Knowledge Justice
[This is text of the keynote I gave for the Critical Librarianship & Pedagogy Symposium on September 1, 2020. The recording of the keynote is here.]
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 the CLAPS Committee: Yvonne, Nicole, Amanda, Lara, Jennifer, Jeremiah, Anthony, Maribeth, and Niamh, for inviting me to speak and organizing this symposium, particularly because of the difficulties involved in planning it this year. Thank you to Lori for helping me with administrative issues.
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 and 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 and guest, 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/guest on these lands and I’d ask you to do the same for the lands you are guests 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 its at risk of losing what is left of their homelands due to a determination made by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Join me to 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, Breonna Taylor. We must 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.
The talk I’m sharing with you today is still a work in progress. And a heads up that we will definitely be dealing with some heavy, violent topics today, like racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism and colonization, 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. And as I’m speaking, 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 prioritize questions from BIPOC and will answer those before I answer questions from white folx. So in the Q&A, please self-identify as BIPOC when you add your question. Thank you.
For this talk, I’ve borrowed the title from a forthcoming collection I co-edited with Jorge López-McKnight. It will be published in spring 2021 from MIT Press.
Much of this talk was influenced and inspired by the work of the 28 amazing contributors to that collection. Thank you to 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. My biggest thanks goes to my frequent collaborator, my brother from a different mother, Jorge López-McKnight, who helped me figure out what this talk needed to be.
One of the reasons I/we wanted to create a collection of work where the authors were all Black, Indigenous and People of Color, was to embody the notion that we, as BIPOC, have knowledge worth sharing, that our scholarship deserves to be uplifted and valued. Knowledge Justice, the title of both the book and this talk, is a demand for the voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to be centered, because they are necessary for any justice to truly occur. Our knowledge is vital because of our experiences, because of our identities.
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 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.
What I’m going to talk about today
So what is this talk about? I’m using a set of questions to explore the responsibility Library and Information Studies (LIS) has to the so-called “public good,” a stated value of librarianship. What power and agency do library and archive workers have over knowledge? How has LIS created and maintained systems of oppression such as White supremacy, colonialism, and racism? How does this impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities? Why is the experiential knowledge of BIPOC critical to imagining and building liberatory futures? And finally, what is our obligation to ourselves and our communities to disrupt and destroy the systems of oppression within LIS?
[counter]Storytime
Let me start with a counterstory about why knowledge justice is necessary. For those of you who may not know, a counterstory is “a [Critical race theory] tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege” (Solórzano & Yosso 2002, 32).
At the last institution I worked at, I gave a workshop on applying social justice and critical race theory to artificial intelligence. After the workshop, a graduate student, a white man, came up to me with a question. During the workshop, he had said he worked on rockets, which in his mind, had nothing to do with people. I was a little taken aback when he said that. Of course rockets have to do with people. People build rockets to serve human interests. Rockets can be used for many people-related activities. Fireworks, weaponry to be used on other humans, rockets can be used to launch satellites into space to surveill people, and let’s not be totally ignorant of where the money to fund this research comes from. This institution was and is heavily funded by the U.S. Dept of Defense and they for sure care about building rockets. Okay, but back to this student, he was determined to inform me that his particular field believed in and cared about meritocracy. Now real talk, it was almost 7pm on a school night, so how much time did I really want to spend on educating this white dude on history he should have learned, that we should have learned, in school? Where to even begin? Did he know that NASA spent $25.4 billion, in 1973 dollars on getting white men to the moon, when African Americans were advocating for economic justice? That the US nation-state decided that“White vanity was considered more valuable than Black humanity ,” to paraphrase CRT scholar George Lipsitz. That the US has done this over and over throughout history?
Honestly, this whole incident really shocked me. I mean, I knew our education system was/is highly flawed, but I really didn’t recognize how badly. On a really basic level, by repressing certain stories from our history, by never telling those stories, never even mentioning that they exist, things that should be obvious - like what rockets have to do with people - become obscured, inconceivable, abnormal. Aerospace engineering isn’t the only discipline where its historical, social, economic, and political context has been ignored and erased.
In 1975, Toni Morrison gave a speech detailing the ways in which history, the social sciences and the humanities have established their profound ignorance around race. Special thanks to Keisha E. McKenzie for their transcript of the speech that I will read from now.
