Practicing Anti-Racism in Information Spaces: Notes From the Field

I was pleased to present to the School of Information's graduate studies course LIBR 508 -Information Practices in Contemporary Society.   Taught by Dr. Hannah Turner, LIBR 508 is a course that prepares students from diverse scholarly and professional backgrounds to investigate, analyze and critique the social, political, and cultural tensions surrounding contemporary information practices.  When I was asked to present to the class, I immediately wanted to share with these future practitioners not only my research into the area of EDI and libraries but also how my personal experiences as a racialized male librarian inform my practice as an academic librarian.   Here are the three themes I shared in this presentation:

• Explore the concept of diversity and intersectionality of identities
• Examining how power and privilege shaped libraries 
• Understanding microaggressions/subtle acts of exclusion in the workplace

The Importance of Inclusive Community Engagement & Equitable Participation in Programming

As a community engagement expert, having organized events over the past twenty years, it’s not difficult for me to put together a public program and speaker panel. It's second nature by now, having done it for so long. But as I reflect over the years, it was also easy to select a homogenous group, especially if a profession (such as libraries) tends to draw from a homogenous group itself.

Professional career coach Karen Catlin and author of Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces is an excellent reminder for event planners to be intentional and inclusive. She points out that there is even terminology out there. Did you know that “manel” is a term coined to describe a panel consisting only of men? It wasn’t too long ago that there were “manferences” featuring all-male speaker lineups. Another huge and ever-growing problem is the all-white panel, or “wanel.” Across industries, these exclusionary events have become ubiquitous for years.

Even more problematic is when these speakers don’t have directly lived experiences with the topic. Consider panels about challenges faced by POC or women featuring only men. Or discussions on transgender rights where all the panelists are cisgender people.

Most organizers reach out to their network to find people who can speak on the topic. If they lack diversity in their network, the likelihood is that they’re going to lack diversity at the event.  Thus, ensuring that speakers represent a variety of viewpoints and life experiences should be a goal for all organizers. We should be willing to move outside our comfort zones. Some concrete suggestions for all who organize public events by Catlin:

• Inclusive speaker lineups - Be intentional in your selection. If you’re organizing an event, ask every male you’re inviting to speak to recommend a woman, a person of colour, or a member of another underrepresented group to also speak.
• Code of Conduct – Creating and enforcing a code of conduct. Having a diversity statement (such as this one from Word Vancouver Festival) clearly concretizes and makes clear the values of the organization.
• Inclusive Content - Ensure supportive measures so that presentations showcase diversity in slide decks. For example, the simple act of using stock photos and illustrations of people from underrepresented groups makes all the difference. Just as we make sure that the presentation works smoothly on technology, the same care should be made to the presentation itself.

Of course, any gathering or meeting should be seen as a forum for diverse perspectives. Inclusion is not just for showing in a public setting. As Catlin puts it, “every one of any identity can ask whether BIPOC, women, transgender, nonbinary, and/or disabled speakers will be featured, and they can push back if not.” I value this title and as I mature as a community engagement specialist, I’m heartened that the work that I do also needs to mature beyond just planning the event, but ensuring it is meaningful to not only the organization but also makes an impactful contribution to society.

Acting With Power, Power with Empathy

Power is a part of a social contract and as Stanford Graduate School of Business professor and psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld suggests, “People have power to the extent that others consent to being controlled.”  Having been in a bureaucratic organization, I’ve seen firsthand how power influences decision-making, often letting personal and subjective impulses cut discard policy and common sense. Power doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but instead is contextual, and exists in relationships by virtue of the roles we play in each others’ lives. Power is often associated with Machiavellian ethics, ancient Legalist techniques, or Kissinger’s cynically “power is the ultimate elixir” maxim. But we should think of the power the other way: that it’s a part we play in someone else’s story.

Gruenfeld’s research and course at Stanford is sobering yet look into the art and science of power. The role of one’s power depends on who’s on the stage and what the story is. Rather than thinking of power as flowing to those who are the loudest or have the most impressive job title, power is how much we use, like actors do, in controlling the stage, which is why some struggle to step up and be taken more seriously while others are too aggressive and others too nice. While there is much to unpack in this two-decade-long research, three themes stand out for me in Acting With Power.

