Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Resources: Library Science Resources

Rising socio-cultural and political tensions have helped increase awareness about long-standing structures of violence and abuse, as we have seen in the development and tumultuous expansion of the #MeToo movement. However, other significant conditions of injustice and oppression continue without drawing attention. This seems to be the case with the library profession. Despite strong and persistent links to white supremacy and a well-established record excluding minorities from its ranks, the library profession has been remarkably successful in nurturing an unassailable public image of virtuous liberal benevolence and near mythical devotion to the highest ideals of freedom, individual rights, and democracy. Its unsurpassed ability in evading scrutiny or criticism of any serious consequence while maintaining a strong record of dedicated service to white power is all the more remarkable at a time where social media is used to amplify campaigns against injustices or organizations believed responsible for conditions of oppression. Although Critical Librarianship, or #CritLib, is beginning to question some of the doctrinal assumptions underlying the practice of librarianship, an examination of some of the mechanisms with which white supremacy has been able to build an entire system of racial protectionism as an occupational sector that intersects with areas of significant public interest is an important and timely research concern.

Despite the claim to neutrality, a woeful lack of diversity has had, and continues to have, latent consequences within librarianship and the services we provide. Historically, libraries as a product of white (heterosexual, capitalist, middle-class) librarianship have unwittingly upheld dominant oppressive cultural values by adhering to the tenet of neutrality. Instead, librarians must radically begin supporting our communities by pushing for the removal of institutionalized barriers to entering the information science profession, and divorce ourselves from the notion of neutrality by supporting social justice and civil rights issues. Using discursive analysis as a way to highlight the major scholarly arguments regarding the state of diversity in LIS, I will highlight the ways in which white librarians can better cement ourselves as allies while remaining cognizant of our position as colonizers.

This article examines racism and the culture of Whiteness in academic libraries in three major areas of public services: space, staffing, and reference service delivery. The authors perform a critical discourse analysis, drawing on critical race theory, critical geography, critical education, and social psychology to examine foundational library scholarship and professional standards. Academic libraries, as products and representations of their parent institutions, are situated within the well-documented systemic and institutional racism of higher education in the United States. This is reflected in the monocultural geography and spaces of academic libraries. It is seen in the organizational culture and hiring practices of libraries, which are overwhelmingly staffed by White workers, while serving an increasingly diverse student body. Finally, it is reflected in the traditional tenets of reference service delivery, including approachability, responsiveness, and objectivity. The authors argue that racism is embedded in academic libraries through a culture of Whiteness. Consistent with social justice traditions in librarianship, they offer tools and suggestions to realign the profession with antiracist values and practices that will enable libraries to better serve their communities.

When librarians discuss the lack of underrepresented populations in librarianship, the solutions suggested most often are recruitment and awareness. But these discussions focus on one matrix of identity, like race or class, and ignore the fact that people embody multiple, layered identities. By treating these matrices of identity and marginalization as separate entities, librarians fail to fully understand how oppressions work in varying contexts. We need to go beyond the traditional diversity rhetoric and speak instead of intersectional librarianship. This article defines intersectionality, how it differs from the current discourse, and how it can be used to help librarians understand and serve diverse populations better.

Drawing on a range of critical race and anti-colonial writing, and focusing chiefly on Anglo-Western contexts of librarianship, this paper offers a broad critique of diversity as the dominant mode of anti-racism in LIS. After outlining diversity's core tenets, I examine the ways in which the paradigm's centering of inclusion as a core anti-racist strategy has tended to inhibit meaningful treatment of racism as a structural phenomenon. Situating LIS diversity as a liberal anti-racism, I then turn to diversity's tendency to privilege individualist narratives of (anti-)racism, particularly narratives of cultural competence, and the intersection of such individualism with broader structures of political-economic domination. Diversity's preoccupation with demographic inclusion and individual behavioural competence has, I contend, left little room in the field for substantive engagement with race as a historically contingent phenomenon: race is ultimately reified through LIS diversity discourse, effectively precluding exploration of the ways in which racial formations are differentially produced in the contextually-specific exercise of power itself. I argue that an LIS foregrounding of race as a historical construct - the assumption of its contingency - would enable deeper inquiry into the complex ways in which our field - and indeed the diversity paradigm specifically - aligns with the operations of contemporary regimes of racial subordination in the first place. I conclude with a reflection on the importance of the Journal of Critical Information and Library Studies as a potential site of critical exchange from which to articulate a sustained critique of race in and through our field.

Michelle Caswell: assistant professor of archival studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. Caswell’s work examines the ways in which traces of the past are used to build more just futures, with an emphasis on community-based archives. She is the author of the book Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014) and of more than two dozen articles. She is also the cofounder of the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saada.org), an online repository that documents and provides access to the diverse stories of South Asian Americans.

The issue of race has been evaded in the field of Library and Information Studies (LIS) in the United States through an unquestioned system of white normativity and liberal multicultural discourse. To counteract these paradigms, this paper draws from various scholarly writings about race and racial formation in order to center race as the primary axis of analysis in the reinterpretation of major theoretical issues in LIS. Beginning with an analysis of the historical construction of libraries as an institution complicit in the production and maintenance of white racial privilege and then turning toward present-day discourses surrounding diversity and multiculturalism, this paper discusses at length the epistemological forms of racism that exist in LIS.

Whiteness—an ideological practice that can extend beyond notions of racial supremacy to other areas of dominance—has permeated every aspect of librarianship, extending even to the initiatives we claim are committed to increasing diversity. This state of affairs, however, need not remain. This article examines the ways in which whiteness controls diversity initiatives in LIS, particularly in light of the application requirements set upon candidates. I then suggest ways to correct for whiteness in LIS diversity programs by providing mentorship to diverse applicants struggling to navigate the whiteness of the profession and concurrently working in solidarity to dismantle whiteness from within.