When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
“There’s Also an LGBTQ+ Faculty Affinity Group”
A Story about (Lack of) Intersectionality Awareness
Posted on September 3, 2025 in Blog Posts
Authors:
Keahi Adolpho
In 2022, I was working in a job I really enjoyed—my department was supportive, the majority of us were people of color (a rarity in any department in U.S. libraries), and my supervisor (also a person of color) was not only a great mentor, but a great advocate for her staff. Unfortunately, I nevertheless found myself job hunting due to the rising cost of living where I was, poor public transit in my area, and my state’s politics becoming increasingly hostile toward trans people.
One of my interviews was for an archivist position at a small liberal arts college with an almost entirely white staff. At the end of the interview, when I could ask questions, I said, “I saw a small mention of inclusive hiring efforts on the library’s page about the diversity and inclusion committee. Can I ask for more details about the library’s efforts with inclusive hiring practices, specifically around race?”
Members of the search committee, who had spent a fair portion of the interview talking about the importance of inclusion and all the DEI efforts their department had started in 2020, jumped in to assure me that the library was taking the issue of recruiting and retaining people of color very seriously. They mentioned that the college had started an onboarding buddies program that paired faculty of color across campus and that the college had faculty affinity groups, one for men of color and one for women of color.
I don’t remember my exact words because I did not take notes, but I asked something along the lines of what non-binary or gender diverse faculty of color like myself were supposed to do in this situation; were we supposed to just pick a gender? There was an awkward silence before a member of the search committee said there was also an LGBTQ+ faculty affinity group. It did not seem to have occurred to them (perhaps not even in that moment) that someone might identify as both non-binary and a person of color in the same moment, experiencing interactions and events through the lenses of both identities simultaneously.
After the interview ended, I imagined myself at a faculty of color affinity group meeting (either of them), where we would perhaps share similar experiences of being called the names of other faculty of color who look nothing like us, interacting with coworkers who haven’t bothered to learn how to properly pronounce our names, being labeled “aggressive” for the slightest pushback, having white “ally” coworkers literally cry to us about feeling bad for not speaking up when someone was racist in a meeting. The list goes on.
Despite those shared experiences, however, I would not have been able to relate to the gendered experiences of the other attendees and vice versa. It is also worth noting that people of color are not a monolith, and the racism we experience can manifest differently based on our specific racial identity/ies. With regards to the LGBTQ+ affinity group, if it had a similar makeup to most of those in academia, I could have expected meetings of mostly white, mostly cis people. Maybe we could bond over being assumed to have a different-gender partner, feeling unable to relate to the life trajectories of our coworkers (because of queer time), lack of adequate all gender restroom access, marriage being the only valid partnership for insurance coverage, and so on. But again, despite these shared experiences, I would be unable to relate to the other experiences of my mostly white, mostly cis colleagues, and vice versa.
For me, many of the microaggressions and ignorance pertaining to my identities are not exclusively about my gender or exclusively about my race. They are a combination of cissexism, transphobia, racism, and colonialism. An easy example is that people who have not met me often guess I’m a woman or ascribe she/her pronouns to me based solely on my name. English speakers have told me they perceive the name “Keahi” as feminine because of all the vowels and/or the name ending in a vowel. In the Hawaiian language, syllables never end in consonants, you cannot have two consonants in a row, and all Hawaiian names are inherently gender neutral. In these instances, the issue is not only that it is unfortunately normalized to guess genders and pronouns based on names, but also that English speakers assume their perceptions around how names signify gender are universal across languages and cultures.
In the interview, it became obvious to me that the library, which sounded very proud of its DEI work and plan for recruiting and retaining faculty of color through affinity groups and buddy systems, simply had no space for people like me (out of curiosity, I did check back later and saw that they had hired a white person for the role). The lesson here should not be limited to how affinity groups are constructed, but rather applied broadly. Are your all gender restrooms also accessible? Does your Black History Month reading list feature anything from Black trans authors or Black autistic authors or Black trans autistic authors? If you’re hosting a webinar on Indigenous issues in libraries, does the software allow captions, and will names and words in Indigenous languages be captioned correctly (either edited live or in the transcript for the recording)? We do not all experience oppression or have needs based on a single axis of identity, and inclusion efforts that do not acknowledge that will inevitably fall short.
About the author:
Keahi Adolpho is a processing archivist at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries. They are a co-editor of Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries (2023), a member of the Homosaurus Collective, and a co-author of Best Practices for Queer Metadata. His research interests are mainly centered around trans and gender diverse inclusion in libraries and reparative and inclusive metadata.
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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.