How LIS Upholds White Supremacy (And What To Do About It)

[This is text of the closing keynote I gave for the CORE Forum on November 20, 2020. Apologies in advance for any misquotes, typos, or missing punctuation, etc.]

Hi everyone, I hope you and yours are doing well and staying as healthy as can be in these chaotic times. Thank you for joining me and taking time out of your day to listen to my talk today. I hope you find it worthwhile. Thank you to Berika and the rest of the CORE Forum Planning Committee for inviting me to speak and for organizing this virtual conference. I appreciate the enormous amount of effort and labor that went into putting together something on this scale.

I’d like to start with a short meditation to help ground us in this virtual space and time.

Plant your feet firmly on the floor. Close your eyes when you’re ready. Take a deep breath in and let it out slowly. Let go of the moment before and settle into this moment. Feel yourself pulling energy up from the earth beneath you. If it’s helpful, you can visualize it as a glowing light. Feel the light or energy spreading up your legs, into your pelvis, up the front of your torso, up your back. Feel it in your shoulders and down your arms. Your neck. Your face. Behind your eyes and up through the top of your head. Take one more cleansing breath and let it out slowly. When you’re ready, open your eyes.

Land acknowledgement

Now, I’d like to recognize and offer gratitude to the indigenous peoples who cared for this land I am on today. I am on the unceded ancestral territory of the Massachusetts and Wampanoag peoples, which is still home to many Native American people, including the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. I also want to acknowledge the free people forcibly kidnapped from Africa in order to be enslaved on these lands. As a Chinese American settler, it’s important for me to acknowledge the history of violence, disease, and genocide that led to the colonization of this land and my eventual inhabitance of it.

One thing I’m thinking about with regard to this is how to behave as a settler on these lands and I’d ask you to do the same for the lands you are settlers on and how you might behave. This slide is by no means the first or last word on land acknowledgements or what it means to be a settler on these lands, but just a starting or continuing point. I particularly want to call your attention to the fact that the United States government is continuing its legacy of forcible removal and hostile actions with a complete disregard for the sovereignty of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. This is the same tribe that welcomed the Pilgrims in the 1600s, and they are at risk of losing what is left of their homelands due to a determination made by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Join me in showing up for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe by signing their petition asking Congress to protect its reservation lands and support the "Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Reservation Reaffirmation Act (HR.312).

I’d like to take a moment of silence for Layleen Polanco, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Riah Milton, Priscilla Slater, Brayla Stone, and Breonna Taylor.

We must continue to demand justice for them while also advocating to abolish prisons and defund the police, particularly as libraries often function in concert with the police to endanger the lives of Black people in those spaces. 

You can find out more about how to do that by following the links on this slide, which I”ll make available after this presentation.

We will be dealing with some heavy topics today, like racism, white supremacy, and how we’re complicit in those systems, so some difficult feelings and discomfort might arise and I just want you to be aware of that before we get started. One of the reasons I like to begin my talks with meditation is to connect our minds and bodies, because when we talk about difficult topics, it’s important to be aware of how that shows up in your body. Your jaw may tighten, your shoulders may rise closer to your ears, your stomach may be in turmoil. Pay attention to your body so you notice when those things happen and when you feel yourself tightening up, take one or two slow, deep breaths and try to release that tension. If you’re watching with other people, feel free to check in with each other at difficult points in this talk. In fact, if you’re a person of color, I would say maybe give yourself a break, because this might be a lot to hear. I certainly had to take breaks from writing this, as the facts are depressing as hell. And I’ll say while it’ll seem like I’m taking you down a dark path, there is light at the end of the tunnel!

I realize that b/c of this format, attendees can add their questions in at any time, so I’d like to provide some guidelines on that before I get started. At the end of my talk, I’d like to use progressive stacking, a process I learned from Ozy Aloziem where I will prioritize questions from BIPOC and answer those before I answer questions from white folx. So in the Q&A, please self-identify as BIPOC when you add your question. Second, I’m borrowing Dr. Eve Tuck’s genius approach to Q&A’s to prevent violent questions, which means that I’m asking you, as the audience, to peer review your own questions. So before adding a question to the queue,

  1. Make sure it is really a question;

  2. Make sure you aren’t actually trying to say that you should have given this talk;

  3. Figure out if the question needs to be asked and answered in front of everyone;

  4. Remember that I am doing a lot of work, so figure out if your question is asking me to do the work that really you, the question-asker, should do.

