Antiracist Library and Information Science: Racial Justice and Community: Volume 52

In Virginia, former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder accused the state’s library agency of racism for “its slow pace in processing and publicly presenting records from his tenure as the nation’s first elected Black governor” (Associated Press, 2020). The State Librarian responded that this was just a lapse in protocols and framed it as a budget issue and staff turnover. However, “Library of Virginia has been processing papers from his gubernatorial successors before finishing work on his” (Associated Press, 2020). Recently, the Alabama State Department of Archives and History acknowledged their participation in systemic racism, epistemicide, and their history of privileging White voices over those of Alabama African-Americans.

Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a way of knowing (Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, & Bertolini, 2020). Conceptualization and analytic application of epistemicide has an established tradition in a number of social science fields, but information scientists have only recently acknowledged epistemicide (Oliphant, 2021; Patin et al., 2020; Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, Bertolini, & Grimm, 2021). Building from our recent identification of the existence of epistemicide within the IS field (Patin et al., 2020), this work challenges the information field to become an epistemologically just space working to correct the systemic silencing of certain ways of knowing.

This chapter examines the four types of epistemic injustices—testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular—occurring within libraries and archives and argues for a path forward to address these injustices within our programs, services, and curricula. It looks to digital humanities and to reevaluations of professional standards and LIS education to stop epistemicide and its harms. This chapter demonstrates how to affirm the power and experience of Black lives and highlight their experiences through the careful acquisition, collection, documentation, and publishing of relevant historical materials. Addressing epistemicide is critical for information professionals because we task ourselves with handling knowledge from every field. There has to be a reckoning before the paradigm can truly shift; if there is no acknowledgment of injustice, there is no room for justice.

The purpose of this study is to explain how library and information science (LIS) with a focus on libraries, librarians and LIS associations, developed into becoming a racist institution that supports white supremacy. The central argument is that a philanthropic organization, the Carnegie Foundation, which led the eugenics movement, captured LIS and with the assistance of the American Library Association (ALA), created a library ecosystem that was structurally racist in order to maintain the power of the elites. This study is an exegetical analysis that is explored through the lens of a Christian spirituality conceptual framework. Some tentative solutions to remedy this problem are suggested.

In the spring of 2021, the author embarked on a soulful exercise of teaching without bounds. The author’s vision was to create a communal classroom environment exploring Black feminist and critical race dimensions of the information stratophere. The course deceptively titled Information Justice & Community Engagement, surveyed contemporary texts that confront and critique the mechanizations of information studies that sustain White hegemonic norms. Each session was an exercise in reflection and creative expression. The author encourged students to name instruments of oppression, crtique information systems, and devise ways to dismantle racism though informed praxis. To accomplish this, the author prioritized intimacy, trust, and community building in the classroom space. The shared desire for the collective learning experience became love and liberation. Through this experience, the author learned that the teacher, as illuminated by bell hooks (1994) is more than instructor, but is truly engrossed in the work of freedom. This proposition, inspired by Paulo Friere’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, offers clarity in the sacred, spiritual, and soulful exercise of learning with a reciprocal benefit to teacher and student. Using personal narrative and learning products this chapter will present the journey to developing an anti-racist consciouness in teaching and learning in a library and information studies (LIS/IS) course.

The long-entrenched belief that “white” equates to inherent racial superiority is intrinsically linked to “racism and pseudo-science used to justify slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and genocide” (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, n.d.). This widely propagated belief plagues American society maintaining disparities in wealth, health, education, housing, and employment, and disproportionately marginalizing African and Hispanic Americans. The resultant inequities and systemic racial disparities in school practices, policies, and institutional structures sabotage efforts to mediate the inaccuracies of America’s history. School libraries and librarians can provide the materials, resources, and expertise to counter erroneous notions of White superiority while affirming all students’ positive racial identities.

In late 2020, a group of librarians at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) came together to pursue the design of a diversity audit for monograph collections. After initial research and reflection, the authors realized that evaluating their existing collection on its racial or ethnic representation would not only be problematic, but also unnecessary, because it was clear to the authors that their collections are dominated by white voices and perspectives. How could they be otherwise? They were built for a primarily white audience as part of a system of knowledge production dominated by whiteness. The authors questioned whether the framework of a “diversity audit” really addressed their goal of a systematic anti-racist approach to collections management. This chapter details the authors’ process of rejecting the diversity audit framework for a large-scale review of monographs in a large academic library collection in the United States. It reviews the literature regarding diversity audits, as well as background on whiteness studies, as it leads to the authors’ rationale for instead developing a workbook for collection selectors. This workbook will position collection management practices within the white institutional presence (WIP) conceptual framework developed by scholar Diane Gusa (2010).

This chapter, inspired by the authors’ experiences with racism and sexism in higher education leadership and frontier Protestantism, will interrogate the leadership models found in library and information science (LIS) through the lens of Judeo-Christian religious social structures and terminology, along with an examination of transitional and transformational leadership frameworks, to suggest a more productive and less abusive leadership model, equitable and inclusive to those who are not white men.

