Vanity: Librarian Laments “Whiteness” of Our Cultural Heritage

[TigerClaws]

Posting this as a vanity in hope it’ll be picked up by the conservative media that hunts here for stories.

The library journal posted this on twitter.

https://mobile.twitter.com/LibraryJournal/status/1118232615847329802?s=19

Links to a librarian who posted this:

If you look at any United States library’s collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections (books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.) are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from POC and then claimed as white property with all of the “rights to use and enjoyment of” that Harris describes in her article. When most of our collections filled with this so-called “knowledge,” it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color. Collections are representations of what librarians (or faculty) deem to be authoritative knowledge and as we know, this field and educational institutions, historically, and currently, have been sites of whiteness.

Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries. They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives via the prison industrial complex, the spoils of war, etc. Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicates that we don’t care about what POC think, we don’t care to hear from POC themselves, we don’t consider POC to be scholars, we don’t think POC are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people. To return to the Harris quote from above, library collections and spaces have historically kept out Black, Indigenous, People of Color as they were meant to do and continue to do. One only has to look at the most recent incident at the library of my alma mater, Barnard College, where several security guards tried to kick out a Black Columbia student for being Black.

I still have some thinking to do around this topic, but curious to hear what others think. I’m less interested in hearing that you don’t buy it, so don’t bother with those types of comments.

[rlmorel]

Good ol’ Gilligan...:)

[NFHale]

THERE HE IS!!!!!!!

Hahaha!!! Dobie!

[Ban Draoi Marbh Draoi]

Exactly.

Shove the hypocrisy back into her face; the medium that she is using to show her disgust was invented by white people.