Addressing Social Injustice in the Academic Library: One Approach

In her previous post, Freeda Brook elaborated the connection between the discrimination that our students and colleagues face in the world and on our campuses, and what they experience in our libraries. In this post, I am going to take it as read that it is an ethical imperative--and in our best interest--for librarians to be working actively for social justice and anti-racism, and describe one way that we’ve started to do that in my library.

While inequity is the result of intersecting oppressions based on race, gender, physical ability, sexual orientation, and class, among other factors, I would argue that right now the library community must engage most actively with race and ethnicity because of the incredible racial homogeneity of our profession. As of 2012, 85.8% of all librarians in academic libraries were white—a percentage that’s hardly shifted since the early 1980s. While we stay the same as a profession, the racial and ethnic demographics of our students are continuing to shift in the direction of more diversity. What this means is that until our profession becomes more diverse, a lot of us white folks are going to have to do some serious thinking and talking about race.

As members of a profession that prides itself on staying relevant, we must ask ourselves: how do we respond actively, respectfully, and quickly to a changing student population with shifting cultural backgrounds, experiences and priorities? Luckily, in 2012, the ACRL Diversity Committee provided us with a starting point in its Diversity Standards: Cultural Competency for Academic Libraries (2012) (full disclosure: I will be an acting member of this committee as of ALA Annual in June 2013).

Before I arrived at my present institution, Dave Ellenwood, a fellow librarian here, and Sarah Leadley, our library’s director, began conversations about how our library could engage with the standards. As a result, the library’s Diversity Team was formed and given a formal charge in September of the 2012-2013 academic year. After I muscled my way on to this team of hilarious, engaged, thoughtful, and committed library workers, we made a work plan of two required all-staff trainings, two teaching meetings, and a series of brown bag discussions that all addressed at least one of the Diversity Standards.

Doing social justice work can be exhausting, frustrating, and emotionally taxing. We face pushback from those that we work with, we struggle with feelings of inadequacy, we make mistakes and say things that are misguided or misinterpreted. Most importantly, it’s hard to know when and if we’re making a difference. In fact, as one study demonstrated, it’s possible in diversity work to do more harm than good. Despite all of these challenges, I remain firmly convinced that the immediate and long-term results of thoughtful social justice work outweigh the inevitable difficulties.

After a year of working actively and intentionally toward cultural competency, with the caveat that we are nowhere near done—and will continue this work indefinitely—I strongly advocate for the approach that we took. I want to outline some of the reasons that I think our work was a success, and how we measured that success:
 
We have the support of our library’s leadership. Cultural competency and social justice work can often be marginalized and sidelined in relation to the rest of the work that we do as librarians. Our director recognized that this work was real, complex, and time consuming, and so she made it a formal part of our jobs, thereby legitimating it in our eyes and the eyes of our colleagues. Doing social justice work is emotional and challenging, and often makes those who are spearheading the efforts emotionally and professionally vulnerable. Knowing that we had institutional support for our work emboldened us and gave us courage to do difficult activities and readings with our colleagues that we might have shied away from without that support.

Our team is composed of librarians, professional staff, and classified staff. While this may seem like an incidental point, the whole team agrees that this is one of the keys to our effectiveness. To be successful, we have to have buy- in from the whole library staff (especially since students rarely make any distinctions between us). Workers from different departments and different classifications will inevitably have different experiences of power, diversity, and student interactions. Having input from different parts of the library helped us to plan trainings that would be relevant to all of our work, and to become aware of the varieties of strengths and interests that our whole library staff brings to our community.

We put relationships at the center of our work. Though I didn’t know anyone on the Diversity Team before we started, we very quickly became a closely knit group of colleagues and friends who recognized that supporting each other’s ideas and work was essential to the group’s overall success. We then began to think about how to support the work that our colleagues were doing across campus, and made it a priority to visit the spaces and events where diversity and social justice work was being done on campus. Doing this increased the visibility of the library, added to the team’s knowledge base of issues and strategies, demonstrated support for our colleagues of color (who often organized those events), helped us get to know the folks that we work side by side with on campus, and helped us contextualize our work in a broader effort toward justice and inclusion.

We built formal relationships with other diversity and social justice groups in our college communities. Our library serves two colleges, Cascadia Community College and the University of Washington Bothell. As part of the UW libraries system we also serve and are connected to the whole of the University of Washington. In addition to serving on our library’s Diversity Team, each member of our team serves on an additional committee at the college, university, or libraries level. Our library is the point of intersection for all of these different communities and through this formal interconnectedness we have been able to harness the work going on around us to strengthen our work in the library, and share with these more disparate communities the wonderful work of our colleagues.

We built community around self-inquiry and justice. Many of us got into the work that we’re doing because of an interest in access to information and resources, which is connected, intimately, to justice. Taking a broad view of cultural competency work can help connect us intellectually and emotionally to colleagues at conferences and at our own institutions who can help us think through issues and problems and gather evidence and empathy. Because this is a formal part of our work (see the first point) several of us made it a point to attend workshops and lectures at ALA Midwinter and ACRL this year that discussed diversity and social justice. Hearing about the work of Jaena Alabi , Kawanna Bright, Deborah Lilton, Pambanisha Whaley, Martha Parker and Maria T. Accardi , intensified our sense of urgency about the work that we can do to make our workplaces welcoming and safe for queer colleagues and colleagues of color.

We take pleasure in our work. Building those relationships across campus meant that we got to meet the fun, funny, heartfelt, and like-minded people that enrich our intellectual and working lives on campus. As a team we made time to decompress, talk about our other work, and generally treat each other like the whole human beings that we are (but don’t always act like at work). We encouraged each other to read articles, watch movies, and listen to music that expanded our understandings of power, injustice, cooperation, and joy. When we start to take them seriously, issues of privilege and injustice become profoundly depressing. Keeping the joy of connection in our sight helped us remember why we’re doing this work.

We keep student experiences ever-present in our planning. At every institution where I’ve worked I’ve heard from students stories about the discrimination that students experience in the world, in their home, in their classrooms, and around campus. This campus is no exception, and that informed every decision that we made about what sorts of trainings to offer, what scenarios to present to our colleagues, and what student information and voices to bring into our conversations. Good library work is based on trust and empathy, as anyone who has conducted a successful reference interview knows. It is our operational belief that working toward cultural competence helps us to be more empathetic, and more deserving of the trust of our students.

We put an emphasis on assessing our work. As I said before, one of the most difficult parts of this work is not knowing if it’s making a difference. Assessing our work is the best way to make sure that it’s having an impact and is relevant to the community. After our all-staff trainings we asked participants to fill out anonymous evaluations and we followed up several months later with in-person meetings with each of the library units to hear how the training was affecting their work after they’d had time to put it into practice. We were hoping to find out how to make our work better, but the most important information to come out of this assessment was encouragement. Our colleagues told us in great detail and with enthusiasm how valuable they found our work to be. When things got difficult or tense in trainings, it was helpful to remember that feedback and stay focused on what we knew was working.

I’m sure it’s clear by now that the most important work to come out of this year’s efforts was relationship building in all its formal and informal capacities. While this was initially surprising, it now seems obvious: social justice work is ultimately about exploring identities and building safety and understanding within our communities around those identities. Of course that work would foster deep and meaningful connections when done with a seriousness of purpose and a lightness of heart. This will be the sustaining lesson that our team takes away from this year of work as we plan for a new year (and beyond) of cultural competency work.

If you’ve made it to the end of this post, please share any work, insights, incidents, or conversations that you’ve had around diversity in your libraries. We’re always looking for new ideas!