“Any one of those studies [history, the social sciences, and the humanities], if it was honest, would acknowledge that the major part of history in this country is the history of the minorities and the Black people in it, how they influenced those who were first and how they influenced each other.”
And yet we know that is not what history, the social sciences, and the humanities have been about.
She goes on to say: “The economic history of this country is among other things, the study of generations and generations of free labor used to make the country grow. The legal history of this country is very heavily weighed with the courts’, particularly the Supreme Court’s, relation to Black people and the legislation designed specifically, deliberately, to keep them oppressed.”
There is a purpose, an intention behind obscuring these histories, these knowledges. These disciplines are serving the purpose, the intention of a system of white supremacy, which is a foundational organizing principle of this country. Frances Lee Ansley defined white supremacy as:
“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” (1989, 1024).
White supremacy uses politics, economy, and culture as tools to hold onto power and wealth. Much of this control comes from these conscious and unconscious ideas that white people are superior and therefore entitled to certain privileges, chief among them, legal rights. White supremacy wants to forget that the histories and knowledges of Black, Indigenous, and People of color existed. White supremacy requires the erasure of these knowledges to operate. It wants us to believe that white superiority and entitlement are right and true. That whiteness equals neutrality and objectivity. It wanted that grad student to think that meritocracy truly existed in his field. That his work had nothing to do with people, and therefore nothing to do with racism. White supremacy masks how everything is connected in order to hide and protect its power. If you don’t know how far its control extends then you can’t dismantle it.
What does this have to do with library and information science? Well here’s a question. Why is our field a science? From what I was taught in my LIS program and from what I have experienced as a librarian, I still have yet to discover what our field has to do with “science.” when you think about what the word “science” conveys, it often makes you think of something objective, systematic. It deals in facts and reason. Subjectivity and value judgment doesn’t come into it. The discipline chose to disguise the very subjective nature of this field with a label of science to signal the very opposite. LIS was created to uphold white supremacy, to keep power for wealthy whites, as an institutional tool for white supremacy. This is just the first move white supremacy makes towards obscuring the real power LIS holds over this thing we call knowledge.
LIS extends this obscuration by establishing that librarianship fundamentally values the public good and in doing so, has an institutional responsibility to the American public. Under the public good, the American Library Association 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 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. Again, there is a purpose, an intention behind obscuring these histories, these knowledges.
In my LIS program, and I assume this must be the case across the majority of LIS programs, we were never told how libraries have contributed to the harm experienced by communities of color. We were never told about the Tougaloo Nine; we were never told the profession is 88% white; we were never told how many librarians of color end up leaving the profession; how many things were we never told?
What LIS loves to do instead is tell stories of how libraries level the playing field, they provide access to all, they’re here for the public good, for democracy, for social responsibility!
They use core values of librarianship to disguise LIS’ power and agency over knowledge. But what have we been told knowledge is? Let’s look at this definition from Merriam-Webster:
“The sum of what is known: the body of truth, information, and principles acquired by humankind.”
The body of truth, information and principles. Whose truth, whose information, and whose principles? What is knowledge but stories that we have told ourselves, each other, repeatedly throughout time, that we call truth?
To uncover what stories LIS has told over and over, in the service of both white supremacy and what Myrna Morales and Stacie Williams call epistemic supremacy, which they define as “a political ideology that facilitates, enables, and upholds the conditions that lead to the destruction of communities of color, particularly working class and poor Black and Indigenous communities,” we, as library workers, need to ask ourselves the following questions:
Whose stories get to be told? Whose identities, histories, truths matter?
Who gets to tell those stories?
Who ensures those stories are considered knowledge?
Who selects these stories for our collections?
Who determines what these stories are about so they can be found?
Who determines what access to these stories look like?
Who determines who gets that access?
Our responsibilities as library and information workers means we collect knowledge, catalog it, and organize it. We teach ppl how to access it, control access to it, decide when it’s time for us to weed it out because no one is using it. 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, in our spaces.