Present-day courts, practitioners, and scholars continue to cite to and rely upon cases involving slavery and enslaved persons to construe, interpret, and apply common-law principles of property, contract, family, tort, and other areas of the law. Often a case’s connections to slavery are not acknowledged in citations. This erasing of context causes institutional harms by both embedding slave-based legal analysis in American legal structures and condoning the detrimental impacts of slavery in society. The deleterious effects of slavery persist through citations to cases involving enslaved persons to support such prosaic present-day issues as warranties on window glass. Slavery may no longer be legal, but its long shadow persists in citations and, thereby, is embedded in the information systems informing the legal profession. The information infrastructures that categorize case law and inform legal research ingrain racism in the American legal system by perpetuating and masking case law connections to slavery and enslaved persons. The legal profession has recently been criticized for the continued citation to cases that state good law or persuasive authority but are rooted in the institution of slavery. This chapter builds on this important research and contributes a necessary element to the discussion – namely how legal information infrastructures contribute to continuing citation to slave cases and how the library and information science (LIS) field can help institute change and promote racial justice.

This chapter provides a glimpse of an ongoing journey of library and information science (LIS) educators and social justice advocates speaking up and speaking out of efforts to decenter white privilege and dismantle its socially ingrained underpinnings that all take for granted in a typical southern university. The narrative is creatively developed to include scenarios of real and/or imagined situations that correlate white privilege in an LIS program with entrenchment within the grips of an emerging American academy. Insights might resonate with incidents of white supremacy and spread of white oppressions experienced nationwide in the entirety of the LIS professions and beyond. The chapter also develops scenarios in the use of collegiality as a weapon that white administrators and LIS faculty (along with those from other disciplines) use to silence efforts that challenge their white privilege and decenter their unfair and unjust infrastructural components in the entrenched academic institution.

Public schools should be educational havens free of religious affiliation. Students and educators are encouraged to think critically, racial injustices and institutional bigotry promote civic understanding and participation, and value diversity of thought and experience. Unfortunately, and especially in the past three years, Nebraska public schools have endured a spate of racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic incidents. Some districts have banned children’s books about racial injustice. Others have failed to diversify their curriculum to include LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) representation or have asked their teachers not to mention “controversial” topics such as immigration. These responses have exacerbated the problem rather than mitigating it, which has harmed marginalized students, families, educators, teacher educators, and librarians in the area. Teacher educators work hard to train teacher candidates and future librarians to advocate for their students and their communities. However, when they become teachers and librarians in our local schools, this work is blocked, and they face traumatic consequences that cause them to burn out and leave the profession early. This is especially true of our Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) teacher candidates, librarians, and teachers. This chapter will describe how educational leaders have failed in their leadership and how some BIPOC teacher educators advocated publicly and got into “good trouble” for themselves and their students who teach in their communities. Teacher educators should not stay in the ivory tower; they have a responsibility to be public intellectuals who have an active role in the community where students teach to model what they teach students to do.

The policing of Black male bodies is not uncommon to America. Less known is Black male bodies policed in public libraries. Having worked at the Nashville Public Library’s Hadley Park branch, I saw behaviors and stereotypes played out on both sides of the public service desk. Hyper masculine behavior, homophobia, mental illness, and staff safety were issues that had to be faced by me and my staff. The quandary was my being a Black man who understood the ramifications of a police call or verbal exchange. Putting a Black man in a “problem” branch in a Black neighborhood was not by accident. Administrative choices were based upon racist and sexist tropes that Black men are familiar with dysfunctional environments of drugs and prostitution and don’t need a sense of safety like any other human beings.

The chapter presents womanist musings about the author’s journey and growth as a Black woman scholar-advocate committed to socially just and antiracist scholarship. Using autoethnography, the author has synthesized her personal experience as a mother of a child diagnosed with cancer, with her professional endeavors as the founder Golden Moms (a peer support organization where majority of the mothers and their children are White) and with my work as doctoral student, to challenge White privilege in the academy.

This chapter will focus on the ways in which publishing in the library and information science (LIS) field has demonstrated to be a career obstacle for the author, a Latina scholar. Academic work is defined as a three-legged stool in which the three legs are defined as research, teaching, and service. Here, the author presents a self-reflection as a Latina in academia related to her experiences while publishing topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in LIS. The author presents specific experiences which have hindered her progress as a scholar especially those related to the push back she has received on the research topic matter and the positionality statements which “outs” her as a Spanish-speaking Latina and might even “out” her identity to reviewers. The author’s goal with this chapter is to shed light into some of the issues that make for a treacherous path to career progression in academia for scholars who belong to minoritized groups, but it is seldom discussed in the field.

