Welcome back to the Heterodoxy in the Stacks Podcast. While this is our third episode of the Podcast, this is going to be episode 2 of our Confronting Critical Librarianship series, which examines the rhetoric and methods in the scholarly literature of #CritLib. Today we look at the (heavily-cited) classic 2005 article “Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies” by Todd Honma, which appeared in the journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, volume 1 issue 2.
This episode is basically a sequel to my January 10th Heterodoxy in the Stacks post, “The Neutrality Conspiracy”, which took a deep dive into the 5 citations attached to the first “Whereas” of the ALA’s 2021 “Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work,” and determined that these sources did not support the foundational contention of the Resolution that library neutrality has “upheld and encouraged white supremacy.” I said in that piece that I thought there were larger issues with Honma’s paper that I wanted to address, so this (and the subsequent episode) will be my attempt to do that; not to single out this paper on its own terms, but rather because it has been so influential (having been cited nearly 300 times) and because of the consequential purposes to which it was been put by the ALA in its Resolution.
Additional Sources cited:
Burkholder, Zoe. (2010). Americanization. In T.C. Hunt, J.C. Carper, I.T.J. Lasley, & C. Raisch (Eds.), Encyclopedia of educational reform and dissent (pp. 59-61). SAGE Publications.
Jones Jr, P. A. (2020). Advocacy for multiculturalism and immigrants' rights: The effect of US immigration legislation on American public libraries. North Carolina Libraries, 78(1), 1876-2020.
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