As Gary Peller has said, “Knowledge and reason are functions of power.” Under White Supremacy, knowledge is the written word and the written word is the realm of the white men who have gotten to go to the right schools with the right education to get the right credentials to write up that knowledge. We are told that knowledge is representative of humankind, objective, neutral, and factual. The way we treat knowledge in libraries and archives upholds white supremacist beliefs and perspectives. Items in our collection are treated ahistorically, history is seen as linear, events are often seen as disconnected and as individual moments in time. This is not a coincidence.
The way we think about knowledge is heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideals and Western, white cultural ideas. Knowledge as we know it, represents the dominant, hegemonic culture. Grosfoguel argues that “the canon of thought in all the disciplines of the Social Sciences and Humanities in the Westernized university is based on the knowledge produced by a few men from five countries in Western Europe (Italy, France, England, Germany and the USA)” (2013, 74). That basically their theories are considered universal enough that all we need are their theories to explain the social and/or historical realities of the rest of the world.
When we take for granted what has come to be known as knowledge without question, we are buying into one of white supremacy’s major objectives: to view knowledges that present any other perspectives as inferior. Of course, that all goes out the window once white folx “discover” BIPOC knowledge they want to claim as their own.
Indigenous scholar, Linda Tuhwai Smith wrote,
“It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations” (Smith 2012, 1).
Who gets to tell our stories?
When BIPOC knowledge is included, its often not written by BIPOC themselves. We don’t get to tell our own stories or share our knowledge on our own terms. Here, let me introduce whiteness as property, a CRT concept Cheryl Harris conceived of, where she argues that whiteness was constructed in order to justify subjugating Black and Indigenous people and then used to retain and secure power for white people.
Harris defines whiteness as “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). 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.
Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni and Klinkit) and Sarah Kostelecky (Zuni Pueblo), make this very clear in their 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.”
Not only is not the author’s information to share, but it’s certainly not the author’s to own. And yet we have a whole system of legal restrictions to protect that ownership. Intellectual property law in the US, which comes from the British system of granting monopolies to authors and inventors, protects “commercially valuable products of human intellect.” (Black’s Law Dictionary as cited in Lee, 2015). IP has become a way for white people to take the knowledge and culture from BIPOC, claim it as their own, and prevent the Black and Brown creators from receiving credit or profits. There are plenty of historical and current examples of this that you can easily find. History scholar Kurt Newman provides the example of Swing Era bandleader Paul Whiteman, who is famous for many reasons, but in this case for “propertizing the resources of African American musical innovators, “ as Newman puts it. Ok and what does the ALA Code of Ethics say about IP?
“We respect intellectual property rights and advocate balance between the interests of information users and rights holders.” That explains so much about this profession. It sounds like ALA respects the person who laid claim to the knowledge as property, not the people who that knowledge came from and who it actually belongs to. Nor does it seem to advocate for the balance between who gets to benefit from intellectual property rights and who doesn’t. And let’s remember, this is a document that is supposed to codify the ethical responsibilities of the profession.
To help maintain these white ideas of knowledge, LIS has erected barriers of entry to those who want to join its ranks. You need to get into a bachelors and then masters program, which use standards not meant to be met by Black and Brown folx. You need wealth to pay for those programs and we already know its harder to get loans for Black and Brown folx. You have to survive those programs, which were not built for you and which operate on white supremacy culture characteristics meant to tear you down. Then you gotta get a job, which again is based on white standards of what is considered experience, knowledge, and professionalism. Once in that job, you’re expected to keep your head down, not rock the boat, continue doing things the way they’ve always been done, and just be fucking grateful that you got a job at all. Once we’ve finished funneling through this system, what do we have to believe constitutes knowledge?
Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have had to learn to survive in a culture, a system, that doesn’t want us there. We have never been seen as neutral or objective; our knowledge and perspective is always considered subjective. We have been told in lots of little and big ways that the very knowledge we have inherited from our families, our ancestors isn’t important, is lesser than the knowledge we learn in the US education system and from the LIS profession, that our experiences as BIPOC don’t matter and that no one wants to hear our stories. What have we sacrificed in order to survive in a white supremacy system? What stories and knowledges have we lost?
