These notes are for the ACRL2019 Friday 10:30am-11:30am session:
Getting Uncomfortable is Good for You: Turning Narrative into Action with Allyship and Advocacy

Presenters:

  • Ms. Lilly Ramin
  • Maria Cunningham
  • Jesse Silva
  • Annie Downey

  • Colleen Sanders

  • Starting out with a Kahoot quiz to get to better know the audience members
  • Hashtag is #ACRLally
  • Dr. Annie Downey starts with a land acknowledgement, plus a warning that you will feel uncomfortable & should lean into that, since that’s where change comes from

Lilly Ramin, First Year Librarian #

  • Starts with her own positionality as light-skinned Persian. Reminds us that race & ethnicity are not the same.
  • “Doing the work” is a phrase often for people out on the front lines doing things from an activist frame
  • Library roles: privilege & opportunities
    • colleagues? are colleagues collegial?
    • administrators? supervisors, directors, deans can support
    • workload / time / money / strategic support for non-admins or front-liners
    • who do students seek out? who’s doing the invisible service work? particularly POC women do afterhours work; if an hour long interaction only counts as a single interaction, you’re miscounting that engagement
  • Library guides, displays & spaces, collections, programs, partnerships to support efforts
    • Lilly went to Carnival as outreach, also Native American Heritage month; although there’s cynicism about “there’s only a month?” but simultaneously if you’re NOT being present, that can be seen as a statement / lack of support for the community, Nowruz (spelling?) secular Persian annual celebration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz
    • this outreach helps give students contacts and make them feel more welcome

Jessie Silva at UC Berkeley #

  • Objective 3: Participants will learn how to think about and approach advocacy at a local level. Incorporating Diversity into Collections
    • Collections are people & people are collections
    • Ask yourself: how can I incorporate diversity into my collection development?
    • Remember: it’s okay not to know. Be vulnerable. Get uncomfortable. Librarians tend to be perfectionists & we need to break outside of that tendency in order to learn and do this work well.
    • Diversity work can lead to more collegiality and collaboration.
    • Go beyond resistist and woke - incorporate this into your work
    • We can leverage allyship into collections and other work that we do
    • He’s slowly been stopping purchases about dead white men; faculty are on board with this and will reach out to him if they do need something on this sort of subject. But largely he’s intentionally purchasing materials around more diverse subjects.
  • Bringing Hidden Stories Out of the Collections
    • exploratory research project on LGBTQ history as seen through federal government publications
    • turned this into a major library exhibit
    • incorporated library & university staff experiences into the exhibit; for instance, institutional folks had gotten married when Gavin Newsome allowed same-sex marriages, then later received documents saying these were annulled. The exhibit incorporated these documents.
    • exhibit comment book captured many related personal stories (shows a few photos of comments with captions)
    • represents what can happen when our organization demonstrates we are a strong ally, not just to our staff, but to the campus and community

Maria Cunningham, Special Collections Librarian and Archivist at Reed College #

  • She’s worked in public & academic libraries
  • she can conform to whiteness (has a white-sounding name, parents told her that this was deliberate on their part, acknowledges those facets)
  • Reed is in Portland, very white city & college
    • collection is about 90-95% white
    • decolonization has become kind of a buzzword, so now students & faculty want materials that have become too pricey for their Special Collections budget
    • Reed archives tell a story of cisgender white men, so a lot of people at the college now are left out & feel left out
  • She reads the Choice cards critically
  • Her actions
    • earmarking a specific number of non-white materials to purchase
    • finding what stories aren’t told in the curriculum and aadd those to the collection
    • making connections with book dealers
    • editing finding aids
    • finding creative ways to diversify the collection (zines)
  • Managers can
    • do comprehensive collection assessments
    • ask who are the top POC researchers in your field? how many of their works do you have?
  • Professional development
    • Maria is often the only Black person present at prof dev she attends, there’s a burden of representation of her institution & her race
    • Trainings are typically Eurocentric and/or minimize the contributions of POC; also reflects on the biases she brings to the sessions / materials
    • Don’t just send a POC to a conference in order to demonstrate that you’ve employed folks of color
  • Issue 3: workplace relations
    • employees of color are often hesitant to bring up issues of microaggressions because they’ll face the repercussions themselves
    • labelled “political”
    • managers can
      • do the work & educate yourself
      • confront your own bias

