Introduction
The contemporary landscape of the information condition is the direct result of our wildly warped social institutional environment.[1] Frameworks of social justice, cross-cultural sensitivity, and openness toward the incorporation of various perspectives need to be at the crux of library and information science education. In order to affect changes to the existing information condition, we must acknowledge the need for and begin to incorporate a more sensitive system of library and information science education in order to produce more successful, diverse, and sensitive professionals.
The Twenty-First Century Library
The most recent induction to the collection of frameworks operating within library and information science is that of social justice. Defined as “the intersecting tautology between the human rights of individuals and reconciling these rights to a society that is composed of groups,” social justice conceptualizes the crucial reasons that shape one’s beliefs and actions.[2] Social justice, as taught in library and information science, shapes relationships and social exchanges in institutional, educational, governmental, organizational, and community-based settings, among others.[3] As a framework, it functions to foster “critical, inclusive, and culturally competent professional engagement.”[4] Because of its far-reaching effects on the work of information professionals, the necessity of the inclusion of social justice as a tenet of library and information science education is inescapable.
Because libraries have a professional public service orientation, they are imbued with underlying power that has been perpetuated through an ongoing social contract with the public sphere, and the groups that make up the public sphere that is often served consists of marginalized communities seeking information.[5] Many of these communities maintain a history of oppressors “suppressing individual [or group] expression and social movements struggling to overcome their censorial power.”[6] Because information institutions must respond to their cultural and community circumstances, the education of the professionals running them needs a stronger and more focused effort to encompass more wide-ranging and sensitive thought and practice behind the actions undertaken during these evolutions.[7] A more well rounded pre-emptive education is intended to prevent the feelings of invalidation, invisibility, and alienation that individuals may feel as the result of unconscious bias and seemingly well-intentioned microaggressions.[8]
Library technology is a more specific area in which further discrimination takes place. Access to and use of information is restricted by these technologies that are embedded within a system in which communities are continually and consistently marginalized based on arbitrary characteristics.[9] Making particular technologies unavailable to certain communities on purpose in order to restrict their access to what can be deemed “privileged” information is what perpetually marginalizes them. This scenario is representative of the need of one group to feel dominion over another, less advantaged group.[10]
Librarians, as well as various other types of information professionals, are facing an ever-more diverse demographic of patrons and an increasingly complex society that influences, colors, and shapes their institution’s resources and services.[11] The library constantly evolves along with the existing social, cultural, economic, and political conditions of the time and community, and these affect all aspects of development and functionality within the institution.[12] As information professionals are taught to evolve with the needs of their communities, the first step in creating a sensitive information professional that can successfully do this is to provide him or her with a holistic and well-rounded library and information science education.
Results of Racial Bias in Academia
The justice system remains color-coded because of the bias embedded within the law school admissions process.[13] Law schools notoriously admit students based on academic merit, primarily through the aptitude supposedly revealed through the scores of the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). Lack of access to education, among other circumstances, is a lifelong struggle for various non-white individuals. This unequal access directly affects the balance of admissions and creates an inequality among LSAT scores.[14] By using LSAT scores and other academic metrics as the preliminary screening test for the selection of law students, academic institutions are admitting applicants based on unconscious or invisible practices of racial discrimination.
Professional programs, such as law schools, need to take factors beyond academics into consideration when accepting the students that will become the namers and controllers of a generation, including problem solving, interpersonal skills, and persuasiveness, among many others.[15] By not taking the non-academic elements of the job into consideration during the admissions process, law schools, and thereby the justice system, unconsciously does not allow for the inclusion of diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Continually admitting a majority of individuals that share the white perspective merely perpetuates the cycle of the legal system maintaining white advantage in its language and actions.[16] The recurring process of academic admissions and subsequent hiring sustains the succession of maintaining the perspective of white privilege in the legal and academic settings. In order to create an academic landscape for an institution that produces professionals that work with information, evidence, and truth, the basis of admissions needs to be more diverse, encompassing, and consciously as unbiased as possible.
Landscape & the Role of Politics
No person has one unitary identity that is defined solely by race.[17] Humans are intersectional beings, and that notion should be at the forefront of our political landscape and education, but that is unfortunately rarely the case. Lipsitz’s concept of “presence of mind” is crucial to a successful library and information science education. He argues that it is “an abstract of the future, and precise awareness of the present moment more decisive than foreknowledge of the most distant events.”[18] Having an awareness of how one’s words, decisions, and actions have an effect on those around you is a necessary element to the education of information professionals.
Racism was institutionalized by both economic and political policies, as well as cultural traditions. It united an ethnically diverse European American population into an imagined community that could together reign supreme over persons of different ethnic origins through purposefully crafted policy and cultural institutions.[19] This “imagined community” gained power because of the privilege that is built into the system of neoliberalism that makes up the current landscape of policy creation and implementation.[20]
Neoliberalism operates on the praxis of individual freedoms and skills, but in this racialized world, these individual freedoms only apply to those with white skin or those who can afford them.[21] Because of this disorientation toward the body of the group, neoliberalism employs a “hands off” political opinion toward race and racial groups, creating an egalitarian system, but in name only.[22] But having an awareness of these significantly impactful disparities and realities, and developing and practicing appropriate ways to address them, needs to be a part of the library and information science classroom. The inherent lack of acceptance and group benefit embedded within the neoliberalist viewpoint makes it so that it is not a landscape within which diversity and tolerance can be expressed, let alone addressed or changed.[23] And because it has immersed itself into our common-sense ways of thinking and interpreting our world, by offering counter-narratives within library and information science classrooms, emerging information professionals can be better equipped to manage these disparities and the stresses felt by their possible patron bases.
