#23: Consider your language rules carefully →

From Emma:

I thought of this tip when I was shelving near a table where a couple of patrons were sitting and chatting, and one of them said to the other “Daaaamn, girl!” I’d just come out of a staff meeting where our branch manager had emphasized the importance of intervening early in code of conduct issues before things got out of control, and the vital-ness of being consistent so that we would be fair. I thought “Should I say something to that patron? Tell her that she can’t say ‘damn’ in the library?” However, even I, basically a demographic caricature of a librarian, know that one black lady saying “damn, girl!” to another black lady isn’t offensive, regardless of what might be on any pseudo-official list of curse words/swear words/’offensive language’.

I didn’t say anything to the patron, and instead I went back and looked up exactly what the library’s policy said about language in the library. It turns out that in Texas it’s based on a state legal code, which says that people are prohibited from: “Making offensive gestures, cursing or using obscene, abusive, profane or threatening language.” I looked up the section of state law this was pulled from, and the wording there is similar: “A person commits an offense [of disorderly conduct] if he intentionally or knowingly” “uses abusive, indecent, profane, or vulgar language in a public place, and the language by its very utterance tends to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”

I’m not a lawyer, but it looks to me that there's no explicit definition of what constitutes ‘abusive, indecent, profane, or vulgar language,’ only an implicit definition that it’s anything that ‘by its very utterance tends to incite an immediate breach of the peace.’ (If anyone with more expertise wants to weigh in on how the legal side of this works, I’d be thrilled!) That seems encouraging. Since routine use of profanity that isn’t directed at hurting someone—like '“damn, girl” or “shiiiiit” (as an expression of surprise)—definitely doesn’t tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace, I can let it go in the library without having to defy a provision of our code of conduct.

Now I’m a branch manager and I feel comfortable telling my staff that they need to allow language like that regardless of their personal feelings. Working in a public library means being exposed to things that you don’t agree with and sometimes being exposed to things that make you uncomfortable, but I don’t have any hesitation telling someone that they can no more tell a patron they can’t talk in a way that’s A) normal in their culture and B) not hostile to any other person than they could refuse to help a patron because she was wearing a button saying she supported a political candidate that they opposed.

That said, I think where the problems might arise would be when other patrons from different backgrounds are listening. For example, I can see some parents objecting to that kind of speech in the children’s area of the library in front of their children, and I’m not sure which side of the fence I’d come down on there. Similarly, adults who come from a different background and haven’t been exposed to that way of talking might feel offended by it, and the discomfort they’d experience would be genuine even if it came from a place that wasn’t very open-minded. So far I’ve been able to handle the few situations like this by finding physically distinct places for each group in the library and reminding the talkers to speak quietly, but I don’t have a good answer for what I’d do if that wasn’t workable.

Once I started thinking about the specifics of the language rules in our code of conduct, that of course made me think about words that aren’t universally considered ‘profane, indecent, or vulgar,’ but can for sure be used in a way is ‘abusive’ or that ‘[tends] to incite an immediate breach of the peace.’ Namely, words that can be used as slurs but aren’t always slurs, depending on who says them and how they are used—often words that started out as slurs but are in some stage of being reclaimed. That ranges from ‘gay,’ which is mostly used as a completely normal word without drama but which still gets used in a completely not-appropriate-for-the-library-or-anywhere-really way as an insult by some bigoted people, to the n-word, which probably still shouldn’t be used in the library at all due to how sensitive some people in the targeted group might reasonably be to it, but could elicit a staff response of anything from “You’re a hateful person and you’re banned from the library for as long as I can swing it” when used by a racist to “Hey, just wanted to remind you guys that not everyone is cool with that word even how you guys are using it, so please don’t say it in here” when used by a bunch of black teenagers.

I often feel unqualified to be producing this blog, but rarely have I felt as unqualified as I do with navigating things like this. I’m just not the right person to be deciding what is and isn’t appropriate library language, and, while I’m maybe more unqualified than most since I’m so thoroughly a member of the dominant culture in my area, probably no single person is qualified on their own. If we ever revise our code of conduct at my library, I’ll definitely try to make sure that this is something that gets looked at closely, and that the library gets input from a diverse group of people about it.