you to think about that as an investment in your community because we all have our own filters that we bring as individuals. Unfortunately, we can't have maybe 20 people, i.e. I had 20 people, half my staff was spending 50% of their time doing selection. I can't afford that. We need to be on the floor because part of our service is marketing those wonderful materials to the community at large and doing community outreach and programming. But what does that mean? So that means that I have to invest maybe two or three people or maybe even five people to do that very valuable and very strongly contributive mechanism of selecting and deselecting. And what does that really look like? So thankfully, we have someone who speaks three different languages who actually has a cadre of other people who think like she does, who she relies on quite a bit for that selective thinking. But even I know when I worked in Oakland and Berkeley and Stockton, we did the same thing, which is I said, hey, how about taking a group of community people with you when you go shopping? How about asking your local teens to actually help in the selection of the materials? So it's not just valid from our voice and from our point of view, but from the community as a whole. And when you think about it, what different tools and filters do you bring with you when you go into that? Knowing full well that the marketing and all of those other things that we heard about today come from that position of privilege. And unless we're lucky enough to have our wonderful members who are doing a lot of self publishing. We also remember, I mean when she talked about indie publishing earlier, that resonated with a lot of us. A lot of us still have that hang up, right? We remember when there was a lot of junk being published out there. I think that's changed a lot, but we have our own filters when we come to that as a whole. So not only who was selecting, who do you trust? Does it have to be a start review every time? No. Where are you getting your reviews from? Is it from the community? Is it from different resources? Is it going to the folks like Junco Yacota and USBBY and CCBC and Rudeen and a lot of the other members that are very... And who's going to replace those individuals? I am so excited to hear that ACL has that new, maybe not so new, but a different way of doing reviews that look deeply into the character. But I have to tell you that language is something that when I was here 20 years ago, we were talking about that. So it's come full circle that we need to do something about it and step up to it. Well, as Petty's alluded to with, I think at various public libraries, there's been more of a trend toward centralized selection. And in some cases, that also means more of a reliance on some of the traditional published book reviews. One of the samples on the slide I had was considering a book, The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinx. When the reviews came out, it was starred in Publishers Weekly. Bookless said it was Laugh Out Loud Funny. SLJ said it was woody and humorous. And BCCB considered it a first-rate comedy. Let's see if she can get the slide. So I was reading along in the book and then I got to page 19. Yes, I was shocked too because I did not see this coming. It was one paragraph out of a 300-something page book. So I can understand that in some ways that if you've got a very brief review, there are only certain things that would be reflected or not. But then I got to this section where the character is reminiscing about the good old days of slavery and it gets worse to me. And there is a lot of questions like presumably the editor thought this was funny. And if so, who were they envisioning as the audience for this book? And feeling badly like thinking, so if there is an African-American teen who picked up this book thinking that it was going to be really funny and enjoyable. And then this comes up very early. And given that this is just one example, what are these other things that we're not necessarily seeing or knowing? If the stereotypes are perhaps more subtle, they might not even be reflected in some of the reviews. Well, in this case, though, Kazmer Kuzhinski, or whatever his name is, is an evil guy. The one who's saying he's a creep. So he's actually saying this thing to reinforce his creepiness. I don't know. But it's at the expense of an old community of people. Right. Is that being used and exploited? Interesting. Well, I can a couple of things. I started reviewing for Horn Book in the 90s and calling attention to stereotypes. And that review, it was a white boy playing Indian. And that was deemed not a significant part of the book. And my criticism was deemed extra literary for a book that was a journal that reviews literary merits of a book. So that review, that book was reassigned. Later, there was a mission book that I was assigned to review. And I pointed out that, you know, actually the history isn't like this. And there's a lot of research coming out about that, that I was reading as a professor or then a student who became a professor in American Indian studies. That there's material that the people who wrote this book and edited the book could have used so that the idea of missions as a good thing for native people would not be perpetuated as we still see in so much of children's books today. So that book got reassigned as well. Also deemed as not appropriate criticism. So I don't review for Horn Book anymore. I do my own reviewing, but I'm also using social media and ways to try to help people see the things that I see and that I want to share. So I did a SLJ reviewer training three weeks ago. SLJ is offering the reviewers an online training program. So I did that for them and coming up in middle of June, is that when I'm doing this? I think so. Yeah. An ALSC webinar. So I think if you're a member of that, I'm not sure what the charges are, but that's going to be online. And you can watch it and it'll be archived and you can look that and it's about collection development and seeing the problems that I see. So there are a lot of problems. It's free. It's free. Okay. And this one paragraph, this idea that it's one paragraph or that it's a bad guy saying it so you should know it. It's not one paragraph for most of the peoples of this country who are misrepresented. It is one paragraph in this book and one in this one and one in this one. Starting with the board books and going all the way up to the novels that you librarians read from schnooks or grocery stores or wherever you buy your bodice rippers. So it's just, it's everywhere. It's not one paragraph and it's easy to dismiss it or to say it's just that one paragraph. And the rest of the book is about something that's so important. I think we should just ignore that part that you don't like. And I think that when we do that, we are actually contributing to that cycle of misrepresentation that just goes unchecked and in going unchecked is just going to keep on going. So reviewing is very important and needs to be done better. And I'm glad to hear of examples where librarians in this area have been pulling books like Indian in the cupboard out of circulation and using the tools available to them to try and have a better collection for their patrons. Well, I have to say I'm so glad there's a Debbie Reese around. I think that just even having a Debbie Reese out there forces those of us who create books to write in a different way. You know, we have to worry about what Debbie Reese is going to say. And that is such a gift to the community because before people like people wouldn't even think about it. They just would add a first American character in there as if, oh, I'm just going to throw that in because it's going to elicit some sympathy or it's going to elicit very lightly done. But Debbie forces us to ask the questions and think about it. And a lot of people have just now don't want to put characters in because they don't feel adept and that's great. You shouldn't just throw characters from other people's in just because you want to exploit them for some reason or another. So I'm grateful, so grateful to you Debbie for that, for making a stop and asking questions because that's really my challenge is just to get to people to think deeply about each thing they're putting in. Because like you said, stories are powerful. They're very powerful. And that's why we have propaganda. That's why children have been used, propaganda has been used for years to shape the way children is already being used now. It's shaped the way children feel about other people, the other. When it comes to start reviews, et cetera, I'll just give you an example. A rickshaw girl came out, zero start