Turning from "Being to Doing" Anti-Racism As Action at Work by Iones Damasco

I highly respect Ione T Damasco for the work she's done in the area of equity, diversity, and inclusion.   Her talk urges us to view anti-racism as action, rather than using the word anti-racist as an identity.   While she questions whether we can change how we define organizational culture in library workplaces be an example of anti-racist action, she frames the challenge that certain hallmarks of white supremacist culture inform our notions of professionalism and workplace norms.  

There are many hurdles.  Quite likely, I won't see great change within my lifetime both within my profession and certainly in society.   I wish to be more optimistic, but based on the experience in my brief fifteen years in this profession and my volunteer work in the community, I've just seen it all and the tokenism and performativity.   One of Ione's message is that having mentorship and a supportive network is necessary to navigate the uncertainties and injustices that racialized and (in)visible minorities face in the workplace.   I've been part of a number of mentorship programs, offering my wisdom and support to graduate students and new information professionals.   I've been heartened at how I've been able to make a difference in their lives and how they've been able to use my advice and person experiences (gathered through years of trial by error).   From We Here, to ViMLoC, to the many ethnic caucuses, change will happen, though at a glacial pace.    

Reviewing "Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies Through Critical Race Theory"

I’ve been working with the Visible Minority Librarians Network of Canada (ViMLoC) in creating a journal club that highlights pieces in the BIPOC/diversity LIS literature. There are some books that I hold tightly both physically and intellectually long after reading, and Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory is one of those titles that I had to read, re-read, and reference in my research. 

 Knowledge Justice features some of the strongest voices of BIPOC writers who are both academic scholars and library practitioners, composed of fourteen chapters that each draw from critical race theory (CRT) in countering foundational principles, values, and assumptions of objectivity and neutrality, long-cherished in Library and Information Science and Studies (LIS) teaching and practices. While it’s no surprise to anyone that LIS is a predominantly white profession, the systemic inequities that historically marginalized groups face are often concealed behind colour-blind policies. 

 With a focus on the counterstory, the book deconstructs the comfortable and clean history of the library and archival collections, scholarly communication, hierarchies of power, epistemic supremacy, children's librarianship, teaching and learning, digital humanities, and the education system, Knowledge Justice challenges LIS to reimagine itself by throwing off the weight and legacy of white supremacy and reaching for racial justice. They propel CRT to center stage in LIS, to push the profession to understand and reckon with how white supremacy affects practices, services, curriculum, spaces, and policies.  I'm deeply moved by the stories shared in this book.   They're poignant, emotional, and at times, and impassioned.   If there's a title that I would recommend for 2021: this is it.  

It's Time To #DecolonizeLIS

I was invited to take part in a panel as part of the Canadian Academic Research Libraries (CARL) Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion webinar series.   It was an exhilarating panel discussion and rewarded me with a lot of deep reflection over my years as a racialized librarian.   In my preparation to the talk, I had re-read Dorothy Kim's article piece, “How to DecolonizeDH: Actionable Steps for an Antifascist DH” is one of the best I’ve come across addressing the historic white supremacy in DH and what some DH scholars have proposed to initiatives and issues with openness, race, disability, LGBTQ, feminist, and other kinds of non-normative bodies in the field.    Dorothy is a professor of English, and is one of my favourite DH’ers.   In this article, she outlines a set of practical steps to #decolonizedh, to make it less white, to begin working on an antifascist DH.   I thought it would be interesting to adapt her proposal to LIS.  What if we were to integrate her ideas from one very white field to another?   How do we de-whiten LIS?   Here's what I came up with, with inspiration from Dorothy.

“If you build it, they will come” is a myth - LIS needs to be more intentional in recruiting and retaining scholars of colour and scholars working by incentivizing their presence.

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.