Grosfoguel, defines what de Sousa Santos calls “epistemicide,” as “the extermination of knowledge and ways of knowing” (2013, 74). How much epistemicide has LIS contributed to? That’s a question we’ll never have the answer to because the answers have been systematically erased. By only centering knowledge that reaffirms whiteness’ normativity, LIS has disrupted the knowledge passed down through BIPOC generations. So not only is material generational wealth almost nonexistent for BIPOC, but cultural generational wealth and knowledge have been diminished thanks to slavery, colonization, settler-colonialism, racism and forced assimilation. Is that really the legacy LIS wants to continue to contribute to?
LIS has been telling a very specific story. It’s a story of white racial dominance, a story about whose knowledge matters, about who is even considered worthy to collect that knowledge, a story about who gets to count as human. This is how LIS advances white supremacy and epistemic supremacy. This is how we as a profession are connected to the very same violence I asked you to take a moment of silence for at the beginning of this talk. And sure, we didn’t create these systems, but by not recognizing how we are continuing to support and maintain these systems, we are complicit in them. We cannot continue to pretend towards the ideals of the public good and social responsibility while at the same time causing harm to communities of color, to the people of color within our profession. We have to pay attention to what White Supremacy doesn’t want us to pay attention to. We have to make explicit what White Supremacy has been trying to conceal.
For LIS to move towards the racial justice we demand and deserve, we need BIPOC knowledge, stories, histories, and most importantly, imagination.
Why is the experiential knowledge of BIPOC critical to imagining and building liberatory futures?
When you only have one version of things, one perspective of the world, your imagination is limited. The graduate student in my story could not envision how his work impacted people partially because he lacked the historical knowledge and experience of BIPOC. Our experiences illuminate where the points of racial domination intersect those of sexism, homophobia, ableism and other forms of subordination. Intersectionality, coined by CRT scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, was conceived of to describe this exact thing. For BIPOC to share our experiences, our knowledges is to challenge the very foundations of White Supremacy.
Walidah Imarisha wrote,
“For those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us” (Imarisha 2015, 5).
BIPOC have always had to imagine a life for ourselves; society has tried to tell us repeatedly who we’re allowed to be and BIPOC everywhere have imagined new realities for ourselves. Black, Indigenous and folx of color have experienced centuries of oppression, centuries of being told no, of being told we don’t belong, of being told we don’t have permission to be human and yet, we’re still here. We will continue to be here and continue to dream, imagine and build towards the kinds of liberatory futures we want to be a part of. If you’re a BIPOC listening to this, we have always had our imagination. It can’t be taken from us. I’ll borrow Jorge’s words here: “No system or structure of oppression was before imagination. It was already there, already in flight, already in freedom.”
One example of the type of liberation work already being done by BIPOC is around disrupting conventional citation practices of citing white men. The Cite Black Women campaign was created by Christen A. Smith to motivate people, academics in particular, to critically examine their citation practices and to consciously begin to cite black women in their work. I want to share their five guiding principles to encourage you to examine your own citation practices and encourage you to share it with your colleagues, your students, your faculty. I want to encourage you to look beyond your citation practices and imagine how else this project could be embodied (Cite Black Women n.d.):
Read Black women's work
Integrate Black women into the CORE of your syllabus (in life & in the classroom).
Acknowledge Black women's intellectual production.
Make space for Black women to speak.
Give Black women the space and time to breathe.
BIPOC knowledge is needed and necessary, but it is up to us to offer it up. After years of being told our experience isn’t valid or important, white folx can’t expect us to give our hard-won knowledge for free. It is crucial for the white spaces where we have been made to feel unvalued, unsafe, and unnecessary to fundamentally change in order for this to happen. It’s not up to BIPOC to change, to shave off pieces of ourselves to fit into these little white spaces. How many more times will you allow BIPOC to be ignored, our concerns rejected, our experiences invalidated?
There are many liberatory projects always already in motion by BIPOC. To the white folx who want to be in solidarity with those 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?
I know this particular audience is filled with folx who adhere to critical librarianship and pedagogy, so I’ll give you a few questions to consider. What would it look like for you to not just theorize giving up power, but to actually do it? What would it look like for you to give your power to BIPOC? What would it look like for LIS to give up power to Black, Indigenous and Communities of Color, to allow them to lead us? What will we all gain when this happens?
I can tell you what I know. We will gain so much clarity, care, and community. We will gain the insight, wisdom, and joy necessary for liberatory imaginings. We will gain the knowledge futures we all deserve.
Thank you.
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