Racism in the Children’s department at your local library

My sister has worked in public libraries for a very long time and she often has interesting insights on working with the public. The other day she shared this story with me.
In public libraries there often isn’t enough room to keep every book they ever acquire. The process of removing books from the collection is called “weeding.” Weeding is not about censoring books that make some people upset. This is about removing books that are either woefully out of date or have little or nothing in the way of circulation. My sister said that it’s easy to weed out of date books, any book that talks about “Soviets, Negros or Retarded people” (in the present tense) can be weeded no problem.
The circulation weeding is another issue. If book isn’t being checked out once in a while, there isn’t much reason to have it in the collection. It is easy to look up how many times a given book had circulation since it was placed in the collection. One librarian told me “you can even just look for dust on the top of the book on the shelf!”
The problem my sister encountered was when she was weeding the picture book collection in the children’s department. She found that over and over again, if there was an African American face on the cover of the book, little or no circulation would be on that book’s record. The town she works in has a population of about 50,000 people, and is very diverse racially, the library gets heavy use by the community (it’s one of the busiest in the state) but still, an African American face on the cover of a book was death for circulation. She couldn’t stand it; there was no other possible reason for the lack of circulation for many of these books, many of which have beautiful art work and wonderful story telling in them. Instead of weeding them, she placed many of them in the special “holiday collection.” These are various collections of books that are kept separate from the general collection and are bought out and displayed for various holidays. These books went into the February, African American History Month collection. This will protect the books from ever being weeded in the future and might even increase the likely hood that they will circulate.
We talked about the problematic nature of putting these books in a separate section of the library’s collection…I’m not sure what the right answer might be with this situation. I understand way she did it, but still, does it re-enforce the notion of separate, not-like-us feeling that was keeping these books from getting circulated in the first place? I’m glad they are protected from ever getting weeded, but it makes me sad that it has to be done this way.
I am a heavy library user. My kids and I go at least once a week and often twice a week. I had gotten out picture books with African Americans in them before (we’re white) and had never thought much about it. From now on, every time we get picture books, I purposely look for a book with a face that doesn’t look like my own. Give it a circulation, keep it in the collection. Even if you don’t have kids, please look for these books when you are next in your public library and give them a circulation too.