The Neutrality Conspiracy

Has library neutrality really "upheld white supremacy and fascism"?

Image: DeepAI Image Generator

Introduction: ALA Things Reconsidered

Those of you who have followed this Substack for a long time—or have just glanced to the right of the screen to see the most-viewed articles—will know that the very first article we ever posted here was an open letter entitled “Against “Radical Empathy” as a Core Professional Principle: An Open Letter to the ALA Working Group on Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice,” which was published on May 3^rd 2022. To date, this piece has received over 10,000 views, and is, in fact, not only the top-ranked article on the Substack, but I’ve also been informed that it is now required reading in a course on intellectual freedom in a Canadian library science graduate school.

The open letter was in response to the American Library Association passing a Resolution at their 2021 Winter Conference entitled the Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work. Among its recommendations was #3, which

charges the Working Group on Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice, with a representative from the Committee on Diversity, to review neutrality rhetoric and identify alternatives, sharing findings by July 1, 2021.

As such, this Resolution included a mandate for policy change within ALA, and hence within the profession, to officially renounce library neutrality (a term which, not incidentally, doesn’t actually appear in the ALA’s Library Bill of Rights or its Code of Ethics). This Resolution was Adopted by the Council of the American Library Association Monday, January 25, 2021, and signed by Tracie D. Hall, Executive Director and Secretary of the ALA Council. According to the ALA website,

The Council of the American Library Association shall be the policy-making body of the Association. The Council shall have the authority to monitor and enforce adherence to all Association policies. The Council shall delegate to the Association authority to plan and carry out programs and activities within assigned fields of responsibility. The Council shall have the authority to establish a division, round table, or any other unit needed to accomplish the work of the Association and to dissolve units authorized under its authority.

Based on the Council’s decision to approve this Resolution, the ALA went on to establish the Working Group on Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice to tackle this issue to come up with alternative language to neutrality. Our first post to the Substack argued not only was the notion of “radical empathy” an inappropriate stance for library workers, but that the entire premise—that neutrality-related language needed to be abandoned—was both flawed and entirely misguided. Many contributors to this Substack including myself have gone on in many subsequent posts over the past two plus years to continue to defend library neutrality. (The Working Group would release its Final Report on July 12th, 2022, having reached no consensus as to how to proceed in replacing neutrality, only that the “work must continue”).

But what I wish to focus on here is the very first statement in the ALA Resolution, the first Whereas, which stated the following:

Whereas libraries have upheld and encouraged white supremacy both actively through discriminatory practices and passively through a misplaced emphasis on neutrality.

Which is a remarkable and extraordinary statement. A damning one. White supremacy is one of the most toxic, corrosive forces in history—if libraries have indeed “upheld and encouraged”—encouraged!—white supremacy then this is something that we should obviously stop doing right away. As an assertion, this claim presumably has some evidence behind it. And as we all know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What evidence was provided?

Attached to and supporting this first Whereas were five citations:

Todd Honma. “Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies.” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. 2005.

Eino Sierpe. "Confronting Librarianship and its Function in the Structure of White Supremacy and the Ethno State". Journal of Radical Librarianship. May 27, 2019.

Em Claire Knowles. “Can Libraries Be Neutral? Should They Strive To Be Neutral?”. March 26, 2018.

Dani Scott and Laura Saunders. “Neutrality in Public Libraries: How Are We Defining One of our Core Values?” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. June 30, 2020. doi: 10.1177/0961000620935501

Jennifer A Ferretti, “Neutrality is Hostility: The Impact of (False) Neutrality in Academic Librarianship." Medium. February 13, 2018.

When I first read the Resolution, and saw what its foundational statement was, I immediately went to these endnotes and asked myself, do these sources in fact support the contention that neutrality has “upheld and encouraged white supremacy”? I quickly ascertained that there was much less to this Resolution than met the eye.

What I want to do in this post—something I’ve wanted to do, in fact, for 4 years—is take a closer look at each one of these citations that the Drafters of this resolution relied upon for their assertion that library neutrality had “upheld and encouraged” white supremacy and fascism in order to determine: do these sources constitute sufficient scholarly warrant for such a policy declaration? Given the gravity of the charge made in the Resolution, one would expect that this document would be based on the most sound research, the most robust findings, the most thorough and reasoned debate, weighing all sides of the argument. Was this the case?

Citations Needed

Let’s examine each one of the five sources cited in the first “Whereas” statement to see—any considerations of inherent quality aside—if the drafters of the ALA resolution were warranted in citing that particular article to make the claim that library neutrality “upheld and encouraged white supremacy.”

The first article is “Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies” which ran in the journal InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies in 2005. This was essentially written 20 years ago, and since its publication it has been highly influential: according to Google Scholar it has been cited 285 times in the LIS (and adjacent) literature, so this is clearly a modern “classic” that is probably required reading in many LIS programs. Clearly, Honma’s arguments have carried a lot of weight in our field, which goes a long way to explaining why his paper would have been chosen by the drafters of the 2021 ALA Resolution in the ALA Council.