Annie Downey, PhD at Reed now and soon as U of Redlands #

  • who she is & who she aspires to be
    • white, cisgender, mid-career, manager, parent of transgender child (who’s out & proud & happy to have this known publically)
    • she’s also an often frustrated changemaker trying to make libraries more inclusive
    • she emphasizing that unless you have felt difference, you don’t understand it
    • believe people (about their experiences of discrimination / othering?) and act
  • Feminist management
    • libraries are grounded in patriarchy, yet pretend to be sites of equity & social justice
    • what I’ve done:
      • share power with those I supervise
      • mentor people & believe them
      • advocate with higher leadership; she asks the white attendees to notice that her fellow panelists who are of people of color have modulated their presentation of this material to be less strident, since they’re more vulnerable to burning bridges
      • commiserate & act
      • she does weekly reflections on how she operates within characteristics of white supremacy culture (I think she has a link to Robin DiAngelo’s handout of this? I missed that)
        • perfectionism
        • sense of urgency
        • power hoarding
        • fear of open conflict
  • Sara Ahmed’s On Complaint and she connects that to April Hathcock’s experience {me: of being labeled a troublemaker & verbally attacked} at ALA
  • practice humility & deeply listen
  • practice transparency in management
  • grapple with systemic barriers
  • follow the process; manager’s role is to make complaints go away. if you ever find yourself telling someone “that’s just how it is” you’re inviting them to leave the institution & the profession
  • white people ask for a lot more; travel, food, opportunities, etc. She has to actively ask her employees of color about what they want, what they need, how they will navigate locations where they’ll be

Colleen Sanders, Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, OR #

  • colleagues have made a lifestyle choice at her institution to put equity, diversity, inclusion foremost in their every decision
  • well meaning, liberal white women are common in libraries, haven’t done enough change
  • how to move from awareness to action? start studying white supremacy for about a year, up to where she felt it was narcissistic
  • on twitter she learned when to be silent & when to speak up
  • libraries were built by & for patriarchal white supremacy
    • Audre Lorde quote “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
    • she has been told that this is the 3rd round of EDI work at her institution, but the first ones were a joke; fears that initiative within the institution will be coopted and constrained, used to mark a checkbox rather than to create change
    • if librarians take a social justice track, we have the power to normalize inclusion & decolonization perspectives rather than white supremacy
  • projects & programming creating opportunities to learn
    • she’s thinking of making a PNW subgroup of #critlib on twitter
      she shows a few different initiatives under these headings: (too many for me to type up now, sorry… I might try to link to an image of them all)
    • Capacity building
    • Programming
    • Collections
    • Professional development
    • Assessment

Questions & Answers #

Q: programming question; around holidays and the sort of checklist attitude to programming, how do we combat that?

A: Carrying this work & conversation with you to every table you go to, to diffuse the decolonization / anti-oppression POV everywhere - Colleen
A: less of a one-shot approach
A: think about doing it all year

Q: What were the characteristics of white supremacy you mentioned earlier?

A: (shows them; I added them above under Annie’s section)

Q: how much can we change this given our constraints? (I might be misrepresenting that question; only sort of heard it)

A: Annie emphasizes that you have a voice, and to let your administrators know that this work is important to the library & staff

Q: I work at a predominantly STEM school, library often does outreach to humanities; is there something you suggest to bring back for STEM specifically?

A: STEM at Cal did women in science event

Q: I’ve gone to a number of diversity talks; I’m white cisgender middle class & I feel like there’s a subtext that I should get out of the space & profession to make room for those who my presence excludes

A: audience response. (I couldn’t hear)
A: Annie says that sometimes we don’t need to be there, and sometimes we do. When we feel discomfort we can lean into that and realize that this is how our colleagues of color feel all the time. It’s hard to tell when you should & shouldn’t be in a space. Developing that awareness is part of the work of allyship. Example of not being able to go into a space that her son goes into.
A: Colleen says that her colleagues expect racial illiteracy & silence, so there’s a tension between knowing when to talk and when not
A: Maria says that she’s often
A: Lilly says that some places do discussion in affinity groups & then group discussions, with POC speaking first; you can start a conversation with other colleagues about whiteness

Q: issue of collections

original etherpad