For this keynote, I’ve borrowed from previous talks I’ve given and added some things I hope will build on the conversation. I also want to express my gratitude towards the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color contributors to Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies, a forthcoming collection I co-edited with Jorge López-McKnight and towards the BIPOC community that joined the first Critical Race Theory workshop I co-facilitated also with Jorge through the We here Community School. Their work and our conversations have deeply influenced my thinking for this talk, so I’d like to shout them out here. 

Thank you to the book contributors Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni & Tlingit), Jennifer Brown, Anastasia Chiu, Nicholae Cline (Coharie), Anthony Dunbar, Anne Cong-Huyen, Isabel Espinal, Fobazi M. Ettarh, Jennifer A. Ferretti, April M. Hathcock, Todd Honma, Harrison W. Inefuku, Sarah R. Kostelecky (Zuni Pueblo), Kafi Kumasi, Sujei Lugo, Marisa Méndez-Brady, Myrna E. Morales, Lalitha Nataraj, Vani Natarajan, Antonia Olivas, Kush Patel, Torie Quiñonez, Maria Rios, Tonia Sutherland, Shaundra Walker, Stacie Williams, Rachel E. Winston. 

And to the workshop participants, Berlin Loa, Jina DuVernay, Lizeth Zepeda, Ayshea Khan, Denisse Solis, Tamara Rhodes, Christina Gavin, Talia Guzman Gonzalez, Kaiya Schroeder, Mimosa Shah, Sajni Lacey, Lalitha Nataraj, Diana Dominguez, Zayden Tethong, Jamia Williams, Olivia Baca, Maria Cunningham, Brenda de Santiago, Shannon Jones, and Shao Yuan Chong.

And of course, a huge thank you to Jorge López-McKnight, who also gave me helpful feedback on this talk.

How often do you acknowledge your identities, your positionality, and your privilege and how it colors your perspective? 

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, but have lived all over this US nation-state. I am the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. I am Chinese American. I am a heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied woman. I was an academic librarian, and while I no longer work at an institution my employment still relies on institutions. All of these elements have influenced my talk in some way and are important to the lens through which I wrote this talk. 

I believe in the power and promise of libraries. It’s why I became a librarian and it continues to drive the work that I do now. However, library and information “science” as a field and a profession has not delivered on a lot of what it has promised us: claims that I’m sure many of you have heard before - leveling the educational playing field, providing access to information for all, upholding democracy and protecting intellectual freedom. This promise has not been fulfilled for all of us in this country now known as America. This is not a mistake or an accidental oversight. This is purposeful and intentional. 

LIS, like most US-based institutions, is built on a foundation of White Supremacy, and is fueled by racism, capitalism, sexism, and other systems of oppression that maintain a specific racial hierarchy where whiteness is the norm, the moral code, and the law. It is the underlying architecture of our institutions. 

 Frances Lee Ansley gave this definition:

“By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.” (Ansley 1989, 1024)

It is a system of control within which we all live and have been indoctrinated into. Let’s delve more deeply into Ansley’s definition to really understand what it is they’re saying and directly connect it to LIS. 

“whites overwhelmingly control:

  1. power and material resources 

  2. conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, 

  3. and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted.”

We can see all of these elements show up in a number of ways. First, control power and material resources: COVID-19 has only exacerbated many of the inequities already existing in society, disproportionately affecting Brown and Black communities. On Nov 12, the American Public Media Research Lab reported that Black and Indigenous Americans now experience a COVID-19 death toll exceeding 1 in 1,000 nationally and Black, Indigenous and Latino Americans all have a COVID-19 death rate of 3x or more White Americans, who experience the lowest age-adjusted rates. 

These high numbers are a result of these same communities dealing with the normal, everyday violent racism they’ve always faced: housing inequality, food apartheid, lack of access to health care, environmental degradation, educational and economic inequality. 

You may wonder what this has to do with libraries. The profession has long despaired of the lack of diversity in our field but for the most part does not connect this lack to the long list of racialized structures I just mentioned. In fact, you may have stopped listening while I read out that list, because it became too depressing. So I’ll mention them again: housing inequality, food apartheid, lack of access to health care, environmental degradation, educational and economic inequality, AND higher rates of infection and death from covid-19. Imagine living in that reality and then imagine even having the energy to think of librarianship as a profession. Imagine living in that reality, trying to go to the library for information or community or find a fun book to take your mind off things, and then being told you can’t enter or having the cops called on you for being Black in a library. The library is no different from all of those other institutional structures - education, health care, housing, etc. The resources available in a library are restricted by those in power and restricted those who fit within the mold of whiteness. But what is whiteness?