Responses to power – Aggressors, bureaucrats, and appeasers are three common responses to power and leadership. While aggressors are motivated to win approval from their peers to do the best of what they are asked to do in positions of power - often at the expense of those they are in charge of - bureaucrats are those who simply match expectations and follow rules to a T, being risk averse and have no aspirations to actually excel. The appeasers, in contrast, played nice and actually befriend their underlings and be liked. Do any of these traits relate to you?

Insecurity - Peeling back the darker veneer of the need for power is a story of insecurity. Whether it’s disinhibition, objectification, entitlement, megalomania, or bullying, abusers have a fundamental need for validation and stem from previous life experiences that deprived them. It’s an interesting psychoanalytical tool to examine how power corrupts, but Gruenfeld counsels that to wrangle a bully – disarm and detach from the abuse – one must reclaim one’s story and control of the plot. Realize that choices are available and we can choose how to respond to the bad actors who enter our realm. The way out is to focus on acting, on doing something, to step out of the role of victim. Choose your context carefully, police your borders, and don’t take the bait.

Culture of Beneficence – The book offers an antidote: beneficence - the developmental maturity to prioritize the welfare of the less powerful. We not only need to look for leaders with maturity whose ability to control selfish impulses while acting in ways to benefit others, but also enact those attributes ourselves. Rather than gaining power for personal advancement, a more mature approach to power is one that is based on lasting contributions to the organization and see power as a resource that is used to protect others rather than self-preservation. Those who give up their own resources to invest in group success with no promise of any return or personal benefit are often rewarded with more status. In evolution, it’s the only approach that makes sense, too.

As a visible minority from a historically underrepresented group, I’ve always felt that power has been fleeting. With context from critical race theory, one can see that power is inextricably more complicated with racialized and BIPOC actors. But I do believe that Gruenfeld’s message is a universal one: although we can all feel powerless, we always have more power than we think we do. We just need to play our roles.

The Racial Pay Gap - Much Work Remains to Be Done in Canadian Academic Libraries

“The Racial Pay Gap” indicates that there’s still much inequity in Canada’s academic libraries. While Canadian academic libraries have made progress in hiring and retaining employees from underrepresented groups, they still lack offering equitable salaries.  My ViMLoC colleague, Yanli Li’s “Racial Pay Gap: An Analysis of CARL Libraries” is an alarming study on the racial pay gap of visible minority librarians. Using data from the 8Rs CARL Libraries Practitioner Survey in 2014, Li’s research study examined the impact of race on the earnings attainment process based on a sample of 392 CARL library practitioners and found a significant salary disparity between visible minorities and nonvisible minorities. It’s really important research that deserves more attention in our profession.

The study admits that because it is limited to 29 of the larger Canadian university libraries and two federal government libraries that comprise CARL. It would be interesting to study the racial salary gap of other university and college libraries or public libraries for a more comprehensive landscape of Canadian libraries. One can surmise that the racial pay gap probably exists in these institutions based on existing research. Perhaps a more in-depth examination of hiring, promotion, and access to senior positions, particularly the discrimination against visible minorities in the library science labor market, can also be done to further understand the specific factors of the racial salary gap.

 
While academic Research Libraries (ARL) in the US made great strides in the last three decades toward decreasing the racial pay gap, the same cannot be said about Canadian (CARL) libraries and this is surprisingly embarrassing, to say the least. As one social commentator pointed out once, comparing itself to the United States is almost like a national sport in Canada. Canadians revel at their superiority over their American counterparts, but when it comes to paying disparities, it’s business as usual. It’s remarkable how far Canadian academic libraries lag behind their American counterparts. As the authors of this study comment, “[o]verall, [American] ARL libraries have done an outstanding job of fostering racial equality in pay. . . there is no longer a statistically significant wage gap between nonminority and minority librarians in ARL libraries.” In fact, American counterparts have used more tools at their disposal for analysis, too. As opposed to using basic comparisons of group means to examine the racial salary gap in Canada, American studies have adopted multiple regression models to assess multiple variables of earnings in the library science labor market. All this is to say that much work remains for not only closing the racial pay gap in CARL libraries.