Honma makes three cumulative arguments in the paper: that the literature of LIS has ignored race and racism; that contemporary (i.,e 1990s, early 2000s) discourse on diversity and multiculturalism essentially glossed over or elided matters of racism; and, that to correct these shortcomings, LIS needs to abandon its current structures and model itself instead after such fields as women’s and gender studies and ethnic studies. While I have broader issues with how he constructs and presents these arguments (which I hope to address in a future post), what’s of interest for us now is that he’s saying that the entire profession is, at its core, racist but doesn’t actually single out institutional neutrality in a significant way, apart from two references to neutrality in the work of scholars outside of LIS: George Lipsitz’s 1998 book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics and Ruth Frankenberg’s 2001 chapter “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness” from the book The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. In other words, it cannot be argued that “Trippin’” affirms what the Resolution claims it does.

Next up is Eino Sierpe’s 2019 article "Confronting Librarianship and its Function in the Structure of White Supremacy and the Ethno State" from the Journal of Radical Librarianship. This paper (cited 20 times in 6 years) consists of a series of assertions connecting librarianship to white supremacy. Of neutrality, he declares that it is a

deceptive and harmful ideological artifact for professional indoctrination, one deliberately intended to obscure the library profession’s and its training programs’ position in the structure of white supremacy. Challenging the dogma of neutrality would ultimately remove the protective shield used to deflect criticism and calls for accountability. As Ferretti correctly points out, neutrality upholds white supremacy and effectively “reinforces structural oppression” (89, emphasis added).

The ability of the library profession to sustain the myth of its neutrality as it works to support the ideological and cultural infrastructure of white power and accommodate its needs for violence is an extraordinary achievement, one most likely attributable to the effective use of a well-designed and complex propaganda system (95, emphasis added).

The overwhelmingly hyperbolic tone of this article should be readily apparent and warrants further scrutiny: Sierpe levels a litany of the most horrific accusations against the profession but these are almost entirely unsupported by qualitative evidence, his own first-person accounts, or reference to relevant literature. The only literary support Sierpe can summon for his assertions regarding neutrality is a blog post by Jennifer Ferretti (discussed below).

More remarkable still is the Drafter’s use of Em Claire Knowles’ blog post “Can Libraries Be Neutral? Should They Strive To Be Neutral?” in which the author argues that, yes, libraries should be neutral, writing that

Neutrality of this sort [i.e., represent{ing} facts, and other information without being influenced by personal feelings or opinions] coupled with balance and objectivity, is in my opinion, the best position to work from to foster intellectual freedom and to observe both the Library Code of Ethics and Library Bill of Rights.

Only a neutral stance, she writes, can ensure equal access to materials, spaces, and services. Given Knowles’ conclusions, it does make one wonder if the Drafters actually bothered to read her post, for it directly contradicts their central contention.

A similar suspicion might also be raised regarding the fourth item cited, Dani Scott’s and Laura Saunders’ 2020 article, “Neutrality in Public Libraries: How Are We Defining One of our Core Values?” which appeared in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. This is a robust qualitative study which sought to draw out the many ways in which library professionals define and think about professional neutrality, and their findings do not at all identify a connection between neutrality and white supremacy. What the authors did find was an overall confusion and inconsistency regarding neutrality, with no universally-shared understanding of the concept, exacerbated by the ALA’s failure to actually define it. Again, this citation did not in any way support the Drafters’ claim.

Finally, the “Whereas” cites Jennifer Ferretti’s post at Medium, “Neutrality is Hostility: The Impact of (False) Neutrality in Academic Librarianship." This piece does explicitly declare (as Sierpe noted) that

Neutrality upholds white supremacy, the dominant narrative in our society. If discussions of race, gender, sexuality, economic status, etc. are not discussed when information literacy and critical thinking are main objectives, you’re making a conscious decision to leave us out, thereby not actually being neutral, but effectively privileging one group over others. I can’t ignore the fact that I’m Latina. So when an educator ignores marginalized identities, it reinforces structural oppression.

However, the author goes on to also declare that

Neutrality is polite misogyny.

Neutrality is polite homophobia.

Neutrality is polite transphobia.

Neutrality is polite classism.

Neutrality is polite xenophobia.

Neutrality is polite oppression.

These cannot be called arguments, but instead can only be fairly characterized as slogans of protest or, at the very least, postmodern poetry: they lack actual examples or references to other LIS literature to support them, beyond the assertion that the absence of racial discourse in information literacy upholds white supremacy.

