For this first entry into what is intended to be a series of audio posts, I do a “deep dive” into the chapter "Not the Shark, but the Water: How Neutrality and Vocational Awe Intertwine to Uphold White Supremacy,” by Anastasia Chiu , Fobazi M. Ettarh, and Jennifer A. Ferretti, a scholarly work that isn’t exactly a “classic”—it’s too recent for that—but has nonetheless been heavily cited since it was published in the 2021 book Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory edited by Sofia Y. Leung, Jorge R. López-McKnight.
As listeners will learn, I chose this chapter for this first foray into podcasting at Heterodoxy in the Stacks because I found it to be so replete with problematic assertions and argumentation that I felt tackling these many issues in a standard written article would require too much direct quotation and as such would be a tad cumbersome.
First, a quick note on the series’ title, “Confronting Critical Librarianship”: Why, the reader might ask, did I not opt for a more open-ended and gentle verb like “questioning” or “responding” in regards to #CritLib? For starters, confronting and challenging the critical turn in librarianship has been at the forefront of this Substack since our very first post, “Against Radical Empathy as a Core Professional Principle” back in May 2022, in which we argued that replacing neutrality-related language in the American Library Association’s professional guidelines with activist-oriented terminology would be unwise. Where some critically-motivated LIS scholars and practitioners advocate activism and “taking sides” in various social causes, my colleagues and I have consistently pushed back and urged caution, advocating instead for adherence to existing robust principles.
Yet, as will be argued in this podcast itself, I believe that some of the rhetoric coming from the Critical side of the aisle has gotten so heated—with (in this case) “demands” for an unspecified “paradigm shift” in librarianship, even if it means (in the words of Todd Honma, who wrote the introduction to this chapter,) “betraying the profession”; and, because its often illiberal approaches have for all practical purposes become institutionalized by the ALA (in the form of its “Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work” which initiated the official move to abandon library neutrality [to which our first post responded] and the 2021 Code of Ethics #9 [which, among other things, directed library workers to essentially intervene in the minds of library users]), that matters have advanced to the point where something more intentional than just “questioning” is warranted.
At the same time, please note that I am not confronting the authors about their beliefs or the existence and persistence of racism—and certainly not their personal experiences of it—nor do I challenge their claims regarding the nature of white supremacy; what I do challenge are the rhetorical methods by which they seek to ascribe to the American library profession in the 21st Century the taint of both. I don’t even deny the possibility that such is the case, I only conclude that, on the basis of the arguments presented here, the authors—despite their good intentions—do not succeed in establishing the connections they sought to make in the title, which is to say that “library neutrality intertwines with vocational awe to uphold white supremacy.” But that will be up to the listener to decide.
To promote viewpoint diversity, Heterodoxy in the Stacks invites constructive dissent and disagreement in the form of guest posts. While articles published on Heterodoxy in the Stacks are not peer- or editorially-reviewed, all posts must model the HxA Way. Content is attributed to the individual contributor(s).
To submit an article for Heterodoxy in the Stacks, send an email with the article title, author name, and article document to hxlibsstack@gmail.com. Unless otherwise requested, the commenting feature will be on. Thank you for joining the conversation!
Share this post