The Diversity Audit Tool (DAT)

A diversity assessment can measure an organization’s progress in increasing diversity not only within its human resources functions but also in its activities in the creation of products or services. While there is no shortage of diversity audit surveys out there, one, in particular, stands out to me and that is the Diversity Audit Tool (DAT) developed at the Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University.  I like that it has been well used in examining both profit and non-profit organizations and adapted for use by many businesses over the years.

The DAT is a useful tool for assessing and identifying leading practices to increase diversity in organizations. The DAT was created by Ryerson University’s Diversity Institute, in partnership with Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance Women in Technology (CATAWiT) Forum, as part of a project on increasing women’s participation in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector, led by Wendy Cukier.  The DAT is divided into six key organizational levels or functions:

• Leadership and governance – Success of diversity initiatives depends on senior management’s commitment to diversity in addition to the integration of diversity goals as part of the organization’s strategy
• Transparent HR practices – Identifies areas where organizations can increase diversity in recruitment, performance management, promotion, education, and knowledge building as well as training and development.
• Organizational culture & Quality of Life – Flexibility and ensuring that the organizational culture is inclusive and accommodates the divergent needs of its employees.
• Metrics – Used to track and measure progress relative to diversity goals.
• Integration into the Value Chain -- Diversity in product development, marketing and customer service programs, communication (both internally and externally), media buys, philanthropy, government relations, as well as in procurement decisions.
• Developing the pipeline – Develops a future workforce that is diverse and inclusive

When compared to the other diversity lenses, the DAT is a more comprehensive and inclusive measure of diversity initiatives than other lenses, and part of the reason is that it focuses on general initiatives at the macro-level initiatives. I’m excited about adapting the DAT to my context of academic libraries and publishing organizations. What would the DAT look like for both smaller and larger organizations; profit and non-profit; Western and global firms? If you have any thoughts, please do share them with me!

Gatekeepers of Diversity in Publishing and Writing

I recently wrapped up an arts mentorship program at Centre A and worked with a diverse group of writers, and as a group, we explored the creative writing and publishing industry within the context of BIPOC artists. It’s good timing that the ​​Diversity in Canadian Writing: A 2020-2021 Snapshot has been released. UBC creative writing professors Rhea Tregebov and Kevin Chong led the project and developed the survey design. The results were not surprising: the typical respondent, based on our survey data, was: female, white, in their 60s, living in Ontario, straight, cis-gendered, and able-bodied.

In our sessions, we explored how “diversity washing” has become simply producing literary texts that publishers want for mainstream, but Canadian publishing continues to lack diversity in staffing. The next generations of writers that I worked with show that there is an emergence of diverse authors, but they are still shut out by the literary gatekeepers as there is a shortage of diverse publishers, agents, and editors. In order for BIPOC writers to flourish, they need better representation in those fields to be supported.

“There needs to be more transparency when it comes to how books are promoted and advocated for, and sometimes this has less to do with literary merit and more to do with the PR machine behind the book. This leaves a lot of us out, especially when we already face systemic barriers. We need opportunities to feature our work in more meaningful ways, beyond conversations about our identity and deeper into craft. […] It’s important that these questions are addressed by the publishing industry so that we can have transparency around what needs to be done.” 

• Gatekeepers – Those in positions of power in the sector need to be more diverse, both within publishing houses and in affiliated organizations such as reviewing outlets, festival and prize administration, literary agencies and funding institutions, by creating concrete, transparent and measurable goals around their makeup
• Smaller Presses – Create greater systemic support for them which often are key in recognizing and promoting marginalized authors.
• Training - Mandate EDI training for staff, as well as create a budget and established procedure for employment of sensitivity readers among publishers.
• No More Identity Labels – Titles by marginalized authors should be promoted, evaluated and featured in nuanced, complex and meaningful ways beyond simple identity labels. Organizations, reviewers and readers should recognize that non-dominant culture content is not of limited interest and that publications are not limited by simple identity labels. Content should not have to be trauma-generated or otherwise identity-specific in order for authors to be given a platform.
• Funding – Create funding structures for disabled writers to pay upfront for the support needed to fully participate in events.
• Prizes – Carefully review the creation of new prizes, their mandates and their selection processes to ensure better inclusivity. Moreover, residency and grant opportunities that set an arbitrary age limit for eligibility should be removed.

