antiracism

Just say it…WHITE SUPREMACY

Posted on by April Hathcock

Last week, I dropped in on this event being organized by a Twitter friend who is an amazing science researcher doing work in the scholarly communication space with a particular focus on social justice and anti-oppression. She’d gotten a bunch of other researchers, librarians, funders, students, and the like together to write a handbook on building better, more equitable systems and platforms of open scholarship.

The point of the group and the handbook was to move conversations and action forward in the scholarly communication space. So right off the bat, for the opening preamble of the handbook, a librarian friend of mine started a draft of two powerful paragraphs that were meant to lay out the values of this collective. Others added to the language.  The thinking was that their radical, critical values needed to be clear and uncompromising for real change to take place.

To paraphrase (the handbook hasn’t come out yet, so I won’t share the exact language), the paragraphs went something like this:

We recognize that current systems of scholarly communication are mired in historical and modern white supremacy, ableism, capitalism, and cisgender hetero-patriarchy . . . It is our goal to work to establish systems that are intentionally anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, anti-capitalist, anti-heteronormative and anti-gender-normative—in short, anti-oppressive.

They were beautiful paragraphs. I loved them. Many of the participants did. Yet, some of the participants, notably folks who were white and more senior professionals with particular power and privilege, felt the statements were “too blunt.” Discussion ensued. And at some point, the real issue came out: “I don’t know,” one of them admitted, “I agree with the ideas here, but some of these terms—specifically, ‘white supremacy.’ It’s just too militant. Too in your face. It’ll turn people away, and we don’t want to do that.”

Ah. Yes. White people hate the term RACISM. But what they hate even more is any reference to WHITE SUPREMACY or WHITENESS. Anything that calls out WHITENESS as  an oppressive norm.

At this point, I got up, said a little something about how awesome I thought the statement was and how pointless the work would be without it, referenced what was going on in libraridom with folks trying to sell marginalized folks down the river while bending over backwards to protect Nazis, and peaced out. That was my cue to leave. Most of the room may have been on board with what my scientist and librarian friends were really, radically trying to do, but the people with the power and prestige and MONEY were scared. As the Bible says, “The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” I didn’t have time for weak (white) flesh.

Then, today, my sister sent me this New York Times op-ed, accompanied by an angry face emoji, and it was the same old, same old. Sure, this Nice White Lady™ was limiting her message to other white liberals. But the message was the same: Don’t call out racism or whiteness or white supremacy for what they are. You hurt feelings that way.

The thing is, this message is not new. I hear it all the time. From angry white trolls and well-meaning white “allies” alike. Lemme say that again: I get this tone policing message from both the angry white conservatives AND the well-meaning white liberals. Don’t talk about WHITE SUPREMACY. Tone down the talk about WHITENESS. It’s divisive and alienating. It hurts feelings. You lose potential “allies” that way.

Black and white photo of woman holding a magnifying glass up to her open mouth showing off enlarged image of her tongue, which is colored bright red

“Megaphone” by madamepsychosis via Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND

Well, let me make this clear once and for all: If the terms WHITE SUPREMACY, WHITENESS, RACISM, WHITE PRIVILEGE, or any variation thereof, makes you so uncomfortable that you wish to disengage from this work, then YOU ARE A WHITE SUPREMACIST.

Yes. I said it. I mean it. Yes, even you. No excuses. I don’t care if your best friends are people of color. I don’t care if you marched for Black Lives Matter. I don’t care if you voted for Obama. I don’t care if you are part of the resistance against the current administration. I don’t care if you participate in actions to free Black and Brown children from cages, to open immigration, to abolish ICE and prisons and the police. If the very thought of hearing or using the term WHITE SUPREMACY makes you want to walk away, tone it down, disengage in any way, then YOU ARE A WHITE SUPREMACIST.

Why? It’s simple. WHITE SUPREMACY is, by definition, the belief that white feelings, values, and experiences are more important and deserve more consideration than the feelings, values, and experiences of people of color. To shy away from anti-racist work because the term WHITE SUPREMACY is used and you find it “too blunt”? THAT IS WHITE SUPREMACY. That is the act of preferring to engage with more blunt, “white-friendly” terminology than to actually get on with the much-needed work of dismantling WHITE SUPREMACY. It’s preferring to support the feelings of white people about WHITE SUPREMACY rather than directly and actively addressing the feelings and experiences of people of color facing WHITE SUPREMACY. IT IS WHITE SUPREMACY.