This chapter historicizes the social construction of racism in Brazilian society and its relation to the development of the library and information science (LIS) field. It is a theoretical-reflective research built on the scientific literature of the field of LIS and related areas that aims at reflecting on social justice in Brazilian libraries and creating strategies to confront institutional racism. The authors develop five main points to understand Brazilian racism: the myth of racial democracy, structural and institutionalized racism, the whitening ideology, whiteness, and the epistemicide of black knowledge. The authors then discuss racism and the promotion of white supremacy in library teaching and professional action in libraries. Black US American and Black Brazilian Librarianship movements show that the activism and political action of black librarians advance the development of informational counter-narratives. Finally, the authors recommend three strategies for social, racial, and informational justice in the LIS field: including ethnic-racial studies in basic university courses curricula; building diverse, inclusive collections that account for ethnic-racial themes and authors; and considering “Pretuguese” keywords while indexing, in order to counter exclusion and promote epistemic repair. The authors conclude by advocating for these strategies to steer LIS professional and educational spheres toward contributing to forward an anti-racist society.

This book chapter represents a case study relating to the challenges that immigrants encounter in their host countries and the approaches they adopt to acquire better life circumstances. The researcher implemented a qualitative research method by performing thematic analysis of the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (ACIJ) website, social media sites, and other related websites. ACIJ is a social justice organization that assists and advocates for immigrant rights. This analysis utilized the Strategic Diversity Manifesto framework (SDM) to analyze the existent communications of immigrants who arrive in Alabama from different backgrounds to determine whether the ACIJ is applying equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) and also to determine if it is allowing these immigrants full access to its’ services and resources. Applying critical race theory (CRT) to dismantle the problems of white hegemonic racism, which is socially and historically constructed and represents cultural power in the American community. This project offers a valuable contribution to Library and Information Science (LIS) by enabling these migrants to express their voices; obtain inclusion that dismantle the hierarchical structures; and fight against violence and power, leading to improved life experiences in Alabama and to a substantial change within the Alabamian community through boosting racial and social justices.

This chapter introduces the construct of “white pricks” defined as vaccines of moral awakenings to inoculate against racialized trauma in a white-centered majority in library and information science (LIS) education and challenge its hegemonic power, privilege, and oppressions. In keeping with the theme of the book, one male “voice” of color from the margins of a predominantly white-female majority provides a strategic approach to operationalize social justice toward antiracist praxis and decenter white privilege in a professional association’s leadership networks of LIS educators. The narrative also highlights ways to integrate the American Library Association’s ninth principle recently included in its Code of Ethics beyond “lip-service” via social justice actions to change imbalanced power dynamics and discard systemic enactment of dysfunctional behaviors, practices, and policies.

Academic librarians have often been hesitant to foreground real-time engagement with social justice in our public facing library guides. The guides, more often than not, serve merely to provide access points to “academic” materials and traditional news sources. Perhaps there is a different path. This chapter suggests that engagement with Twitter can point patrons toward the real conversations happening outside (and sometimes inside) academia that are missed when we rely on traditional sources. The critical engagement with social justice issues such as race and technology, or migrant justice, is happening right in front of our eyes on Twitter. This chapter discusses how adding Twitter feeds to library guides can engage libraries (and our students) in critical conversations around racism and the foregrounding of traditionally marginalized voices. A problem with traditional library guides is that they center the voice and opinion of the librarian curating the guide. Adding in Twitter feeds can complicate this. Adding Twitter feeds from traditionally marginalized voices centers those voices in real time as opposed to centering the voice and authority of the, often white, librarian initially creating the guide. This centering occurs because while the librarian initially chooses which feeds to feature, the feeds are continuously updating in real time. This chapter reflects on why this centering of non-white voices is important, how it engages the counterpublic discourse on Twitter, and how doing so can push us all to be a little more critical, a little more subversive, in our work.

This essay is a call for American people to unite around a common cause to end systemic racism through honest dialog. Critical Race Theory (CRT), which was created to reveal the truth about history, can be used to solve the problem of racism in America, help end racial oppression, and create justice and equity for all Americans.

In a review of the tragedy that occurred in Charlottesville Virginia on August 11, 2017, this essay discusses the public perspectives and the view of public culture for historical artifacts and monuments, especially those whose pasts do not align with the views of our community today. Based on the renaming of a public park and removal of a Confederate soldier statue, protestors made up of hate groups claiming loss of heritage and counter protestors converged on the site. As tempers escalated, a protestor drove his car into the counter protesters where multiple people were injured, one person was killed, and two responding police officers also lost their lives. Historically, and in other countries, the removal of monuments whose imagery and historical meaning are painful to the community today is a commonplace practice. Within the United States, however, this leads to protests, hate groups that claim these artifacts as their heritage, counter protests, and painful outcomes with harsh repercussions including loss of precious life, as occurred in Charlottesville. Libraries, and other GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), have a key responsibility for educating their communities on the true history of these artifacts. This outreach work is especially vital in communities where laws have been enacted that disallow the removal or relocation of monuments, even those whose effigies inspire hate, as is the case for 90 Civil War statues in North Carolina. This essay reviews key literature, as well as personal experiences through blog posts, relating to cultural heritage and its relationship to public culture. This review is done to identify productive measures that libraries can take to break the archaic perspective of being neutral and becoming social justice advocates for their communities.