WHITE PRIVILEGE—see also LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Once again the Library of Congress has refused to add WHITE PRIVILEGE as a subject heading.

Long-time critical classification activist Sandy Berman has been fighting for this for years, and other library folk whom I know and love, like Netanel Ganin and Jenna Freedman, have also been discussing and taking up this fight.

Still to no avail, though.

The Library of Congress, even as it finally welcomes a black woman at the helm, refuses to acknowledge that WHITE PRIVILEGE is a reality that extends beyond RACISM or WHITE—RACE IDENTITY. Privilege isn’t about discrimination; it’s about the automatic benefits and advantages that come from living in a system set up to value the lives, ideas, and expressions of one group over all others.

WHITE PRIVILEGE ≠ RACISM.

You may be a staunch antiracist, but if you are white, you are steeped in WHITE PRIVILEGE. It is a reality of living in the systemic bias of our society. Granted, not all white people experience the same flavor of privilege. WHITE PRIVILEGE intersects with other domains of identity—such as class, gender, gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, religion, etc.—so that the final product can look and feel differently for different people. But the essential fact remains: All white people have WHITE PRIVILEGE. And that privilege exists regardless of their racism/antiracism or their sense of racial identity.

Contrary to what the Library of Congress thinks, the current subject headings are not sufficient. They do not capture the reality of WHITE PRIVILEGE. But the LoC continues to refuse to see this. (Many refer to this phenomenon as being “blind to privilege,” but that construction is ableist and fails to acknowledge the willfulness involved. Truly blind people have no choice about not seeing; but people who ignore their privilege do so willfully.)

For those of us who write and do research on WHITE PRIVILEGE, we are going to have to continue to be creative in the way we hunt down and share resources, knowing that the classification system continues to fail us. Take this post, for example. While I mention the terms RACISM and WHITE—RACE IDENTITY, those terms are not what this post is about. This post is about WHITE PRIVILEGE. But since that term doesn’t exist as a subject heading, you’d have to do some fancy footwork to find it in one of our most popular classification schemes.

I find myself once again reflecting on Hope Olson’s “The Power to Name: Representation in Library Catalogs.” This power to name and classify the realities of life is a potent and creative one. And the inverse is just as true: The power not to name is just as potent and full of anti-creative energy. While it does not destroy the reality of that which is never named, it does render it invisible, making it much more insidious, and thus, much harder to combat. The power of the LoC not to name WHITE PRIVILEGE helps to further cloak that privilege in camouflage so it can continue its work.

“The power to name is indeed a power. It is a vastly effectual power that those with privilege are always hard-pressed to cede.”

~”A Lot’s in a Name, Romeo,” July 29, 2016

I’m grateful to people like Sandy, Netanel, and Jenna who activate their privilege for good and unceasingly take up this fight to name WHITE PRIVILEGE in our library classification systems. We didn’t get a win this time, but maybe one day.