I understand that there are folks who are new to this work and need space to learn and move beyond their discomfort. I get that, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the space for that needs to be elsewhere. Because there are others who are busy doing the work and don’t have time or energy to coddle white feelings and coax white people along.

As for that scholarly communication group, like I said, I left early so I don’t know how the conversation ended up. I don’t know what the preamble to the handbook will look like. But what I do know is that while they were busy going back and forth on whether to say WHITE SUPREMACY, they weren’t busy engaging in action to dismantle WHITE SUPREMACY in scholarly communication. And ultimately, that was part of what their work was supposed to be about.

So, if you’re serious about doing anti-racist work, then you need to be able to work through the discomfort and just say it. WHITE SUPREMACY. Because that is at the crux of what we’re dealing with here.

 

 

Oh, and by the way, fellow people of color, while this post is directed mainly at white people, please know that we too can and many times do enact WHITE SUPREMACY. But that’s another blog post for another day.

selfie photo of April in large conference hall

To ALA and Beyond

Posted on by April Hathcock

I just got back from the 2018 American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans, and I actually feel invigorated.

selfie photo of April in large conference hall

Me, waiting excitedly to see First Lady Michelle Obama at ALA Annual 2018

And that’s saying something given how the U.S. Supreme Court just upheld the President’s ban of Muslim folks while he still orders the holding of thousands of children of color in cages.

Being invigorated this year is also huge because this time last year, after the 2017 ALA Annual in Chicago, I came back demoralized and exhausted by whiteness and then eventually harassed by white supremacist trolls.

But at this ALA, I made some changes. I took more breaks and surrounded myself with colleagues of color and allies. When I could, I took myself out of spaces and situations that felt tiring, leaving me more bandwidth for coping with the spaces and situations from which I couldn’t leave. My parents came for a day, and I soaked up some much-needed familial love. In short, I made my self-care a priority, and it paid off.

I also had the opportunity to present in two wonderful programs that really left me feeling encouraged, hopeful, and ready to keep doing the work.

April's conference badge with ribbons for Speaker, Spectrum Scholar, pronouns she/her/hers, Wakanda Research Library Staff, and Council

Obligatory badge pic

The first was a panel with Nicole Cooke, Miriam Sweeney, Cynthia Orozco, Stacy Collins, and Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez (in absentia) titled “Bullying, Trolling, Doxxing, Oh My! Protecting Our Advocacy and Public Discourse Around Diversity and Social Justice.” During the session, we each shared our stories of suffering extensive harassment online, by phone, and in the mail, from right-wing white supremacists angry about our public social justice work. We also talked extensively about the lack of meaningful (or any) support we received from our institutions and professional organizations, including ALA, and suggested better, more productive ways for providing support to harassed professionals. I shared my experiences after last year’s ALA, when I received hateful tweets, emails, and voicemails from white supremacist trolls about my post on race fatigue. I even had people calling my library and university administration about me. It was a devastatingly traumatic time, but I made it through with the support of my family and wonderful allies and friends, like the women with whom I had the pleasure of presenting. The room for our panel was packed, and we heard from several attendees who were eager to take the conversation further in developing plans to provide support for victims in the future. I was also delighted to learn more about Stacy’s Anti-Oppression LibGuide, an amazing resource for supporting folks from marginalized communities and educating potential allies.

My second session was a workshop I led on “Breaking Below the Surface of Racism, Whiteness, and Implicit Bias,”  which was part of the Association of College and Research Libraries series of programming. I figured we’d be sequestered in a tiny room and there’d be a small group of folks who are already heavily involved in this work. So I brought 40 or so handouts, thinking I was being optimistic.

Y’all.

The room was HUGE and packed. There were 500 attendees for my workshop. FIVE HUNDRED.

And we had a great time. There was a wide diversity of attendees, white and people of color, from all types of libraries (not just academic), from all different levels and ranks of work or management. Everyone was very engaged and eager to participate in the group and plenary discussions that I had arranged. After all, antiracist work is active and collaborative, so we put that into direct practice during the workshop. It was a room full of people willing to learn, teach, share, make mistakes, be corrected. There was an amazing collaborative, supportive energy flowing through those 500. And it was made even better given the fact that my parents were also in the room. What a beautiful, beautiful time. Ryan Randall got these community notes started and others filled in if you want to check them out.