In Critical Race scholar Cheryl Harris’ powerful essay, “Whiteness as Property,” she details how whiteness was constructed in order to justify subjugating Black and Indigenous people and then used to retain and secure power for white people. She writes that “whiteness--the right to white identity as embraced by the law--is property, if by “property” one means all of a persons’ legal rights” (1993, 280). So here we’re talking about whiteness as a bundle of rights that are given to people culturally and socially deemed to be white. 

Her concept of whiteness as property is based on two ideas, as delineated by Dumas and ross (2016, 421): 

  1. Black people are a form of property that white people are entitled to and

  2. All land belongs to white people, Indigenous peoples are not entitled to property or to even be on property. 

In other words, the enslavement of Black people (slavery) and the genocide and erasure of American Indians (settler colonialism) were deemed necessary to build these United States of America. And know that this country’s colonization did not stop with these lands, the US has continued its legacy of colonization all the way up to the current day, where we now occupy Hawaiian lands and Boriken lands, which you may know as Puerto Rico, and which were both annexed in 1898. As you may have realized, this particular part of history is deemphasized and hidden in our education system. These are things we have had to unearth and recognize were hidden from us on purpose. These histories have been buried in order for whites to overwhelmingly control material resources, to return to Ansley’s definition of white supremacy. 

The lack of demographic diversity in libraries and archives and the lack of diversity in our library and archival collections has to do with the historical, systemic racism and settler colonialism that pervade our society. It has to do with the way white settlers systemically erased Native American cultures, knowledges, languages, and Native Americans themselves from this land. It has to do with how African people were brought over to this country to be enslaved and the property of white settlers. A common response to this is well, that was hundreds of years ago, that has nothing to do with the present day. Unfortunately, it does. All of that violence, genocide, and erasure became the foundations of this nation-state that we now call America. They shaped the underlying ideology of this country, which was then used for the foundations for all of our systems, structures, and institutions. 

Our libraries and archives sit on stolen land and the indigenous peoples of that land are usually erased from any historical or current understandings of that land. This means that our institutions, and by extension, we as library and archive workers, are participating in ongoing settler colonialism, but we’re just not acknowledging it. These erasures enable these institutions to hold tight to the idea that they are somehow “good,” that their mission, as the American Library Association’s website puts it, of “enhancing learning and ensuring access to information for all” (ALA 1876) absolves them of any guilt. Nor is it acknowledging that access is clearly not for all. 

You may hear echoes of vocational awe, the concept Fobazi Ettarh coined to describe:

“the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique” (2018).

And you would be exactly right. By making it somehow bad to critique libraries, and by extension, librarians, we protect the status quo, which is exactly what white supremacy wants us to do. 

And let’s not forget how libraries get funded or what we spend our money on. Presently, in 2020, many universities refuse to divest from the prison system, fossil fuels, the military, and other colonial and racist sources of profit and many public library systems heavily invest in their local police departments. When I still worked at an academic library, this is something I struggled with once I began to recognize where my paycheck was coming from. Just because we work in libraries or the information field doesn’t mean we’re removed from capitalism, racism, white supremacy or the patriarchy. On the contrary, we’re steeped in it.

I want to take a moment for you to sit with that because it’s heavy, particularly now in these COVID-19 times. It is difficult to realize that something you once believed in is intricately connected to and ultimately relies on systems of oppression to operate. It is difficult to wrestle with how we are complicit in these systems, but that is necessary in order to begin dismantling them. 

Now let’s move to the part of the definition that talks about conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread. One of the ways this shows up is in the core values that our profession has proclaimed to care about. ALA’s website states that the core values of librarianship are meant to quote, “define, inform and guide our professional practice.” CORE Forum shares some of the same values as ALA, but neither organization mentions the words race, racial, or racism. This is again, purposeful. There is a reason behind this concealment. Paraphrasing CRT scholar Devon Carbado, colorblind intersectionality refers to instances in which whiteness is part of a person’s identity but is neither expressed nor referred to as an intersectional dimension of who they are. These core values of librarianship are really white core values that allow, again to quote Ansley’s definition of white supremacy, “relations of white dominance and non-white subordination to be daily reenacted.” It lulls us into complacency and complicity.

