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Announcement thread: I was recently promoted to Assistant Dean of Special Collections & Archives at UMKC. I’m still holding down my work in digital archives and stewardship until we can figure out a solution to my workload, but in the meantime, I have a few things to say.
While it’s a personally significant step in my career, I didn’t set out for a leadership position. What I actually wanted when I entered this field after earning my MLS over a decade ago was a beacon—to see a person that looked like me holding positional power in my library.
Aside: To be clear, I do believe in collective power, but when POC are so few in number in your organization, it’s hard to build the power to challenge system inequities when the majority population are on the receiving end of those system benefits.
What I wanted was access to a mentor of color so I didn’t have to face the emotional labor (and associated risk) in convincing a white mentor that I and all POC face barriers and challenges in career support and advancement.
Why? Because our work culture and decision-making structures reflect the values and ways of being, knowing, and doing of white people.
In fact, how can we make meaningful progress on advancing racial equity in the workplace (and librarianship) when we solely engage in the feel-good diversity rhetoric of universities?
This rhetoric often paternalistically focuses on how POC have additional barriers and challenges to overcome without also acknowledging and engaging the structural advantages that white people hold in the academy.
The simple answer is that we can't advance racial equity without also identifying and disrupting these white cultural norms. We have to do it if we want to actually retain POC in librarianship.
It’s not a topic a lot of white people want to discuss. I need only refer to the lack of white librarians at the White Fragility talk by Robin DiAngelo during ALA Midwinter to serve as a good indicator, but there are so many others.
Here’s the reality of my situation: A white man had to make space for me, not as an act of benevolence but because it had to work well for him too. He’s supportive and I appreciate it.
But how many white people faced with the opportunity of career advancement would resist the individualistic attitude that reinforces a narrative of meritocracy (But I earned it!)?
How many would pause to ask themselves, “Is the opportunity presented to me also informed by structural societal privileges and positive bias that I receive because I reflect what the system reproduces (whiteness)?”
Yes. Yes, it is. That’s a part of it too, but I’ve rarely seen a white person acknowledge and disrupt it. And this from a field with lots of white liberals who care about diversity. That high percentage (87%) of whiteness in our field says otherwise.
I’ve experienced the paradox of the invisibility of my oppression and the hypervisibility of my identity.
For instance, having early career white librarians vent to me about their own desire for career advancement in an environment that 100% reflects them in leadership while also being told “Oh, you’re here because you contribute to diversity” when offered a more stable position.
If we truly want to diversify our profession and sustain that diversity, then we need to name, acknowledge, and disrupt the racial hierarchy which favors the white person’s need for moral comfort and access to privileges over the POC’s right to basic safety, dignity, and equity.
To wrap up, having positional power as a woman of color doesn’t guarantee transformation in our work culture because being at the table is not the same as being heard and included, but it’s a start.
I’m here to do the hard work. I know I’m not alone and thank those who have paved the path, challenged the system, and taken risks. We here.