I’m heartened by the work that the authors of this report and I’m optimistic that it puts the lens of EDI squarely focused on the current landscape of Canadian publishing. I’m often invited to government book awards and grant juries for diversity, consult on EDI by book publishers or join EDI committees. While I’m happy to participate and make a difference, I feel that my role is really at end of the conversation, to ensure representation, but not at the beginning, such as systemic change. It’s about time that EDI is integrated so that box-ticking exercises don’t need to be left at the end, as an afterthought. When I ended my final session of the Arts Writing Mentorship Program, I was heartened that participants understood that they were the next generation of the publishing industry, whether they are writers or acquisitions editors – and had a responsibility to instill change.

Everything Will Be, Will Be in Chinatown - Honouring Asian Heritage Month

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Thank you to the NFB, for sharing this film with us.  I recall during my early days of community engagement and outreach work that the goal of Asian Heritage Month was to "celebrate" the successes of Asians in Canada.   The complicated history of Canadians of Asian heritage or mixed-race heritage has often been obsfucated by the model minority myth and problems of anti-Asian racism covered and blurred.   Since the pandemic, anti-Asian racism has skyrocketed and with one city called the anti-Asian hate crime capital of the world.    The 1907 riots in Vancouver is but one unfortunate historical incident among countless ones during the formation of the colonial settler society of North America.   This video is an excellent reminder that the history that we forget continues to haunt us in the present day.  

Innovation Does Not Spread Like a Virus – It Requires a Village

Much of what’s been popularly written is that influencers are the linchpins who spread ideas and spark revolutions. They are paid the big bucks to promote products and campaigns and hired to be brand ambassadors. For almost a century, scientists have believed that human behaviours spread just like viruses do; however, research shows that is not true. Social movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Arab Spring, and the popularity of certain social media apps, all happened geographically and incrementally through local networks first before they went viral.

Residents in Ferguson were shaping a network infrastructure both online and offline that generated awareness and local small-scale protests in towns and cities across the country which eventually vaulted Black Lives Matter to the national spotlight after the death of George Floyd. It needed time to develop as a network before it could result in social action and change.

We’ve all heard of the Oprah Winfrey effect where books skyrocket to best sellers based on Oprah's recommendations. But the research shows the influencer isn’t enough: it’s existing book club networks that enable the success to take off. One individual’s voice is insufficient.

Social and technological innovations require credibility and credibility within the network. The more social approval that happens the more people in the network are excited to adopt. Social reinforcement in the geometry of networks is the key ingredient. As such, a centralized network (the fireworks) is much less powerful than one which is distributed network (fishing nets). While a centralized network can spread information faster, like a virus, a distributed network that is bound to be slower and have redundancy, is actually going to result in a much stronger message.




Weakness of weak ties – People in a centralized network have very few if any common contacts. It’s like a firework that requires a central node but has little else beyond that. In contrast to conventional network science often highlights the utility of weak ties, the reality is that it’s quite the opposite. Rather, a fishing-net pattern fosters the most trust and intimacy – strong ties networks - friends, families, close contacts. It’s quite a counter to the 6 degrees of separation that we’re so used to hearing about.

Snowball effect – Instead of targeting “influential people,” tipping points happen when places within networks are targeted. Social movements require time to incubate and to grow a critical mass. Social reinforcement spills over from one social cluster to another. “Early adopters” snowballs into a social movement that can tip the social norms for an entire community.  As Damon Centola puts it,

“Social innovation” comes from social networks that balance coordination with creativity.

Now if we were to extend this metaphor of networks to how libraries traditionally operate, we can probably find some lessons here. Libraries are notorious for defaulting to a centralized network, partly due to the nature of their hierarchical and organizational traditions. Libraries have for the most part been crystallized in the past. Publications such as Knowledge Justice have explored how historical white supremacy has been passed down in the practices, services, curriculum, spaces, and policies with the result that the LIS field continues to be invested in the false idea of its own objectivity and neutrality. When a profession is unable to diverse workforce is one that attracts people of different cultural backgrounds, ages, genders, disabilities, religions, sexual backgrounds, etc. it risks lacking diversity of not only people but new ideas and different approaches to thinking. This is nothing new as a species' ability to adapt and survive depends on diversity.

