Lowrider Librarian

Someone on a list I'm on recently posted that they were hesitant to renew their ALA membership because of the recent ALA press release scandal.  You can read about it on Librarian in Black here:  http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/alastatements/ . The person who posted asked the group what they thought about renewing their memberships.  Below is my response. I'm not a member of the ALA, but I work with them on issues concerning Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.  I'm on the ALA EDI implementation Work Group and I try to represent marginalized people who can't afford membership or conference participation (among other things).   I would say that ALA has been made progress due in large part to work by people like Melissa Cardenas-Dow, Trevor Dawes, Martin Garner and many others who are strongly committed to EDI in ALA and in libraries in general.  I would also say that the constituency should scrutinize candidate's actual wor...

Here is a link to the presentation with notes:

In the US, every piece of information and every bit of knowledge we have has been mediated through a White-Supremacist lens--this is especially the case the more educated an individual is in the US. It usually doesn’t matter what the ethnicity of the creator of this knowledge is, nor what their first language is because they have been educated in a system that is fundamentally White-supremacist. It takes much work and effort to even attempt to break out of this colonial mind set. #InformationLiteracy #education #EthnicStudies #Libraries #Information #knowledge #colonialism #21stCenturyEmpire