Book People Archive

Re: Is ther a place for White surpremicist books at OBP?

Racist books, while unpleasant and hateful, have a place in The Online
Books Page index insofar as they've had a place in history and culture.
I screen them according to the same criteria of significance as I give other
works:  Are they complete? Are they clearly free from copyright problems?  Are 
they carried by a major library?  Are the texts stable and reliably copied?
Of course, I don't endorse the books' contents, but my job is to link to
books that are significant, not books that I like.  This is addressed in
the FAQ at

    http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/faq.html

(See "I found a book you list that makes some outrageous (or
  inaccurate) statements. Why do you list it?")

Racism has been fairly significant through history, and the collection
I've compiled reflects that.  Some of the books clearly have that as
their main theme.  The title of the 1922 volume _The Rising Tide of Color
Against White World-Supremacy_, doesn't leave much to the imagination,
for instance.  There are also many other books from the public domain
era that implicitly treat "white" people, however the author defines them,
as innately superior to people of other ethnicities, even if that's not the
main intended subject of the book.

Whenever more titles are going online than one can easily index, though,
one does have to be selective about choosing what to index next.  Because
white-supremacist viewpoints are in fact fairly broadly represented
in the collection, explicitly or implicitly, I tend not to go out of my way
to look for or clear more such titles.  Where they're relevant I'll
include them-- for example, today I've been updating my cataloging for
various books about US immigration controversies that are already in my
index, one of which is a 1924 nativist pamphlet published by the Ku
Klux Klan.  I'll also check out individual titles that readers request
(though as you know, my backlog is pretty long at the moment).

As you note, a number of the present-day "white power" websites don't show
much evidence of caring about copyright.  I see little point in my
taking the time to try to clear copyright for such sites when I could be
listing more significant and distinctive books instead.  And once I *do* list
a title, I don't like to have to delist it later, for whatever reason.
Therefore, I tend not to list many post-1922 racist titles unless it's
fairly clear that someone's diligently cleared the copyright for them.

(I sometimes *will* go out of my way, as time permits, for viewpoints and
 subjects that seem to be under-represented in the collection.  In particular,
 if someone seems to be unfairly attacking a person or group, and there is
 little or nothing in the collection rebutting that kind of attack, I'll
 sometimes proactively search for suitable titles.  And I'm happy
 to get suggestions along these lines as well.)

As with other titles, I list racist books in accordance with the law in
the United States, where I'm located.  Just as you should check local
copyright laws before downloading the books I list into countries that
have different copyright terms, you may want to check local censorship
laws, if your country has them, before downloading books into countries
that don't have the same free speech protections that the First Amendment
guarantees.  (Whether or not censorship laws are justified, it can be useful
to know of their existence in your jurisdiction.)

I have put the titles in your post into my submission queue, and will
check them out when I get to them.  Thanks for telling us about them!

John Mark Ockerbloom
Editor, The Online Books Page
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/