reviews, zero nothing. Absolutely not a good reviews, but not across the board, good reviews, but no stars. And I thought, well, the books, you know, it's just going to hobble along like, you know, with one wheel broken. But what's happened over the course of that book is Charles Bridge has championed that book by keeping it in print. And librarians started to pick it up. Independent bookstores started to pick it up. It was never in the chains. In fact, none of my books are ever in the chains. You will not see my books probably unless you go requested at a bookstore. It's not going to show up or if it's Luanne or somebody like that that cares about these books. But librarians started advocating for that book. And bit by bit, there was a librarian who was on the board of the Bay Area Children's Theater that said, you know, I love this book. Let's make it into a musical. And so she championed it, became a musical. The book is selling so well. It's been seven years or eight years since it came out. It's selling better now than it ever did. So I think what you said about the power of social media and the community now, it's one of the best things we have right now for you to be out there, making us ask the hard questions for people like you to be able to take a book that got no attention from the traditional review sources. And now it's being made into a musical and it's reaching lots of different kids. I think that's something to celebrate. That we have a flatter platform now thanks to social media. So if you're not tuning into social media sources and staying with traditional sources, you're really missing out, I would say. Thank you. I have a few more questions and I'm also just going to invite the panelists to start a free-flowing discussion, too. So if you guys have questions to jump right in, I'm going to already go off track what I had planned just because we have this example up here, which is, I think, percolated an idea that I've heard coming up today in a couple different places. I know it's something we wanted to get to. And that's the question of, you could call it the fatal flaw question. So Debbie, you are pointing to this example as this may be just like one book on one page, but for readers it's one book on one page here, one book on one page there. I think the question of how you deal with a passage like this, it comes up a lot and it comes up in a lot of different contexts and it's a very difficult conversation for many of us. So here's an example of somebody who's being portrayed, somebody who's saying something hateful in order for the author to portray this character as evil. And the question then is at whose expense and was that the necessary method through which to get this portrayal? A couple of other examples and this book brings other things to the table. People like to read about vampires and that's important because we want youth to read and enjoy reading and find books that they want to read. So popularity is a really valuable thing that some books bring to the table. Another example might be The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz, who is an amazing writer and has written an incredibly interesting to many people very, very funny and engaging book with one or two passages that provoke this same kind of reaction and the discussion around that book has been why does this one passage sink the entire book? And I think one more example is The Better Nate Than Ever, which has another small scene and somebody else is going to have to remind me if I'm even blanking out on what it is, but here's a book that is award-winning. It brings other kinds of diversity to the table and somebody remind me what happens in that book. Better Nate Than Ever is there's a passage in there when Nate is in New York City and it's Halloween and they are out on the street and there's a parade of kids in costume and one of them, his aunt, I think it's his aunt, sees somebody in a cowboy suit and says, oh, you better look out for the Indians and Nate says in reply to her, which is a positive thing. Tim Federle is understanding a little bit of the misrepresentations of Native people that are in children's books, so he has his character say, the child character say to the adult character, oh, you're not supposed to say Indians, you're supposed to say Native Americans and I think, oh, OK, Tim, nice try, but it still says look out for the Native Americans. So it's a superficial change that really didn't change anything. Yeah, and those of you who attended Angela Moffat and Carla Kozak's talk today also saw Angela pointing to a lot of revisions in Caldecott books where they took really gross statements or illustrations and revised them to make them a little bit better and really didn't make them any better. So, but in this situation, I think a lot of times as librarians where we get caught up sometimes in this idea of, well, in whether this is literary criticism, if we can see the literary device that the author is using intentionally and in Tim Federle's book, his character corrects another character, so there's some context about that around that, but what was the purpose of that scene to begin with and what effect did it really produce for readers? And I just wonder if anyone else wants to jump in and how you approach books like that, especially in a library collection where it's a good book until that one page. I think often we try to put it on a scale as a fair assessment of how to go about it. I heard today many times and I hear this a lot that it's politically correct and maybe I think you might have said it, don't say it again. And I say that with sincerity and because when we say politically correct, we are saying somebody told me that I can't say that. I think you did, but maybe not. Well, let's roll the video, please. But it may be one of those waterline things and a lot of people say politically correct. Forgive me if I'm wrong. It's okay, I might. I make all kinds of flaws. I do too. And being aware of them and being open to hearing that when it happens is important. But if you use the phrase politically correct, and I don't mean just metallic, but anybody using the phrase politically correct, Tim Federley made that change so he could be politically correct. Then you go down this path of being forced to do something because someone's going to call you out on it. If you start to think about changes that need to happen as being changes that are... I see the agenda of the author. Yeah, that's right. Educationally sound. So if we replace politically correct with educationally sound, which is what we're all about, we're all people who work in education and that's what we're about. Then if Tim thinks, okay, is this educationally sound? Then he has to pause even more than if he thinks about, okay, I'm changing it from Indian to Native American. He has to do that backstory in a different way, thinking about the education that he's imparting with that change. So I think that particular phrase is really problematic and if we shift to thinking about the education that is happening in the phrases that we're looking at, I think we could get further down that road. This is a tough question. It is hard because, again, I'm so glad we're delving deeply into these issues, but as a creative, I find it terrifying because I know I'm going to make a mistake. I'm going to make a mistake that is going to create pain. So I just am. I talked about the disease that we all have in our heart. Maybe shadeism will creep in my book. Maybe something will creep into my story. So there's an article that was recently kind of going around about how fan fiction or fandom has sort of started to punish creatives if we go the wrong direction. I think there was a Captain America cartoon that just recently came out that revealed Captain America as being a secret Nazi spy the whole time, right? So this was devastating for the fan base and the creator of the cartoon began to get death threats and horrible things because how dare you do this to my Captain America? So that idea that where does the story... Where is that creative freedom to be able to make the mistakes the way Patricia McCormick did the way I did and bring it out to you and then have it be part of that educational... What did you call it? Educational? To develop communally a sound education for our children. If the mistakes are not explored and put out there and discussed and how they're discussed, I feel that almost every story I've read has a flaw. Like I said, I have a bridge character in my monsoon summer. At what point, who are we to say this is the fatal flaw? This is the flaw that will cause us to ban that book or eliminate that book from our collection. That starts to get a little