When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
The Importance of Antiracist Mentorship in Librarianship
Posted on August 7, 2024 in Blog Posts
Authors:
Sam Berry-Sullivan
Mentorship is a tradition, if not an institution, in many fields, including higher education and librarianship. Mentoring in librarianship is particularly important, as it is a field of such incredible variety that, without guidance, a new librarian may flounder in inappropriate settings for years before hopefully finding their way. Mentors to new librarians should go beyond having the occasional coffee and agreeing to review a curriculum vitae. A mentor should internalize the maxim “you don’t know what you don’t know,” and not assume that if their mentee wants to know about something they will ask about it. A mentor should put their mentee’s well-being before anything else, even if that entails advising that the mentee pauses their education or steps away from librarianship altogether. In their book Sister Resisters (2022), Drs. Janie Ward and Tracy Robinson-Wood propose additional responsibilities for mentors who advise Black women specifically, taking into consideration the added layers of bias and discrimination that Black women face.
As I discussed in a recent webinar presentation for the Long Island Library Resources Council, “Best Practices for Deconstructing Whiteness in the Academic Library,” librarianship is an overwhelmingly white profession, and has been since its inception. Higher education as a whole is also overwhelmingly white. As whiteness scholar Robin DiAngelo points out in What Does It Mean to Be White? (2012), one of the privileges of whiteness is the feeling that, as a white person, you are the norm. When you read books, you automatically picture the characters as white in your mind. When you go to the grocery store as a white person and there is not one single person of color there, it does not occur to you to notice. The only time you ever consider yourself as having a race at all is when prompted to fill it out on a form or survey. Coupled with the pervasive whiteness of the academy and librarianship, this creates an academic library environment in which norms of whiteness are reinforced and reproduced in everything from the way books are tagged in the catalog to which patrons get spoken to about being “too noisy” while other patrons get a pass.
As wonderful programs like Syracuse University iSchool’s Pathways to Librarianship seek to identify and eliminate hurdles to our profession for people from minoritized groups, librarians currently in the profession can do our part as well. Just as that project acknowledges systemic obstacles to education and opportunities, librarian mentors must be cognizant of those same realities in the lives of their mentees. White librarian mentors in particular must also be mindful of our deficit of experience moving through oppressive systems and be willing to learn from our Black female mentees as well, which Drs. Ward and Robinson-Wood refer to as “reciprocal development.” White librarians who invest in reckoning with their whiteness and in learning about the racist, particularly anti-Black, history of our nation and profession will be perfectly positioned to anticipate the obstacles their Black mentees will encounter in order to help them navigate those challenges. These white librarian mentors will be able to look more critically at supposedly neutral hiring policies and recruitment practices, and call out committees with no Black faces making decisions impacting Black employees and/or patrons. As Sister Resisters argues, in addition to educating ourselves about anti-Blackness and the ways it manifests in our institutions and society, white mentors must also employ the social privilege afforded us by our whiteness to the benefit of our Black mentees.
Sister Resisters was titled to reflect the long history of Black American resistance: against economic and social oppression, against daily microaggressions, against the attempted erasure of the history of our racist nation, and against the erasure of the Black people upon whose backs it was built. In the preface, Drs. Ward and Robinson-Wood explain that their philosophy of mentorship arises “from the knowledge acquired over the years by African American people living under conditions of racial inequality.” They go on to note that “resistance reflects the enduring power of a people whose liberatory strength has maintained and sustained survival and actively challenges dehumanization brought on by chronic oppression.” This book invites white mentors into this culture of resistance, to be accomplices in dismantling the systems that made a culture of resistance necessary. As members of a profession tasked with curating and providing access to the contents of “memory institutions,” it is our responsibility to help shepherd in new librarians as diverse as the United States, and to learn from the memories we keep.
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About the author:
Sam Berry-Sullivan is a white, nonbinary, neurodivergent academic librarian who leverages their privilege and unique experience of the world to advocate for diversity and equity in librarianship, higher education, and health sciences, for which Sam is subject liaison.
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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.