Let’s begin with librarianship’s fundamental value of the public good and consequently, its institutional responsibility to the American public. ALA states that “it reaffirms the following fundamental values of libraries in the context of discussing outsourcing and privatization of library services. These values include that libraries are an essential public good and are fundamental institutions in democratic societies.”

For libraries to be a public good, that would mean they provide “a service…without profit to all members of a society, either by the government or a private individual or organization,” according to Oxford’s English dictionary. And yet, we know this does not happen indiscriminately. Many others have written about historical and more recent incidents, like at my alma mater, Barnard College, where Black people have been forcibly kept from entering libraries or using library services.

What is the service a library provides that’s so special that causes library workers to commit violence against Black folx? Let’s return to ALA’s statement about public good, libraries “are fundamental institutions in democratic societies.” Ah, so libraries are presumably fundamental to democracy. Turns out democracy is also one of ALA’s core values of librarianship, so let’s look at that definition.

“A democracy presupposes an informed citizenry. The First Amendment mandates the right of all persons to free expression, and the corollary right to receive the constitutionally protected expression of others. The publicly supported library provides free and equal access to information for all people of the community the library serves.”

So the library is supposed to provide free AND equal access to information for ALL people. It is an educational resource. Public libraries are supposed to help keep the citizenry informed. That’s part of what we, including Black people, pay taxes for. But if libraries are keeping out Black folx, logic here would say that libraries don’t want Black people to be informed, they don’t want them to be a part of a democratic society. And, as a fundamental institution in American society, libraries are operating as a tool of the American government to help the White Supremacy project of disenfranchisement. They’re just not saying it explicitly. 

However, libraries have always been good at hiding behind their supposed neutrality by stating that they care about access for all and intellectual freedom, while at the same time, serving the interests of racial domination. Paraphrasing Gary Peller’s words, “institutions claim to be neutral and objective, which allows them to exert a power over people.” In order to be seen as neutral and objective, LIS has to hide what it is doing, what it is erasing. White supremacy requires these conditions to thrive, to maintain its system of control. 

Let’s look at diversity, which ALA states that it “strives to reflect the nation’s diversity by providing a full spectrum of resources and services to the communities we serve.” From the examples above, we’ve seen that the communities we serve refers to non-Black communities and from our collections, we see that the full spectrum of resources refers to white resources. And as David James Hudson has written, “Diversity’s preoccupation with demographic inclusion and individual behavior competence has...left little room in the field for substantive engagement with race as a historically contingent phenomenon” (2017).

In their Knowledge Justice chapter, Jennifer Brown, Nicholae Cline (Coharie), and Marisa Méndez-Brady write about the problem with treating diversity as a commodity in academic libraries:

“Ignoring whiteness paves the way for diversity to become a commodity. Diversity becomes commoditized when it becomes measured, accessed, and used to justify racist structures and behaviors. Diversity work literally becomes valuable to the white institutions so they can avoid things like lawsuits and public outcries” (2021, 99). 

We’ve seen this in the ways that our libraries and archives put out statements on Black Lives Matter, but do not take into account the ways in which they are harming their own Black staff members or the Black communities they supposedly serve. We see this in the surge of antiracist reading lists by libraries, labor that is often put on the library workers of color who work there, without a list of action items that the libraries will take to combat antiracism, which both Dr. Nicole Cooke, David James Hudson, and others have written and spoken about. Libraries are all about the performance of antiracism but of course if we accuse our institutions of that, we’ll be the ones who are seen as the problem.

Tema Okun put together a list of Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture in organizations, one of which is fear of open conflict. Okun describes this as, “people in power are scared of conflict and try to ignore it or run from it, when someone raises an issue that causes discomfort, the response is to blame the person for raising the issue rather than to look at the issue which is actually causing the problem, an over-emphasis on being polite and equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line. I’ve definitely felt this one because one of my favorite things to do is challenge the status quo, in case you couldn’t tell. White supremacy does not want its supremacy challenged and most especially not by BIPOC. 