arrogant sounding, at least on my part. If I'm going to sit and so I'd rather it be in the community where the questions are asked, the hard discussions are had and people that have prophetic voices are pushing us forward to dig deeper. But I do feel that there's a sense of... There's kind of a terror out there among creatives right now that we're going to make a mistake and that we're going to get punished brutally by the dark side of social media. And that means there's not a freedom to make a flaw. We don't have a freedom to make a mistake. You're not going to... You're just going to feel like you're silenced with your stories. I'm writing a picture book that's coming out in 2018. It's called Gifts for Abuela. It's set on the border by the fence and it's about a child who wants to meet her grandmother on that Dia de los Pasadas when you can see each other across the border and exchange gifts. I'm not Latina. I've not experienced that. I'm very much an outsider. I did my homework, but I hope. But I'm sure there's probably going to be flaws in that story. So I'm scared. I'm like, should I write? Can I only write Bengali? And even when I wrote my dang California Indian American story, I made a dang mistake in that. So maybe I should just shut up and not tell any of these stories anymore. Do you see where it leads you? That fear of like, I'm going to blow it. I know in my heart there's all this crap. Shadism and colonial oppression and all this stuff. So it's going to come out nice. But I think if you're brave enough to ask the questions, to face your own limitations, to admit your own mistakes. But I think there should be a sense of the community engaging around all books because why should the fatal flaw be just about race and ethnicity? What about class? Why is that the fatal flaw all of a sudden? Because our nation right now is so racially charged that we're terrified about race. But at another time in history, maybe it's going to be another issue. So who's going to be the judge's jury? It just gets very complicated. And when you get to that fatal flaw question, I don't like that question, fatal flaw. I feel like I'm doomed. I'm going to sit at home and just tell the same story over and over again about that same old boring Indian-American girl on her dumb crush. It's going to be over and over. But I don't think that... Metallia, I don't think you're the case of someone who's going to throw your hands up and walk away. I think you're wrestling with the question and you're going to do a better job. And I think that a lot of the writers who are very defensive and put this out there that there's a mob after them are not seriously engaging the questions. I think it is a defensive reaction and not a thoughtful one. And I hope that some of them do eventually get to where you are with that question. But I think that if we all at the society say, oh, yeah, those bad people mobsters out there, and I am one of those that is seen that way, if the response is just to ignore us, then what is the... where are we going? If we're just going to say, well, they're just mean, ignore them. That's not the answer either. Right. We need the prophets for sure. That's a term fatal flaw because that's one that gets tossed out a lot and it's a deliberately provocative term that gets used to attack the argument often, although sometimes and sometimes is the genesis of the argument. Patty, did you want to leave in? No, Miss Holly, I think one of the things you bring up though as a creator is that you share responsibility to your reader and to the authenticity of the experience. To be your homework, you invest time and interest and bring in that human element. I mean, I understand... No, actually, I don't understand why this was written in this way because I think it's sensationalized for a purpose. And I don't think that the purpose was necessary or led to a greater understanding of the evilness of this character. Truly, I mean, this was meant to be a sensationalized reaction because we all had it when we saw it, even if you read it before. I mean, at least that's the way I see it. Right. Yeah, I guess I'd ask the question about the use of this book to further the discussion with teens to explore what their emotional reactions are to this, how they felt about it, to talk about it in a safe place which a lot of libraries are. A lot of you guys create that safe place with teens. Now, it's different with teens than with kids. I think kids don't have the barriers that teens have to discern that this is out of the pale, whatever. But I do think that the discussion is well worth it in whatever little community of influence we have to raise up the question around the dinner table to say, what do you guys think about this? Is it a fatal flaw? These questions that we're having here should be taking place around all kinds of different situations with your patrons and with your community as well. Yeah, in the case of Better Nate Than Ever, I feel like it's a book that's both important and flawed. We are considering whether to include it in a set of books that we inserted tags on in our library catalogs so that people can search on the terms equal read to find books that promote diversity in a variety of ways. And because we were considering diversity broadly, it did not seem appropriate in this case to include Better Nate Than Ever. It is still on our LGBT book list, though, as a recommended title. Maybe I'll turn the question over to consider how do we in libraries look at the whole collection? We're looking at a single book. No book is flawless. There's different kinds of flaws for different reasons. And then how do we look at our whole collection? And we've talked about that a tiny bit from the point of view of selection. How do we find the books that we need to serve our community? But the collection building is really a continuum of selecting, curating, displaying, hand-selling, weeding, selecting, all of that going on at the same time. And so how do you look at books? How do you look at the balance of books in your collection? And how do you consider these same factors, for instance, the factors that Matali was talked about in her talk, when you're weeding, as well as when you're selecting? You know, librarians traditionally use those musty weeding standards, right, with its musties and acronym, and the M stands for misleading. So you're supposed to weed out anything that's inaccurate or misleading. So Pluto is no longer a planet. You get rid of your Pluto books. But I think that all of us probably have extremely misleading books about the California missions on our shelves, and extremely misleading books about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, misleading by leaving out very, very important parts of our history. I think that Debbie's presentation very early, the first thing this morning was eye-opening for us that probably most of the books about First Nations peoples on our library shelves are misleading. And another one of the letters in musty is the eye is for irrelevant. So you're supposed to weigh whether this, whether a book is relevant to your community or not. And there is a wide gaping opening for anyone who says, there's nobody like this in my community. This book is irrelevant. So, you know, what happens as you're, when you're looking at your whole collection, bringing books and letting them go out, how do you balance the need for having better neat than ever on your shelves? When you're looking at, right, fiction books are space hogs, they take up a lot of linear inches. Do you feel the need to have classics on your shelf? Who determines what are classics and what belongs there? And how do you balance the accuracy and the relevance in your collection? That's a big question. I just, you know, I sit there, if I read my 900s, I go through and I take everything out and everything goes off the shelf. And I think, well, I can't do that. So then how do I decide which horrible books to put back on the shelf? And then I think, okay, no, that's not the answer. I'm supposed to go out and find better ones to replace them. And then you spend the weekend looking and you can't because you don't have time at work and you can't find anything. Yeah, that was one of the things with pulling Better Nate off of that list then it left this hole in the composition of the list because there were the picture books for younger kids and the transgender chapter books for middle grades and then nothing for now. For now, yeah. I do want to just bring up one thing about this going back to this question. We often ask, you know, how is this affecting the black child? But I think we forget how is this affecting the Indian child, all the children that are