So, it was a good conference for me, on the whole. Add on top of that getting to hear First Lady Michelle Obama dialogue with Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden and to hear actress extraordinaire Viola Davis speak, and I can’t help but to feel invigorated and surrounded in my Black girl magic.

Don’t get me wrong, our very white, cis-het, middle-class profession still has a ways to go. It wasn’t all roses. At our last session of ALA Council, many of my fellow cisgender and gender-conforming colleagues refused to be bold and stand with our genderqueer and trans colleagues on a resolution that would aim to have 100% of conference bathrooms be gender-inclusive. We ended up with a weak compromise that only calls for a “sufficient mix” of gender-inclusive and gender-specific bathrooms, a resolution that really changes nothing of the status quo. And what was more disheartening was hearing the arguments being made for “safety” and the “comfort” of the oppressive majority. It felt grossly familiar to stuff many have lived and the rest of us have read but in our history books. We need to do better.

We can do better. And I’m determined that we will. My ALA Council term ends next year, and I’ve already submitted my candidacy for another term. So, we’ll see.

But in the meantime, I’m taking this renewed energy I’ve got and pushing forward with the fight. To ALA and beyond!

black postcard with multicolored hand outlines in background titled "Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS," edited by Rose L. Chou and Annie Pho

I’m super excited about this new volume edited by Rose Chou and Annie Pho, Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS, coming this fall from Library Juice Press. Get one!

Columbus Day 2017: Tear It All Down

Posted on by April Hathcock

Today is Columbus Day, but I’m in the midst of a social media break so you won’t see this post until much later. Still, I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, and it’s really come to a point where I’ve got to get the thoughts down.

I just eavesdropped on a white woman talking about her family’s participation in the New York City Italian-American community’s Columbus Day celebrations. (Columbus Day became a holiday in the U.S. initially as a way for marginalized Italian immigrants to celebrate their heritage.) There will be protest by native folks and allies against the settler colonization and genocide that Christopher Columbus represents. In the words of this woman, “I get it, but I don’t get it.” Then, she proceeded to give all the usual trite arguments:

  1. It’s a celebration of Italians in America, not Columbus per se (though he was Italian in America and a genocidal one at that).
  2. You can’t judge historical figures by today’s standards of morality.
  3. I supported the taking down of the Confederate monuments, but where do we draw the line?
  4. Blah, blah, blah.

I don’t mean to rag on this woman. She’s only saying what many other well-meaning, white, liberal Americans say. But this thinking is the very epitome of why we will likely never decolonize and dismantle white supremacy in the country (or anywhere else really).

White people are just too married to their own supremacy and privilege. Even the well-meaning, so-called “liberal” and “progressive” ones.

Over the last few months with all the hullabaloo about taking down Confederate monuments, so many well-meaning liberal white folks took to their thinkpieces to explain why it’s the white (do I mean “right”? Is that really a typo?) thing to do to take down the Confederate monuments, and why it’s okay to leave monuments to other well-known slave-owners and native murderers because of “all the good they did in founding our great country.”

Huh. Cue thinking-face emoji.

What “good” did they do? For whom? What “great country”? For whom?

Because from where I sit, I see native peoples being chased by dogs and teargassed for trying to protect the sanctity of their (and all of our) water.

From where I sit, I see black athletes, whose very bodies are owned by wealthy white men (sound familiar?) being castigated and Black-balled (quite literally) for engaging in peaceful protest against state-sanctioned, racist violence.

From where I sit, I see Spanish-speaking, colonized Americans, Black, Brown, and every shade in between, being left to die of thirst and disease in the midst of one of the worst natural disasters in their living history.

But yes, let’s please preserve the racist legacy of the racist people who built this racist country. By all means.

I say tear it all down. I say this as a proud American who wants to be even prouder of her country. I say this as a Black woman, most of whose ancestors didn’t choose to be here, but here we are, so deal with me. I say this sincerely and unequivocally.

Until we’re willing to, figuratively and literally, tear down every vestige of our nation’s racist, white supremacist history—from Washington to Jackson to Tr*mp—we will never attain the equality and equity we like to talk so glibly about. We need to confront our history and our present, and then we need to tear it down.

Until then, enjoy your ridiculous parades and bank holidays. I’ve got better things to do.