Conclusion
Politics and unconscious bias underlie most, if not all, of the actions and decisions that occur in the current political landscape and information condition. Ideologies stem from the different perspectives that contend with issues of race, gender, sexuality, and social justice, and those individuals that represent them and have them challenge the normative landscape that disregards them.
An education needs to be in place in which information professionals can recognize and value cultural competency as an important skill set.[24] The aforementioned addresses both the real-world and academic effects of the need for more inclusive library and information science education. Well-rounded library and information science education that focuses on the use of the abovementioned frameworks “creates opportunities for students to gain a more holistic and inclusive perspective on the relationships between people, information, and technology, with the ultimate potential of shaping a more just society.”[25] Information that exists, as well as new information that is being produced, are increasingly only available to those groups within society that can afford its costs.[26] Therefore, underrepresented or marginalized groups of individuals are not getting access to information, and thus their chances at privilege are continually being unconsciously shot down. Education in library and information science that is directed toward creating better and more holistic processes that allow for more universal access to information is critical to the well-rounded functioning institution and its representative professional.
References
Brown, Michael K. 2005. Of Fish and Water. In Whitewashing Race: The Myth of
A Color-Blind Society., ed. Michael K. Brown, 1-18. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Cooks, Nicole A., Miriam E. Sweeney, and Safiya Umoja Noble. 2016. Social
Justice as Topic and Tool: An Attempt to Transform an LIS Curriculum
and Culture. Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 86(1) :
107-24.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2006. Introduction. In Critical Race
Theory: An Introduction., 1-6. New York: NYU Press.
Harvey, David. 2005. Introduction. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism., 1-38.
Chicago: University of Chicago Center for International Studies Beyond
the Headlines Series.
Lipsitz, George. 1995. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized
Social Democracy and the “White” Problem in American Studies.
American Quarterly 47(3) : 369-84.
Mehra, Bharat, Kevin S. Rioux, and Kendra S. Albright. 2009. Social Justice in
Library and Information Science. In Encyclopedia of Library and
Information Sciences. Third ed., 4820-36. New York: Taylor and Francis.
Omi, M., and H. Winant. 1994. Chapter Four. In Racial Formation in the United
States: From the 1960’s to the 1990’s., 53-76. New York: Routledge.
Pacey, Arnold. 1983. Technology: Practice and Culture. In The Culture of
Technology., 1-12. Great Britain: First MIT Press.
Schiller, Herbert. 1996. Data Deprivation. In Information Inequality: The
Deepening Social Crisis in America, 43-58. New York: Routledge.
Sue, D. et al. 2007. Racial Microaggressions and the Asian American
Experience. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 13(1) : 1-13.
Winner, Langdon. 1986. Do Artifacts Have Politics? In The Whale and the
Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology., 1-11. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
[1] Schiller, Herbert. 1996. Data Deprivation. In Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America., 43-58. New York: Routledge.
[2] Mehra, Bharat, Kevin S. Rioux, and Kendra S. Albright. 2009. Social Justice in Library and Information Science. In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences. Third ed., 4820-36. New York: Taylor and Francis.
[3] Mehra, Social Justice in Library and Information Science, 4821.
[4] Cooke, Nicole A., Miriam E. Sweeney, and Safiya Umoja Noble. 2016. Social Justice as Topic and Tool: An Attempts to Transform an LIS Curriculum and Culture. Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 86(1) : 107-24.
[5] Ibid, 4824-5.
[6] Schiller, Data Deprivation., 44.
[7] Pacey, Arnold. 1983. Technology: Practice and Culture. In The Culture of Technology., 1-12. Great Britain: First MIT Press.
[8] Sue, D. et al. Racial Microaggressions and the Asian American Experience. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 13(1) : 1-13.
[9] Winner, Langdon. 1986. Do Artifacts Have Politics? In The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology., 1-11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[10] Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, 3.
[11] Cooke, Social Justice as Topic and Tool, 107.
[12] Ibid, 4822.
[13] Brown, Michael K. 2005. Of Fish and Water. In Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society., ed. Michael K. Brown, 1-18. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
[14] Brown, Of Fish and Water, 17.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid, 16.
[17] Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2006. Introduction. In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction., 1-6. New York: NYU Press.
[18] Lipsitz, George. 1995. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the “White” Problem in American Studies. American Quarterly 47(3) : 369-84.
[19] Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 370.
[20] Harvey, David. 2005. Introduction. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism., 1-38. Chicago: University of Chicago Center for International Studies Beyond the Headlines Series.
[21] Harvey, Introduction, 2.
[22] Omi, M., and H. Winant. 1994. Chapter Four. In Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1990’s., 53-76. New York: Routledge.
[23] Ibid, 13.
[24] Cooke, Social Justice as Topic and Tool, 108.
[25] Cooke, Social Justice as Topic and Tool, 121.
[26] Schiller, Data Deprivation, 55.
everyone sucks except you 