reading this are being shaped by this. So I think there's creative ways that I've seen librarians use to display books that would link books together not necessarily again with the primacy of ethnicity but with another theme that allows... So I think there's like, for example, it goes back to that windows and mirrors thing. So you're going to do a display of African-American books for you could, you know, Kwame's book on the crossover, you could do it for African-American display month but you can also have books on sports, right? So that a kid who loves sports and like my book Tiger Boy, it's about a kid who is good at math or hates math. Sorry, hates math is good at English and reading and writing and hates school, hates studying. So there's a window of the mirror there for all kids. You can do creative things like that where you link certain books together. I think you can also... It's a tough question about weeding classics. I just... That's a very tough question but I do think that there are some creative ways that librarians can mix and match certain books. Comparison, like compare. You could do comparison displays from old books to new books. There's lots of creative things you could do to get your community thinking along those lines to get them to start thinking of the questions that you're asking. Because I think that the questions you're asking are so that I want to spread those out. Like, parents to be thinking about musty. Do you know how you get them to be... And even kids, even teens to be thinking about that. Like, how do you spread that what you guys are already naturally thinking about into the community? And getting people to think about books by the way that we display them is a really interesting question because, I mean, Debiou said we're all educators. That's why we're in it. And I think that that's a big part of librarianship and then we're also... But we also have this piece where we're trying to create pathways for people going wherever they want to go with reading and requesting whatever they want to read. So, you know, does your library have tiki-tiki-tembo? Probably does. Most libraries do because a lot of people request it. And so our job as a public library is to provide it for them. Where do you keep it in your library or do you get it for them from another library? And how can you invite people to think about books in different ways? I'm curious, Patty and Joy, especially if you want to talk to what... You know, what do you do or what do you say or do you say anything when somebody asks for tiki-tiki-tembo? Or pick your least favorite... pick your least favorite book. Have you had that question? Oh, I have, many times. Okay, so I don't know where it is now, but when I was in Oakland, we had Little Black Sambo and we had tiki-tiki-tembo. Oh, where did we put it? It was behind the scenes collection. It was the rare collection. The rare collection, okay. And when we did have children, adults, doesn't matter who requested those items, that was a point of information and education where we could explain actually why it was kept there and why there was actually a note in the note field in the mark record that actually explained why we had it in that collection and what that collection was designed for. There's a lot of things actually in that collection that are both positive and maybe out of, you know, that we're not... that we're misinterpreted and actually misrepresented in a lot of different things and that led to strong, I think, discussions, but it led to an illumination process. So it was a conversation between whoever we were working with and the staff to better understand not only from the position of gatekeeper, because unfortunately it sort of came down to that, but why it was important for us to have that conversation, how it was misinterpreted, how it was dealt with through history, actually, with the original intent with, and that led to all kinds of conversations to Uncle Tom's Kevin and everything else. And so it created an opportunity and that's probably one of the things I think that we shy away from those librarians and library workers is actually that word education, because I think we have a role and we have a duty as individuals who do the selection and the introduction and the programming and the outreach to work with our community and to let them know and sometimes to up out when we make a mistake, actually, and that when we've had a change of heart over something, we just had to take something out of the collection and that totally should not have been there in Yolo County and it was probably the most racist thing that I had seen in probably, I don't know, 15 years, but it was revisionist history once again and yet what did my staff do? Was it Rush Limbaugh? No, not as far as that. Actually it was a lot worse. It was very subtle in the children's section and my staff actually had it on the shelf displayed, okay? It wasn't just even on the shelf. It was down on display. Well, no, I don't want to talk about that. I think what I'm saying to you is that that was also another opportunity for us to have a good conversation about the selection process and our duty and responsibility to not rush. So the other things that, you know, that your staff that are doing selection, they have to spend a certain amount of money in a very short period of time, right? There's a lot of reviews, a lot of things that they have to go through. You may cry because they actually don't come to you all the time with questions about your neighborhood and the changes in your population and the different things you need. Force them to hear you. I mean, it's not just their responsibility, I think, to come to you to ask you those questions. Take the other side of it and actually be responsible for your community to share that information with them and to have that good dialogue. So we keep the materials actually as part of an educational process, as part of an educational process both for our public and for our staff. One of the suggestions that Mattali brought up about displays and we've had that here too is that kids understand fairness. They know from, you know, when they're two years old what's not fair. And if we frame the displays that we do as not fair in terms of how someone is depicted, I think we will start some education at a very young age and that will be very helpful. So you could have, for example, a little House on the Prairie and some pages from that that are factual errors about the people, native peoples that the Ingalls family was interacting with and have the true known facts about all of that, side by side in that and do some education in a programmatic way very easily. And the other thing, when we were talking about shelf space, we know that you probably all have, like, five or ten copies of Little House on the Prairie in your library right now and probably five or ten copies of Catty Woodlawn and do you have a matching number of copies of Birch Bark House by Louise Erdrich? Because if you don't, then you're out of balance in terms of providing kids with stories from that time in history. I like that word balance. I think that's a, you know, a lot of B words, but I think that's something that we need to really include in this discussion. I do have to say that ALA has been such a long time champion of intellectual freedom and such a strong stand against one of the best things about American libraries. If you travel around the world, we don't have the freedom in lots of parts of the world to have books so widely produced about so many different things and so I just really keep speaking out against this kind of fear because I just want to keep encouraging you to fight both fights. The intellectual freedom fight and keeping our shelves just full of free books with tons of horrible mistakes because that's something you've done so well. It's really unique to America. You just go to other places and they don't have that. We don't have that freedom of expression and freedom of speech. And it's thanks to libraries really. I lived in Newton, Massachusetts for 12 years and they fought the fight during the war on terror relinquishing patron records and my librarian Doug Ann said no, no, no. This is a free place. And one, beat the whole federal government. Kept the federal government out of what we check out. The library. So we have to keep those things in bounds. I think I sense that in your unease. That idea of emptying shelves is frightening because we don't want to empty shelves. Not a single shelves. Not a single story, but with many stories. So we get to that balance. Because if you have one book about First Nations and it's just a little house on the prairie, you're completely out of whack. But