Jo Schneiderman is a retired educator and health administrator. Sarah Schneiderman found a new setting for her show, "More Garbage Than Fish," which runs through November at Old State Andrew's Church, 59 Tariffville Rd., in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Two other artists subsequently pulled their work from the exhibition in solidarity. For more information and to see more of Sarah Scheiderman's work, visit sarahschneiderman.com.
BRATTLEBORO-My sister, Sarah Schneiderman, asked me to write a piece about self-censorship in the time of increasing authoritarianism and restrictions on artistic expression and freedom of speech. This was neither a frivolous nor arbitrary request.
She is a collage artist, and one focus of her work is creating likenesses of endangered fish made from trash - often the kind of trash we throw into the ocean. Her pieces are beautiful, educational, and powerful, especially when she mounts a whole show.
This fall, she was invited to mount a show at the Simsbury Public Library in Connecticut. The show had been vetted, and the library board and director had expressed enthusiastic support for the show.
Then, four weeks before the show, my sister was informed that the library director was distressed about the underlying message of the show. She requested that my sister remove all references to climate change, ocean warming, over-fishing, or humans dumping garbage in the ocean.
The show instead needed to be "fact-based and neutral." Instead of arguing that facts are by definition neutral or pointing out that warming oceans are a scientific fact, my sister chose not to mount the show.
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My sister is not Amy Sherald, and the Simsbury library is not the Smithsonian. But parallels in the institutional behavior of the two organizations are obvious and point to a disturbing trend.
In both cases, it was the institution itself that chose to self-censor - there had been no threat to funding and no criticism on social media. Just fear.
Responding out of fear creates a code of fearful silence, many examples of which have sprung up over the past nine months.
Northwestern University responded to the Trump administration's withdrawal of funding to Columbia and Harvard by preemptively rewriting rules and polices to conform to the demands placed on Columbia and Harvard. Northwestern's federal funding was cut anyway. Columbia capitulated to the administration's demands, and not only was its funding not restored, it was cut further.
Political scientist Daniel Ziblatt wrote, "Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him."
How quickly will democracy die if people yield ground before any demand to so has been made? We become our own disrupters. We embody the very censorship we claim to abhor.
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The Smithsonian is a big institution, and it's now under attack. Its struggles have received a great deal of press. The library in Simsbury, Connecticut is little, and its censorship has received no press.
The Smithsonian is federally funded and is at serious risk of losing funding if its leadership offends the orange dictator. The Simsbury Public Library is not at risk for losing funding if it espouses beliefs contrary to MAGA truths.
Yet the director responded as if the danger to the library was equivalent to the Smithsonian losing funding (and the director being fired by the president of the United States).
She faced no risk other than some library patrons being upset (maybe). But librarians have been under siege from the political right for a while now, and censorship like this affects all members of the community who use libraries and brings the conflict directly into our home communities.
We can be very far away from the rarefied atmosphere of Washington, D.C., yet if people mirror the behavior of the president and his henchmen, the poison spreads far beyond the Beltway.
How many other artists, writers, songwriters, playwrights and poets are being told to alter their messages in order to show their work to the public?
How many local libraries, schools and other local venues are beginning to cower in fear of the anti-woke thought police?
How long before no censorship is needed because we have silenced ourselves?
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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