Another white supremacy culture characteristics is Paternalism. Okun describes some examples of this, “Those with power think they are capable of making decisions for and in the interests of those without power” and “often don't think it is important or necessary to understand the viewpoint or experience of those for whom they are making decisions.” More to the point, “those without power do not really know how decisions get made and who makes what decisions, and yet they are completely familiar with the impact of those decisions on them.” 

An easy example to point to for libraries is deciding what goes into our collections, how to organize it, who gets to access it, and when it’s time for it leave our collections. These may not seem like a huge deal, it’s a library, I’m a librarian, that’s what we do. But I’d bet that most communities of color don’t know how we make those decisions. Nor do they know that in order to pay for the privilege of housing that knowledge, we use questionable funding sources, at the cost of Black and Brown lives through the prison-industrial complex, the military, the spoils of war, and gentrification. Most importantly, we help decide what’s considered knowledge, what the value of that knowledge is, and whether it’s “important” enough for us to have in our collections. Knowledge is created, validated, stamped as truth by the oppressors and we have filled our physical spaces with it. By selecting what we consider to be worthy enough to be in our collections, we’ve also signaled what and who are not worthy to be in our collections and in our spaces. 

And often, when information about BIPOC is included in our collections, its often not written by BIPOC themselves. We don’t get to tell our own stories or share our knowledge on our own terms. White folx enjoy the right to own their identities, to tell their own stories and by extension, use, enjoy, and tell the stories of people who don’t have the privilege of being white. BIPOC knowledge is only worthy if white people tell it, never mind the fact that it was never theirs to tell, because we value diversity, don’t we?

Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni and Klinkit) and Sarah Kostelecky (Zuni Pueblo), make this very clear in their Knowledge Justice chapter:

“Research by outsiders has resulted in the publication and dissemination of ancient sacred knowledge, esoteric traditions, and religious practices—without free, prior, and informed consent of Zunis. The information and knowledge collected was not the author’s information to share or the readers’ to know.”

This is an important point, because not only have Zunis lost their lands to white settlers, but they had their sacred knowledge taken and written about without their consent. Consent clearly isn’t one of our profession’s values. 

But the values that have shaped our profession, have shoved us towards conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement. Another white supremacy culture characteristic is what Okun calls “only one right way.” Now I know all of you have experienced this one, whether you were the one saying it or having it be said to you, “well this is the way we’ve always done it, so why should we change?” This white supremacy culture characteristic is focused on the “belief there is one right way to do things,” and that new folx joining the profession have to adapt to that way and BIPOC have to assimilate into the dominant white culture in order to fit in. That we have to be professional, which of course, means a white standard of professionalism, which includes looking white.

Being BIPOC in predominantly white institutions has always been inherently unsafe for us. We are in the minority, in spaces never meant for us, in where we were never meant to succeed in, where we have never been made to feel safe. If we don’t police our own behavior, our colleagues will do it for us. Within the walls of our workplace, the outside world doesn’t matter, Black people are shot by the police--for no reason other than being Black--and those same police officers are allowed to go free, but Black folx are still expected to show up to work and behave “professionally.” White supremacy wants us to think of those days as just another ordinary day of racism, no different than any other, so why should non-Black people think to behave differently?

LIS is fulfilling what Jorge calls, the promise of white supremacy, which is to say the destruction and dispossession of BIPOC. But we have an opportunity to examine what we think is normal and ordinary, to examine our everyday practices and systems, and the fundamental concepts and ideas underneath those practices and systems. The pandemic has interrupted the status quo, the normalized, racist and white supremacist path we have all been heading down. It has shown all of us, white folx included, that we’re not immune to the power of interlocking systems of oppression. Now is the time for us to question why things are the way they are and explore different avenues, open ourselves to alternative ways of being, doing, and seeing. So let’s explore some of these alternative ways.

I want to share some tenets and principles from Critical Race Theory and from Emergent Strategy, a framework created by Black feminist and activist, adrienne maree brown. These principles and ideas come from a space of abundance and care, rather than scarcity and carelessness. Since being introduced to them, I have tried to center these principles, these frameworks, and make them part of my mindset. I share them to encourage you to do the same.