if you have many stories then you lose that danger of a single story. Then you get that balance. So if we start to empty our shelves it gets troubling. I can so understand that tension that you guys face of both of those values you hold so dearly. And balance is a good word because we've seen, we've been talking about the imbalance. We all are very aware of the imbalance in the publishing industry. And not just who's depicted in the books, who's writing the books. But the perspective and the white normalizing that goes on in a lot of them. And so if we look at if we think about it because Patty was saying here's an opportunity to provide information and to educate, can we bring more balance into our collections by providing additional information that we can't find that isn't being presented in the published books. I want to start passing the mic around the floor too. And do I have the mic up here? Meredith has it. So, I don't know if anybody does anybody have we've got a question right up front. Say something. Hi. Thanks so much for sharing all your wisdom around all of these topics. Mattali, you just bring up a free speech which really struck a chord with me, especially I mean I would love to hear the whole panel's thoughts on how do we maintain free speech in a nation where our speech is very monetized and so folks who have money have free speech and folks who don't are silenced. How can we, I mean I am in full belief of embracing creativity and creative right and creative freedom and how can we overcome the financial disparities that tend to silence these. That's a good question. Free unequal speech. Well, go ahead. I think just having that in the back of your mind is important for all of us because we can say free speech or freedom to read but what is the it there and how did that it get there and what didn't end up there is exactly what you're talking about is getting published is something that happens with a lot of privilege and money is part of that and so many of us don't have that, don't have that access. So the ideas that ALA rests on and the United States rests on have to be looked at critically and that's the completely vital thing that we all have to do is step back and think critically about those words and what's underneath those words and sometimes they lead us down a path that we think we're in good shape and we really aren't because so much of what we have in the libraries is there because of institutional racism and we need to be aware of that. This is why I look at Debbie kind of as a case study of what social media has been able to do. I do think it's kind of the Wild Wild West out there. It's a cruel brutal world out there. It's scary but it allows voices that have been silenced to have some measure of power. It's a way from traditional media to social media which allows people who have traditionally been silenced look at the Black Lives Matter movement that movement gained a lot of traction on social media and they use those new structures and I think with creative freedom people empowering and tuning into those new it has its excesses I know but I would never be one I'm such a champion of social media because I do think it has that freedom it doesn't allow and you guys providing room for the digital divide so you have access to anybody can have access to the social media through your libraries. You don't have to have all the technology the little iPhone in my pocket I can come into your library and use my hashtag and have my voice heard that's a big deal. So like Debbie's the fact that we're listening to Debbie now I think 15 years ago Debbie was saying the same thing but she wasn't being invited to panels like this or speaking or being taken because she's developed that voice that is being listened to now. Mattali did you know you said wild wild west? Yeah sorry but you know what I mean like no laws absolutely lawlessness let's just say a place of which is what was the tragedy of that time in history there was no goodness of law to restrain people to provide justice and that sometimes social media feels like that there's not that much restraint right? So anyway I would say that there are some new places to listen to new voices and thinking about who gets to say what and who's not being heard I mean in libraries this happens this gets back to our first question about selection and who are we listening to who are we listening to through our reviews who are we not listening to who else can we go to can we include the community can we go to social media enjoy you and I we were talking a lot about the the amount of work involved in that and the fact that we have to trust reviews and yet we can't trust reviews you know how can we start to Mattali you were showing us earlier I think some guidelines for how to start looking at books themselves to start to pick them apart but we almost need to be to try to do the same thing with reviews where is someone not where is somebody not what are people not saying what are they leaving out and I don't know how you are handling reviews right now or if you're going to other sources I think we've started I'm feeling like I'm trusting some review sources more than others right now I know that Kirkus and school library journal are talking a lot about trying to make some changes in their review sources in the way they approach reviewing so I'm more interested in their reviews but I wanted to piggyback on what you said a little bit about the digital divide and access I think we also have a responsibility for our library professionals and library workers to create that access for your community because I know there are several of us that actually serve rural communities where we don't have broadband internet access and so I think in order for social media to thrive for all of our consumers and everybody we represent who come in and don't come into our library you need to be an advocate at the table for making sure that you have free or low cost broadband in your own community so I was going to say that that's my big pitch and so how you as children's advocates actually can make that happen is find out who's actually your local consortium for doing broadband internet access in your community right now because you all have consortiums that are working in that area and to make sure that that is happening because it's not happening if it's not happening in your community then your community has to go through the gatekeeper that's a terrible position to be in yes we love it when the kids and everyone is using the internet access and everything else do you really love it when they're hanging out at the library after you're closed I don't it's not because I don't want them there I want them to have free access wherever they happen to be which means at home anyway I'm just throwing that out there because I think it starts there that's a fundamental right anyway I don't think it's going to go any further unless that actually happens in my mind I think Joy why don't you go ahead get back to at least part of your weeding question our collection and development practices are still undergoing some changes but when we were weeding some of the kids fiction one of the more distressing things that we've noticed and I've heard this from other librarians as well is that a significant of the books that were on the consider for weeding cart based on circulation were chapter books about kids of color and some of them were from the 80s or 90s and it was probably time for them to go because better things existed but in other cases when we went through the cart a little more carefully and looked at them there are books that were out of print that we knew had been well reviewed and that we should have been promoting more so there were certain ones that still had attractive covers and we put them face out and then they went out but it's important to be aware of the books that we should keep alive and I look at things like Farmer Will Allen where it's this little thin book and some of us have it catalogued in the 600s but others of us have it in the 920s where it might get lost if it isn't handed to people I think it's an interesting question about how we apply weeding standards and here this goes back to a perception of neutrality should we apply the same weeding standards to every book and so we pick our circulation cut off line all fiction in this collection must have circulated in the last six months and just leave it there or can we then look at the books we have and say well why didn't this book circulate what place what value does this book still give can this book still give to the collection is this has this one do we need to have Little House on the Prairie in this library is that the one