LIS needs to stop being defensive about its whiteness - Instead of insisting on compiling a list of “projects” about communities of colour, LIS needs to protect those at the margins who are being attacked. It’s necessary to be proactive and digging in to help, fight back, and do the work against white supremacy.
LIS must stop ignoring critical race theory and postcolonial/ decolonial theory - LIS needs to ask how to dismantle and decolonize its standard histories, epistemologies, and methodologies. It needs to question its stance on science, which neutralizes the intersectionalities. Scholars have challenged the neutrality of ‘science’ in LIS and one even has suggested that LIS education itself has become “technocentric, male-dominated and out of touch with the needs of practitioners”.
LIS must have separate funds for inclusive projects - LIS needs to earmark separate money for projects related to and run by communities of color, graduate students, faculty and researchers of colour. It must be separate and specifically geared to expand this range of work, give credit, give funding, give resource help.
LIS must stop writing narratives that ignore other entire fields - LIS has often had difficulty defining itself, and within these identity crises, it’s had a tendency to subsume topics, methodologies and scholarship and pass them off as LIS’ interdisciplinarity.
LIS must stop excessively citing white men - It's time to stop creating conference and panel structures that replicate white genealogies. From its inception, LIS has glorified the likes of Melvil Dewey, Eugene Garfield, John Cotton Dana.
LIS must decolonize its conferences and panels - LIS must decolonize its biggest conferences in the field and start to apportion out panels and presence by a different standard of inclusiveness. Organizing committees must find participants and panelists that represent the larger populations of their worlds.
LIS methods must not be only about tools - LIS classes must stop being just about technology. They must include a balance of discussing critical issues like race, gender, disability, multimodality, sexuality, etc.
LIS must fund developing scholars of colour - LIS training needs to directly give scholarships and particularly try to assemble groups to help potential scholars of colour to learn new skills but also these groups can allow people to talk to each other about some of the issues they see at stake and potentially find other collaborators.
LIS and the Rooney Rule - First started in the NFL as a requirement that at least 1 minority must be interviewed for every senior position. Some companies have begun using this hiring rubric, but LIS needs to institute the Rooney Rule for every position, every major grant, every major conference keynote and panel. Some disciplines, such as Communications and Sociology, is currently tackling this problem of perpetuating citational segregation and the ghettoization of research. LIS must address this as well.