  1. Centering/valuing BIPOC experiences and knowledges

What if we actually centered and valued BIPOC experiences and knowledges? What would that look like? For me, that would mean we actually say in job descriptions, a requirement is that the candidate come from the communities of color we serve. That having the experience and knowledge of having grown up in that community rather than having just read about it actually counts for something. That the so-called diverse programming is actually given by someone who has direct lived experience and knowledge about the content of that programming. That we value having students of color see a librarian who looks like them, or how about multiple librarians who look like them? That we actually pay BIPOC what this knowledge and experience are worth and that we actually give credit to and compensate the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who have been doing the work of racial justice for a long time. 

2. Employing an intersectional lens to locate how different systems of power and oppression intersect at the point of people’s lives

If folx actually understood what intersectionality meant, perhaps it wouldn’t be so flippantly used the way it is now. It’s important to note that intersectionality came out of the legal field and that it gives us a different way to frame a problem, as Kimberle Crenshaw, who coined the term, says. Critical Race Theorist and scholar, Devon Carbado says that “intersectionality challenges power structures by asking whose story and identity matter? Whose stories are being told and who is telling the story?” 

CORE Forum’s opening keynote, Dr. Meredith Clark, talked about a similar question posed to her by Dr. Amelia Gibson, “ whose voices are turned up in our national conversation right now?” 

These are all questions we have to think about when we look for places to make change for racial justice. 

3. Understanding and recognizing the particular historical, social, political and economic context

We need to understand how everything is connected and that this moment in time did not arise independently from what happened before. Where has this profession caused harm and where does it continue to harm marginalized communities? What are we doing that minimizes that harm and makes a concrete difference in the material consequences of people of color’s lives? If we truly understood the historical, social, political and economic context of this country and of LIS, we wouldn’t just be saying that Black Lives Matter, we would actually be doing something about it.

4. Challenging dominant white supremacy ideology

This one should be obvious, after I’ve pointed out how “whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted.” So now that you are aware of some of the ways in which white supremacy operates, you can question why things are the way they are, you can call attention to injustice.

5. There is always enough time for the right work

We want to be making time for the right work. The process for building anything worthwhile is just as if not more important than the thing itself. Whenever we build towards something or create a new policy, procedure, or process, we have to be asking ourselves critical questions like whose story is being told and who is telling the story? A white supremacy culture characteristic I have not yet mentioned is a sense of urgency. This false sense of urgency will have organizations trying to do the easy and fast thing because they want to show how “good” they are. Racism will not be solved because the organization said it believed in the Black Lives Matter movement or if we read a bunch of antiracist books. Racism is intertwined with capitalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy, just to name a few, and their shared purpose is to maintain white supremacy. 

An example of trying to put these principles into practice is a publication I started with Joyce Gabiola and Jorge López-McKnight, called up//root: a we here publication. It’s a publishing collective that exists to center the works, knowledge, and experiences of BIPOC within the context of the library and archive community. More explicitly, our focus is to center and build on works of knowledge and/or creative expression by Black, Indigenous, Persons of Color that impact archives, libraries, LIS education, and/or information. 

That means that all contributors and peer reviewers are BIPOC, we ask that contributors try to only cite other BIPOC in their pieces if possible, that the work is rooted in antiracism and anti-oppression, that contributors interrogate coloniality, white supremacy, patriarchy, white feminism, and/or racial capitalism as they impact archives, libraries, LIS education, and/or information. AND That the white gaze is far removed from this project as possible.

Most central to this work is care. What does care require? It requires you, first, to recognize that this profession and the communities we serve are made up of people. They deserve care. They deserve accountability. They deserve, at the bare minimum, to not be harmed by us, because we’re so focused on our mission. 

To the white folx who want to be in solidarity with liberatory projects, let me borrow the words of education scholar David Stovall:

“You have agreed to support something that will challenge you in the support of it. And at some point, you have to get out of the way of the people committed to doing that work. You have to ask yourself, is what I’m doing helpful or is it actually harming the very folx I’m trying to support?”

The work of racial and social justice is always already in motion. It’s not waiting around for you to get on board. We’re waiting for you to get out of the way. 

To close, I want to highlight BIPOC founded and led organizations and projects around LIS that are separate from and independent of traditional LIS institutions. These are the spaces where real liberatory work is being done and they are for and by BIPOC. These are the projects you should be supporting and uplifting:

Thank you to the We Here community, particularly Ray Pun, Jessie Loyer, Andrea Jackson Gavin, Rebecca Martin, and Charlotte Roh, for helping me compile the list. I know this is not the whole list, but just a starting point. 

Thank you for your time. 




Sofia Leung