that people can ask for and I'll get it for them from another library and I'll make room for something else I'm just throwing this out there that everybody who's weeded has done this you get your car you pick your weeding your circulation mark you pull it up and then you have your favorites that you put back or you think I'm really supposed to have Little House on the Prairie so we're going to give that a pass even though it's even though it hasn't circulated for a while because it feels wrong to get rid of that and I think we should be asking I think we're sometimes turning that around the wrong way and should be asking other questions can I just add one thing about the you mentioned about reviews I don't know if you guys have already talked about the Kirkus reviews using the the racial identifiers now so generally the response to that has been positive but I found myself pretty troubled about that partly because of what I talked about earlier like if a review says oh this is about an Indian American kid but then the white people don't get a tag I feel like that's saying something first of all and also when do you drop the ethnic identity if your grandparents are Polish or Italian do you get to be called an Italian American with a high I mean well racial definitions are so changeable and they really are politicized so to have to and also why is that primal when it comes to identity what about our gender what about our sexual preference at what point are we going to read reviews now that say you know queer black it's going to go on and on with all the ethnic racial at what point do we just and what are we leaving out by not identifying a character well something really crucial was being left out and being identifying people as white so I think the reason that Kirk has started to do this is because there is a because characters are getting called out by race or perceived race in reviews to draw attention to the books that many of us are looking for with non-white characters but white is not being called out and so it's because I believe they're trying to do it around race because that is the that is the issue that they're trying to call call attention to as an identity though that's the focus right now but what the heck is even white I feel like whiteness I wouldn't want to be called by a color so they're approaching it from a journalistic point of view which is they're trying to approach it from a journalistic point of view which is to say I don't for the label, you just get to be white don't you get to be Polish or Transylvanian why do you have to just be white it just feels like such a weird label to me and the same thing unfortunately with black and a lot of times there's this huge resurgence of genetic tracing because people are longing to find out what their people are who are they, am I Igbo am I I'm from Senegal but which part who are my people this writer brings to it and that's the point so I think the reviewers are trying to look for what is the writer pointing to what are those do they give the character a last name that's suggesting an ethnicity or do they name somebody by hair color and skin tone then the reviewer is going to say well they're going to try to find a way to say this is what this author is trying to suggest about race in this book and it's it's because it's very deliberately present but not being talked about I think that they're trying to bring it up I know there's a lot of questions on the floor and we keep on talking up here so let's go to another question I want to bring it back to Weeding for a moment we talked about classics you touched upon what you do with classics that have racist content but what about the books that are new and that based on initial reviews libraries purchase and then after collections additional reviews with additional perspectives come out that point out what is problematic in the books I experienced that in my library branch with home by Carson Ellis recently and also a fine dessert and I checked the circulation statistics and on the new bookshelf both of them had circulated 14 times in the previous 8 months I'm wondering what your perspective is on whether it's appropriate to weed that book due to the problematic content and if so how do you frame that justification does everything have to be based on numbers I mean remember that your role is not necessarily gatekeeper in or out right for all the reasons I think that Nina and the panel actually described there's some really good quality literature that you want to retain think about this so a lot of us remember when children's book press was around okay and you know what they all went out of print right out of business mom and then daughter and that's because we actually I mean I own this too we although it was hot at the time we didn't buy enough to keep them in business sad but true thankfully Leigh and Lowe picked up the line so but that's yours it's almost a decade later and now we're very happy that that they're back in print but so part of it is how we also sell the material you know so some of the stuff's gonna fly off the shelf are they do they have the same value and weight just because they fly off the shelf as to put something that you know speaks to the child because it resonates with them when they see and then they hear about their own experience we don't you know our readership is very different I mean and so I think we have to that it is a balance but part of your role as professionals actually is to create that balance and not always rely on the numbers from collection HQ or Baker and Taylor or whoever is telling you balance your collection shift all of this stuff out and only emphasize this we're human beings and we come with our own set of criteria and responsibilities I would say if it comes up with a different review and you have a different take on it then when in doubt you know and I think it's important not to succumb not to succumb to the fear of being called a being called a sensor but remember that we're selectors and curators of our collection and we make the choices we make the best choices we can given the information that we get and the wisdom that we get from each other so we I bought a book called home just using this as an example I bought a book called home from Carson Ellis because it has great reviews it's by a a known book creator and a known publisher it starts circulating like crazy and now I have more information about it that changes my mind about it so then my question is well why is it circulating like crazy it could be a lot of different reasons it could be that it's in the news and people want to find out about it that book in particular is a beautiful book and it's a very accessible and resonant theme right there in the one word title so if that is why it's circulating then is it delivering what people are is it delivering on what it's selling I think that's a fair question to ask about that book and if you decide that it's not that it's not responding to your community in that way that may not be the book that they want to check out about home it might be but it might not be and I think that it's I think that it's fine to ask why a book is circling so much and consider whether or not whether or not you need it and in terms of the balancing there are books like say when the new Susan Cooper book came out we expected that at least some patrons were going to ask for it but because of the mixed reviews we opted to buy one copy for the system and felt like that was going to suffice that was the ghost talk great I'm glad to hear that I see some other hands there's one question here first of all thank you so much for the excellent conversation and discussion I kind of have a question in opposition to weeding is seeding I think a lot of our libraries are in areas with predominately one type of ethnicity or another what are you doing to especially in lieu of the kind of the political landscapes with black lives matters you know Islamophobia what are we doing to add books and certain books to the curriculum to the circulation to come back those things for Islamophobia we now have a new imprinted Simon and Schuster call so long reads and they're going to be having a really great time out in next year so can you just introduce yourself and just tell us what book is coming out in November I'm not with salamere to thank you I'm Nahid Hassan since I wrote the book Shooting Kabul Shooting Kabul yeah another one coming out in November which is about Syria which is very depressing to write so as libraries as a consumer it's the richest place for you to find the other and learn about the other and that's something where you know what Patty was talking about taking going shopping shopping with