Lowrider Librarian

Subject: ALA Task Force Seeks Your Input on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Greetings!  The ALA Task Force on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion was created in the spring of 2014 by then ALA President, Barbara Stripling.  The Task Force is currently in the information-gathering phase.  To aid with information gathering, it has launched a series of short surveys to be conducted at times to coincide with the ALA Midwinter Meetings and Annual Conferences through 2016.  These surveys are designed to help understand the culture of the association, the profession, and our communities with respect to equity, diversity, and inclusion. We recognize that incidents of racial bias and injustice continue to occur across the country on a regular basis.  This third survey, however, focuses on the economic implications of participating in ALA functions. The survey can be accessed at  https://www.surveymonkey.com/ r/TEDI3 . Responses will be...

Colonialism and Whiteness This is the first post in a series of blog posts that seeks to understand the development of Whiteness in the Americas from colonialism to today.  These blog posts are short necessarily short and are not meant to be exhaustive, but to give the reader an idea of where Whiteness comes from and how it appears in our culture. The need for these posts came out of the backlash against Whiteness History Month at Portland Community College this April, 2016.  Casta Painting A Casta (Spanish:  [ˈkasta] , Portuguese:  [ˈkastɐ, ˈkaʃtɐ] ) was a hierarchical system of race classification created by Spanish elites (españoles) in Hispanic America during the Spanish colonial period . The sistema de castas or the sociedad de castas was used in 17th and 18th centuries in Spanish America and Spanish Philippines to describe as a whole and socially rank the mixed-race people who were born during the post-Conquest period . These...