So let’s recap: Honma makes no specific claim regarding neutrality in the LIS context; Sierpe’s accusations regarding neutrality are hyperbolic and evidence-free; Knowles offers a thoughtful and nuanced defence of neutrality; Scott and Saunders report on the variety of interpretations of neutrality held by librarians, none of which implicate the principle in white supremacy; and Ferretti supports the Drafters’ assertion, but in the most ungrounded fashion as part of other sweeping, radical accusations—which are, again, unsupported by argumentation, evidence, or citations to relevant literature.

Discussion: Radical Assertions as Conspiracy Theory

We see in the work of Sierpe in particular the sheer conspiratorial nature of the rhetoric seeking to connect library neutrality with white supremacy, the near-defamatory accusations of openly evil intentions on the part of the profession’s leaders to deceive its members (and the public) and “accommodate…violence” as part of a “well-designed and complex propaganda system.” Sierpe states that

librarianship [is] a system whose existential function is to preserve, manage, and defend a structure for informational, educational, cultural and political race-based domination…embody[ing] an enterprise for race-based supremacy and white power (86-87, emphasis added).

That their professional function is geared towards achieving race-based domination and supremacy will surely come as a surprise to most library workers. The reader can only conclude from the article that the perpetuation of white supremacy through institutional neutrality is an intentional effort by some secretive “cabal” of powerful librarians installed at the highest level of the profession.

This is—for all intents and purposes—a conspiracy theory. And I use this term advisedly, as I find it a mistake to lump all such theories together as a kind. Like Gina Husting and Martin Orr in their 2007 article, “Dangerous Machinery: “Conspiracy Theorist’ as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion,” I believe the term has its descriptive uses, it should not be consistently employed to pejoratively and systematically exclude alternative perspectives on controversial issues. However, Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath in his chapter “When does Critical Theory Become Conspiracy Theory?”, draws compelling connections between some critical theorizing and conspiracy theories—prone as they are to seeing patterns of injustice and the need to explain the presence of both those who benefit within a society and those who do not. For this analysis, he writes that he

focuses on the formal qualities rather than the content of the belief systems in question. Most importantly, it does not require that the conspiracy theory involve a literal conspiracy, or even an intentional agent. A conspiracy theory typically begins with the detection of a pattern, then posits a hidden force or mechanism that is taken to generate the pattern. The most natural way to explain a pattern, of course, is to ascribe it to some form of intentional agency...This is not essential though, as many conspiracy theories feature aliens, gods, mystical forces, as well as impersonal agents such as social structures (e.g. “the system,” “the deep state”) or classes (e.g. “elites,” “the 1%”). One can see therefore why academics should not take themselves to be immune to the charge of promoting conspiracy theories merely because the hidden forces they claim to see are impersonal (e.g. structural, institutional, systemic, discursive). The presence of intentional agency is largely beside the point. The question is whether critical theorists are detecting a pattern that does not really exist, and yet are unable to see that this is what they are doing…(16-17).

This is clearly what is on offer in several of the works cited in the ALA Resolution: neutrality is seen as the “hidden force” promoting the “false consciousness” fueling a self-perpetuating system of white supremacy, which is supposedly manifest in (among other things) a largely white and female workforce—a theory requiring no further explanations, understandings, or causal mechanisms.

Conclusion

It is difficult to overstate how appalling and unsettling this is: librarians of all people should understand the necessity of citing useful, relevant literature to support one’s claims, especially extraordinary ones. Instead, the institution charged with leading, supporting and accrediting professional practice in librarianship approved at the highest level a document that, the central claim of which was entirely unsupported by evidence, yet carried with it a mandate for implementing fundamental transformation to nearly a century of ethical guidance.

Abandoning the ethic of neutrality was an extraordinary proposition--one for which (it must be stressed) the Association had no mandate from its general membership to undertake. Granted, ALA Council does have the authority of governance to make these sort of policy decisions, but I really want to impress on readers what a remarkable, tectonic shift this would represent if the abandonment of neutrality-based principles were officially undertaken and promulgated. It would be a decision of the most serious and far-reaching implications and effects, foundational in nature to the profession—and not just any profession, but one that is public-facing, that millions of citizens rely upon every day, one that is almost universally recognized (both internally and externally) for the significant role it plays in supporting democracy by enabling and facilitating an informed electorate.

And yet, the Resolution intended to set all this in motion was based on nothing more than a radical assertion—that neutrality upheld white supremacy—rather than robust, empirical findings and argumentation based on evidence. To be fair, it is difficult to imagine just how such a claim could be empirically demonstrated: by what scholarly methods might one credibly and causally link a professional principle as an independent variable to the real-world practice of an odious racial ideology as a dependent variable?

The answer is: with extreme difficulty. It’s a claim that can probably only be asserted and repeated (and cited) by others making the same assertion, over and over, until you have a body of literature, the claims of which its practitioners simply accept as given. For that, no conspiracy is required.

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