I’m heartened that change has begun to happen at the grassroots level. Change in LIS must happen at a distributed network level for it to be sustainable. Quick fixes in the language of job advertisements or meeting a quota of token hirings aren’t effective. Rather, racialized and minority organizations such as APALA, CALA, REFORMA, ViMLoC (just to name a few) are effective in creating professional networks, mentorship programs, and ultimately an infrastructure for meaningful change.  And yes.  It will take a village.

Upstreaming Bureaucracies, Undoing the Games

Upstreaming is efforts intended to prevent problems before they happen or reduce the harm caused by those problems. Upstream is like teaching kids to swim upstream to prevent drownings. Downstreaming is reactionary, it’s easier to see and easier to measure because it’s tangible: bureaucracies love it.

when done successfully, is not tangible. It’s hard to prove what didn’t happen. Victories are stories written in data, with heroes and victims. Eventually, bureaucracies devolve into an exercise of turning into a game, or “gaming the system” for those cynical. Here are a few case studies from the book:

• Paying $40,000 for insulin when $1,000 might prevent someone from ever getting diabetes and needing insulin
• Police who hide in order to hand out driving tickets to meet a quota
• Doctors who prefer C-sections because they’re scheduled, no weekend or holiday work, and especially because they get paid more per hour than waiting for natural births

These are more extreme examples, but unfair or not, we encounter these types of what may seem anomalous affairs more than we would think or want. We can probably think of a few from our own experiences.

The library world has forever been in dire straits when it comes to using statistics to prove its value or the much-dreaded ROI. There have been studies done about how numbers don’t tell the whole story and might not always be reliable, such as this one, or this one, and of course, this one. In bureaucratic systems, where data can be only too easily used as an excuse for decision-making, upstreaming can be tempting. Data-driven decisions can (in)advertently turn into an exercise of “gaming the system.”

In some ways, Dan and Chip Heath’s book is essentially an academic study of cutting corners.  But in the end, they make an indelible argument: it’s not just gaming the system, it’s also defiling your mandate.

Decentering Asian Canadian Studies in the Global Diaspora

 

At an event that promoted intercultural dialogue and celebrated fusion culture, I remember one out-of-town visitor asked what is the point of celebrating “Asian Canadian.” I was taken aback by the question, but upon years of reflection, perhaps the question is worthwhile to ponder. It’s unique to me as someone who’s familiar and identifies with “Asian Canadian,” but to another individual from a different part of the world, it might evoke different emotions. It took a number of years for us to figure this out, but the LiterASIAN Festival, a literary festival that celebrates and highlights Asian Canadian writers, decided for the first time to shine the spotlight outside of Canada on writers of Asian heritage from across the world.

As festival director, I explored this idea of “GlobalAsian: from Grassroots to Globalization” and thanks to a virtual setup, was able to feature authors and cultural activists. It leads to my reading of Chris Lee and Christine Kim’s ​​Inter-referencing Asian Canadian Studies: imagining diasporic possibility outside the (Canadian) nation as they ask critically, what would it mean if Asian Canadian Studies repositions itself towards Asia while decentring the West?

“By shifting the poles of discussion from the overly abstract distinction between Asia and the West to linked spaces and societies such as Seoul and Singapore or Delhi and Bangkok, new forms of knowledge are generated as we investigate local problems and draw comparisons among them” (Lee & Kim, 305)

Asian Canadian Studies has always been a comparative project that looks “outwards and engages with other diasporas within and beyond the nation-state,” and I’m heartened that LiterASIAN has matured and evolved to explore the literary traditions of “Asian Canadian” writing to the shared experiences around the world. The anti-Asian racism and sentiments around the world these past three years is yet again a central theme of this year’s LiterASIAN festival and another stark reminder that racism, just like a global pandemic, is a global phenomenon not siloed and contained within the borders of any nation-state.   I hope to see you at the festival, where we will be finding our voices, telling our stories.