When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
Refusing to Look Away: Systemic Racism in Academic Libraries
Posted on June 24, 2025 in Blog Posts
Authors:
Jamia Williams
In this blog post, I want to speak plainly about systemic racism and how it appears in academic libraries. Too often, our profession hides behind policies, committees, and statements while refusing to confront the deep roots of racism that continue to shape our spaces. I am especially challenging the idea that we can fix these problems by simply hiring more Black librarians or claiming colorblindness. These approaches do not address the foundation of exclusion that academic libraries were built upon. Through reading the works and words of authors like Michelle Alexander, Isabel Wilkerson, Heather McGhee, and Dr. Ruha Benjamin, I have come to understand how racism is embedded in every system, including the library, and why surface-level diversity efforts will never be enough. This post is my reflection on this phenomenon and a call to action for my colleagues to delve deeper into this issue by reading the books and scholarship by these and other Black women. This will help to prepare for the substantive work that my co-authors and I suggest in the guest editorial for Medical Reference Services Quarterly, “Starting with I: Combating Anti-Blackness in Libraries.”
Racial Colorblindness Is Not Neutral
Reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) was a turning point for me. Her work gave me the language to name what I had experienced and seen. Colorblindness is a tool of systemic racism. It allows people, especially in predominantly white institutions, to ignore how race was invented as a legal and social construct to divide poor white people and enslaved Africans. This was not an accident. It was intended by design, and that design shaped every institution through which we live, work, and learn, including libraries.
In their article, “The Civilized War within American Librarianship: Teaching Strategies for Battling Colorblindness in the LIS Classroom,” Mónica Colón-Aguirre, Nicole A. Cooke, and Lisa K. Hussey underscore that systemic racism does not disappear just because Black people show up in spaces from which they have historically been excluded. That includes academic libraries. If we as librarians are serious about equity, diversity, and inclusion, and not just putting on a show of it, we must first acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that colorblindness is a lie. The authors remind us that colorblindness can invalidate the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and can become a “silencing mechanism” when racist events occur. Therefore, it is not neutral, it is not kind, and it is not progressive to act as though one does not notice race. Colorblind ideology is violence masquerading as politeness, and it shows up in academic libraries every single day.
Academic Libraries as Microcosms of the Academy
Academic libraries are not immune to racism. In fact, they are a microcosm of the academy, a fortress built to keep certain people out and uphold a specific status quo. We see this in hiring practices, collection development, programming, scholarship, and even in the unspoken rules of who gets to belong and who is constantly told, through words, actions, or silence, that they are outsiders.
And yes, Black librarians work in these spaces. Some of us even lead them. But as Dr. Ruha Benjamin said so powerfully at Spelman College last year, “Black faces in high places are not gonna save us.” That line lives rent-free in my head because representation without structural change is not liberation, it is assimilation. It is being told to fit into a system never built for you, and will never fully consider you to belong.
Caste, Scarcity, and the Illusion of Progress
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) clarifies this sentiment. In America’s caste system, Blackness is placed at the bottom, no matter how many degrees Black people collect, how many titles we earn, or how many leadership positions we hold. Racism is baked into the system, into the floors, the walls, the policies, and the cultures of academic libraries.
Let’s also talk about scarcity. In The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (2021), Heather McGhee illustrates what I have observed in countless meetings and strategy sessions: the zero-sum mentality. This is the belief that if BIPOC individuals gain power, resources, or recognition, then white people lose something. That attitude also poisons academic libraries. It shows up when colleagues resist equity audits; when they push back against diverse collections, claiming neutrality; and when they question the need for affinity groups for staff of color. It shows up when DEI work is treated as extra, optional, or worse, divisive.
But the truth, as McGhee reminds us, is that racism harms us all. It costs libraries their future. It costs scholarship its integrity by not including historically marginalized people. It costs communities the chance to see themselves reflected in knowledge production. And it costs the academy the beauty of diversity.
A Call to Academic Librarians
Lately, I’ve heard some academic institutions reassuring us that they will still continue the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion, even if the words will change. But, if I’m being honest, some of them weren’t really doing that work to begin with. They were doing the bare minimum: performative gestures, watered-down statements, and checkbox trainings that never touched the roots of systemic racism in their institutions. When political pressure came knocking, many of these same institutions folded with little resistance, quietly scrubbing DEI language from websites, burying the work under new buzzwords, or pushing it into the shadows. This happens when the work is surface-level and not embedded in the organization’s values, practices, and culture. It becomes something to hide or rebrand when it becomes uncomfortable.
We cannot read our way out of this, but reading can help us to see, name, and refuse to be complicit in racism. So, I leave you with a final call: if you are a librarian (especially one who works in an academic library) and you believe you are colorblind to race, I invite you to ask yourself, who does that serve? Whose comfort are you protecting? And at what cost?
Dismantling systemic racism in libraries means more than just hiring Black staff. It means tearing down the historical structures of systemic racism that have long excluded, marginalized, or tokenized Black people in library spaces. In the words of New York State Attorney General Letitia James, “I will not be silenced, I will not be bullied. I will not bend, I will not break, and I will not bow to anyone.” Now, more than ever, is the time to come together to do the hard and necessary work because if we don’t, it will have negative effects for generations to come.
About the author:
Jamia Williams (she/her) is a health sciences librarian. She is also the co-creator and co-host of the podcast LibVoices and the founder of The Diversity Fellow’s blog.
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Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.