The second piece in a three-part series by Liv Graham (MLIS ’20) is now available by clicking here. The first part of the series, can be found here. A short introduction to this piece is listed below:
Introduction:
Much of the contemporary American discourse affords institutional violence a frustratingly limited scope; for example, mainstream liberal and conservative reporting on continued organizing in the streets against state-sanctioned violence and terror describes civilians reacting to their oppression as violent, rather than depicting the scope of the violent conditions that we are rising up against, including and not limited to: narrowing avenues to survive and be sheltered in the wake of the pandemic-triggered economic recession; continued racist police terror which fuels white supremacist extrajudicial violence—as of the last week in July, there have been over 70 instances of cars attempting to run over protesters; continued expansion of state/corporate surveillance; and protesters fearing kidnapping by Homeland Security while Democratic mayors about-face against Trump on camera while draining taxpayer money on military tech-equipped cops and allowing DHS in their cities in the first place. Prison abolitionist and organizer Mariame Kaba (2018) writes that the “stranglehold of oppression cannot be loosened by a plea to the oppressor’s conscience” (Kaba, 2018). Social progress against something as fundamental inside the American institution as racist oppression inevitably involves violence. Kaba continues, “you cannot have progress here without violence and upheaval, because it’s a struggle for survival for one and a struggle for liberation for the other. Always the powers in command are ruthless and unmerciful in defending their position and their privileges. This is not an abstract rule to be meditated upon by Americans. This is a truth that was revealed at the birth of America, and has continued to be revealed many times in our history” (Kaba, 2018).
Inside LIS, forward thinkers in the discipline note that mainstream or ALA-led approaches to librarianship do not critique the historic truths of our institution but rather represent a “historical trajectory of evolving practices whose present status continue to embody an enterprise for race-based supremacy and white power” (Sierpe, 2019). These embedded practices are found in every facet of the library and reflect “the grim reality of de facto segregation in our communities, the enduring differences in educational achievement and opportunities, as well as in the structure and composition of the field itself” (Sierpe, 2019). The way that library buildings and interior spaces are designed, where these physical spaces exist and who can access them; how our collections are defined, built, managed, cataloged, organized, and communicated; how our buildings are staffed and if these demographics are representative of the communities attempted to be served; and in how we conduct reference services, programming and for whom, outreach and for whom are prime examples of the embedded institutional violence of the library.
In positing the library as an institution, we can examine how violence, oppression, and bias is systemically maintained. nina de jesus (2014) writes that libraries are implicated within institutional oppression “by having their genesis within the enlightenment ideology and by existing as a tool to perpetuate the state” (de jesus, 2014). In the following piece, I will speak in conversation with critical LIS thinkers on the religious and Enlightenment origins of the public library specifically and how these festering moralistic values influenced not only the settler colonial project of the 19th/20th century American public library but also how this violence against marginalized patrons and library workers proliferates today. Then, I will discuss how we came to the professional-philosophical virtues of 21st century librarianship through examining federal and professional policies. Following this, I provide an introduction to how libraries can take culpability in their historic roles, including modern white librarians’ culpability in decolonize the psyche in order to provide more caring service to those whom we wish to address their information quandaries; the necessary task of destroying myths of the library as a neutral space or institution; and finally, how we can decolonize our tools like classification schema alongside what necessary apprehension we should possess when deploying new service tools, technologies, and institutional formations. Following this will be a final piece in this three-part series, synthesizing theories from prison abolitionists to provide more caring, less violent services to people who are currently or formerly incarcerated, in order to meet their informational needs neglected by state institutions.