In 1993, Butler wrote an op-ed “sounding the alarm about the shrinking access to public literary spaces” — specifically, public libraries. “I’m a writer at least partly because I had access to public libraries,” Butler wrote. “I’m Black, female, the child of a shoeshine man who died young and a maid who was uneducated but who knew her way to the library… At the library, I read books my mother could never have afforded on topics that would never have occurred to her.” Reading her words amidst the conservative onslaught against public libraries and education that deviates from the white, cisheteropatriarchal norm – as online platforms expected to take these spaces’ place are owned by people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – is an experience that’s, well, hard to put into words.
An indifference to the truth ignores the fact that, in Butler’s…