your community shopping in your community is crucial and a lot of the books that are published outside outside the mainstream can be found by going into your community going to places of worship often which often have book stores or libraries of their own or people who can get those books for you is one way one way that we can do that inviting panel discussions from community members I feel like a lot of a lot of the books that we do need to add to the to our collections are being self published or alternatively published and finding those is really hard because they don't get reviewed they're not carried by our vendors our purchasing requirements are obtuse and unnecessarily convoluted and make it really hard to just go online and buy something with a credit card so those are all institutional barriers in the way of along with a high workload in trying to get things done in an efficient manner these things are working against work against spending time to go out but you know I think the more that we can rely on our institutional methods of acquiring books quickly to allow us to spend time to go out into the community and find the books that are that they're looking for it's time really well spent it's another balanced question not every part of the collection needs to have the same microsecond some parts of the collection need more attention but thank you for bringing that to our touch really are the microphones going around let's see there's a hand here and then there's one behind you too and then there's one in the back of the room here with the red shirt too hi I'm Anne from Berkeley Public Library and I think that as librarians we've sort of reserved our opinions in reviews that we write but the reviews are really there for ourselves our profession but I heard Metali talking about how and Patty too like assuming a more role of educating our community or having more conversations with our community and now that's really possible with social media and the internet in a way that it wasn't possible 20, 30 years ago and so is it possible that our role as librarians should be evolving with that too not just having these conversations with ourselves but making but trying to find ways to have these conversations with our communities especially when we have these more controversial books I think we've tried to avoid to have in the interest of not being promoting intellectual freedom and sort of trying to withdraw we've withdrawn from that conversation with the community for that reason but maybe we need to go back to having a more purposeful role in these conversations or not, I don't know what do you think? I'm trying to picture what that would look like with my library like an online forum where the certain books that are being weeded would be put up and people could comment on them as part of the community and you could give a justification these are the 10 books I'm thinking of weeding from my children's classic collection I'd love to hear from the community and then getting back to you I'm trying to imagine a practical thing like that I think that would be kind of interesting you probably get a lot of trolls but I like trolls I think trolls make it interesting I think you can also through book clubs or through having inviting community coming for panel discussions you can create an atmosphere where the community can talk with each other about what matters to them there's a whole bunch of people here I'm a school librarian and I'm really interested in this discussion about kind of building this conversation to build critical readers and take it from behind the librarian shelves to sort of why do we read a certain book from the collection or why do we deem this inappropriate and how do we counter the narrative that's so mainstreamed at this point and I know as a teacher with Oyate their curriculum to look at why is this insulting have conversations with kids like let's look at this stereotype and why do you think this is insulting to someone and let's analyze this and I think that as librarians if we make all these decisions for readers they may or may not have the opportunity to really grapple with this like why is this troubling to me or why does this make someone else uncomfortable I think actually that's we're not paying as much attention to that as this representation how is this making what am I thinking about this person and so that kind of dialogue I'm really interested in hearing about especially how public libraries are including kind of critical literacy in their programming because I'm supporting some international libraries through librarians without borders and they're looking at this protocol of using paulofrarian sort of pedagogy and really building critical readers I don't know at least a lot of models in public libraries of how that's happening so I'm really interested in your thoughts and ideas on that are you a school librarian for middle school or elementary or high school in a spanish immersion school but you guys want to go I think it's hard in public libraries because we are not trained to be educators the classic MLIS education doesn't doesn't present it in that way to us there are a lot of librarians who are I mean the classic model is a book club book clubs don't really always work in every library and so the kind of end up the discussion around a problematic book I think it's more likely when that happens on a case by case basis as people at least in my experience as people come in and request the book that just makes your teeth hurt I think there is a lot of discussion and education on the opposite side about the books we put on display books we put on our book list the books we choose to use in our story times and talking about what makes these such great books I think that also helps to inform that discussion I think there is a generational difference in how to talk about race I came of age in the 70s and I think at that time majority culture was very uncomfortable talking about race it was more polite not to talk about it I think kids from the age of four three, two up are already encountering the issues of race today in a way so to be able to be bold enough to bring it up I could so easily have seen little house on the prairie on a shelf with the sign saying we're eliminating these books from our or thinking of eliminating these books from our collection would love to hear from you chime in leave your notes or thoughts and here's why I would have as a parent so stopped and read why my librarian was thinking of eliminating these ten books from the collection and it could have easily contributed to my my own critical reflection as well as the boys so I think that's a great role that you guys can play developing that ability to ask the questions I think there's some age appropriateness though when it comes to focusing so much on race because I think that middle school age is a vulnerable age when it comes to identity like anywhere from fourth to about ninth grade I think I would have died of humiliation if the librarian had come up to me or school librarian and said oh here's a book about an Indian kid and tell you look at just like you you have to give the child space to explore their own identities what identifiers they're choosing for themselves and for adults to come rushing at them and say this is about a book like you this is about a kid like you because of this at that age it's there but I think elementary younger ones are so proud of their heritage and older kids are able to do the critical thinking in community but having a discussion like that community when your community includes one black kid or one you know native kid or whatever like that that becomes an entirely different dynamic when you're in middle school and it's difficult you have to have that sensitivity to the ages too that's why I asked what age you know I think a lot of us have programming that is designed around gender inclusion and diversity and equity I think we have those all the time maybe the intentionality that you're talking about is including critical literacy thinking in that model so that's a really good thing to focus on but we have to be open to hearing the conversation first so yeah but good point I'd see a couple hands when done here and went up there and then most ask Mike. Hi so I've been aware of a sort of increasing tension that I'm feeling around the idea of the education and the sort of didacticism I mean I really worry when it feels like we're taking our responsibility for endorsing the messages in the all the books that are in our library because I think at that point then we're not trusting our readers and we're not trusting that they can figure things out I like the idea of having the books we're considering taking out and having a public discussion about that because then at least they get to be part of the conversation whereas if we're moving things because we think they might be bad for the kids we're like that really interesting collection that's on the fourth floor of this building where you go back and you look at what the first children's books were and they are so scary because they were so you will think this this is the message you should be getting from this book and that I think we're all really happy that that's not where we are now and it worries me that conversations sometimes feels like we're shifting back that way a little bit I think that depends on the demographic that you're talking about I do not trust American citizens to do right by Native people because the information is massive, misinformation is massive that's why mascots are still on football fields I don't have the trust that you have there's research studies that show that white children seeing stereotypical images of mascotry their self-esteem goes up it works the way it's supposed to work the Native children who see that their self-esteem goes down so I don't trust it it's doing work that is very harmful to the non-Native child and to the Native child as well so I think it depends on the demographic and I know it's uncomfortable to think that we do need to be policing perhaps the content of books to the degree that we have to but I think we've done that historically as a society we have done that historically and that's why we don't have little black samba in the numbers that we had a hundred years ago that's because we as a society recognized that women didn't need to be barefoot and pregnant we are in a different place with that depiction now but it takes enough people being aware of those depictions for them not to be taken as truth and then we can trust the reader in that regard I mean I'm sorry I just feel like I hear what you're saying and I respect your perspective and I respect your perspective particularly in the specific area you addressed but I think the idea that we can trust people when we've only allowed them when we've controlled the choice I mean that seemed to be what you were saying I want to your question is a really important one and I think it's the crucial question of the day that's why we're all here the to me you brought up that trusting the reader I mean I trust the readers to take whatever they need from whatever book they want to I also trust that children are children and I know how I know that they read differently than we do I don't trust our reviewing industry and I don't trust our publishing industry to give me a full picture I don't trust our reviewing industry as a whole I'm not picking on any individually but as a whole to give me a full accurate picture of what's in the books and I don't trust our publishing industry to give us accurate accurate or balanced choices to kids so when you're talking about kids having choices they have limited choices to begin with and I think that I'm going to speak for a moment as a white woman to other white women in the room and just say I think that it's extremely when we think about who gets to critique what and who gets attacked when they critique what as white women in the industry we are in a position of privilege to ask difficult questions of each other in a relatively safe space about books and I think that we have to ask we have a choice of bringing a book into a collection at any point in time and if we bring a book in because we know kids want funny books and here's a funny book and we want to give them a choice to read this but is this a book that makes a joke at the expense of other kids and does that need to be a funny book in our collection no matter that it got three star reviews I just think we have to ask those questions and not be afraid to consider that as part of our selection process we are forcing the choices for the kids and all the time and we need to look at how and why we're doing that me? Hi I was just remembering you know during this whole talk I'm remembering a battle that I was part of in 1992 it was called the California textbook wars and I was one of the parent committee one person in the parent committee and we were reviewing the Houghton Mifflin social studies textbooks line by line paragraph by paragraph and making you know voluminous comments what we found out was there really is no such thing as free speech there isn't it's corporate speech and the corporations decide what we're going to read and one of the parents got up before the group and before the media and this is what she said and excuse me my voice is shaking what she said was in order for some children to feel proud of themselves other children must be made ashamed of themselves and that's what I want to leave I think I've listed Debbie over the years and I realized her point is not that it's not free speech against policing it's one way of policing versus another way of policing like there's a de facto and a de jure way of addressing this issue that choices are never not policed I think when I've listened to Debbie and there have been times I know when I've I really err on because I've freedom to read was so important to me but I've listened to her and I think what the difference would be Debbie would say choices are already being made for the kids it's not like we're moving them from freedom to policing is that right? and that's what I've heard you say do we have time for Meredith it's 3.30 but we have time okay great okay okay well I'm just this conversation is making me think that as a new teacher librarian a lot of the literature and the the librarian reviews that I'm getting to read and some of them are so critical and valuable but as a teacher and as a general reader I didn't have access to those reviews and it's just making me think that the controversy around books new books, popular books or classics like how can we make it more transparent whether it be from on a bulletin board in our libraries or little controversial postcards that we would place in you know accessible locations or a binder about you know just to because I myself was interested have always been interested in this topic long before I became a librarian and I just think I just think we should make it more transparent these conversations about these controversies and I loved what Marine said about you know encouraging our students to also think about these issues and not taking that option away or that critical thinking away hi I'm fairly new to the field I'm a graduate student in library science about halfway through but I watched with interest especially when a fine dessert came out the conversations about it on social media I'm also a parent and I think what really struck me in a lot of the spaces from a lot of the comments from those who have white privilege quite honestly was the sort of the intellectual side conversation around choice and freedom of speech and I really said wow so many people are invested in a fine dessert as this exercise in choice and investment in this author's perspective and intention but it seems so disconnected and so disconnected from the effects of what this information being out in society or the role that the library plays so I can get behind and I believe in freedom of choice in many different things but I feel like what's lost when we come to that is how just leaving these grossly inaccurate racist misogynistic etc etc etc things on the shelves the effect that they do to holding up white supremacy or other isms as a leading way of functioning in society and so I think that we have to be very careful not to be so and this is not against any one person just the conversation to be so in the clouds about these ideals and disconnecting them from the realities you know my children are terrified of Donald Trump not to be overly political being president for real reasons and when my nine-year-old brings things to me in books and says why does this say this why would someone say something like this you know or friends whose children are white who have certain beliefs that are reinforced so I think the intellectual side the academic side the theory is great but not so much where we disconnect it from the real reality of the role that the things that we have serve in society in upholding institutions and ways of being in systems of power that are fundamentally unjust and are detrimental to all of us so I just wanted to put that leave to put that on the table Any other last words Nina No Mahasin thank you Thank you for sharing Any other any other brief last words from anybody up here I want to just say thank you guys for making this space and time for having this discussion