Feature #54 – Decolonising the library

Foreword

I apologise for the rather university-centric nature of this feature article.  I originally targeted it for a UK higher education audience but many of the lessons apply equally to the other educational and public library sectors, and to a lesser extent to ethically aware corporate libraries.  I warn you now that I have not pulled my punches and I do not apologise for the assertive tone of advocacy.  Decolonisation matters and even in its infancy, it is in danger of being quietly bureaucratised, transforming it from revolutionary strategic change into a safely managed process without the momentum to threaten the existing imbalance of power and truly liberalise learning.  Other than that, I hope you find it interesting, informative and enjoyable.

~ David

What is decolonisation and why care about it?

We all have an original nature, with our own authentic wants and needs. We act spontaneously. Then we meet other people. Very soon, who and what we want to become and even who we believe ourselves to be becomes influenced or even defined by others. Such internalised messages can become self-limiting, and the friction between the self-concept imposed from without and a person’s true nature within can be painful and may even result in mental ill-health (Dykes, Postings, Kopp, & Crouch, 2017, p. 179). For repressed groups, such as women and black, Asian and minority ethnicity (BAME) people, the messages received about who a person is and what they should be are often harmful and repressive. These groups are systematically shown that that they do not matter to society, not least through the lack of BAME role models and the abrogation of their cultural heritage. BAME women suffer intersectional repression and are among the hardest hit.

Systems of oppression overlap and interact. BAME people of sexual, ethnic, racial and religious minorities, and women in general, face particularly severe intersectional repression. For example, women, BAME people, and in particular black women, are seriously underrepresented in both higher education and libraries in general. Even in librarianship, where most professionals are women, the number of women, and in particular black women, reaching leadership roles is vanishingly small.  Such intersectional oppression makes it even more difficult for them to find acceptance and thereby to learn to accept themselves.

The lack of BAME representation among library staff makes services less approachable for BAME potential library users, while the lack of BAME representation in library collections makes it harder for BAME individuals to find content to which they can easily relate. In turn this imposes psychological hurdles to engagement and achievement and contributes to the more widespread insitutionalised racism of western society that erases the impact of BAME people, making them feel isolated, making their lives harder, more stressful and more tiring. To grow up BAME risks being defined and limited by those around you and to see the world through a lens not of your own making. Libraries should strive to be part of the solution, and not part of the problem.

To take a broader perspective for a moment, this links tangentially to the marketization of education, which has focused the education process on the delivery of a marketable graduate product; students have become a known and uniform commodity produced to the specifications of prospective employers. This model is efficient but assumes that students all want and benefit from this deliberate restructuring of thought rather than helping each student grow as an individual. Creating a space in which each student can develop and reach their full potential, with no preconceived ideas of what that might look like or what they might go on to achieve, we might end up with a more versatile, healthier and happier, if less uniform product. Such a humanistic approach would require faith in our students and their ability to right themselves, develop, grow and become the best authentic version of themselves they can be (Dykes et al., 2017). It requires an exploratory library collection be provided to satisfy the curiosity of each student rather than a prescriptive syllabus, and the courage to believe such graduates who know what they want from life will be as or more employable and/or entrepreneurial than those we currently produce. It is worth noting that this approach to education is dying out despite seeming to sitting hand-in-hand with the decolonisation, democratisation and liberalisation of education.

In higher education, a drive to widen access to higher education, universities recruited more students from ethnic minorities without making adjustments to support them adequately. These pioneers into higher education entered an almost exclusively white culture without relatable role models, texts, perspectives or authorities outside the western, white cultural tradition. It was little surprise that these student BAME pioneers, isolated and uninspired, demotivated by their conspicuous otherness from academic texts and forced to fit into a world where they were made to feel they were being admitted as a favour but did not truly belong, that these minorities began to drop out or underachieve (Universities UK, 2018). Universities were then attacked by the populist media and accused of admitting people without the academic potential to succeed and damaging education by casting out parts of the accepted scholarly canon for the sake of political correctness (Turner, 2017; “Decolonisation is not a commodity”, 2019).  This presumes that what is familiar is best, that tradition trumps diversity, that other literatures cannot be as authoritative or informative as that written by white men, and ultimately that nothing should be trusted except the direct line of thought derived from Socrates down the western ecclesiastical and scholarly tradition.

Had we been this liberal in the past, western medicine would have stalled for want of Arabic insights, mathematics would have faltered for want of fundamental concepts such as ‘zero’ from India and the abacus of the Far East. Even after the industrial revolution gave the west a march on the rest of the world and allowed us to monopolise the production and dissemination of new STEM research, it still makes no sense to insulate ourselves from the free exchange of ideas and discoveries, particularly in the social sciences and the liberal arts.

There is now social pressure on universities for academia to become more inclusive from black academics and social thinkers such as René Eddo-Lodge together with legal pressure from government fund holders to close the BAME attainment gap. The problem is bad. 44% of university library staff and users have experienced racism from colleagues and/or services (SCONUL, 2019, p. 5). Raising public awareness of this attainment gap has embarrassed higher education and institutions are keen to be seen to be doing something about race. There is, however, a real risk that the change will be superficial, clearly visible but not actually touch upon the experience of students.

Enter “decolonisation”

Hence, we arrive at today’s ‘decolonisation’. The term implies radical activism directed to restructure and refocus education such that it represents world cultures equitably and representatively and exposes students to the full gamut of perspectives that exist. This is more than a challenge to the status quo, it is a call for revolutionary change. The literature and accepted authorities are all white, and almost all men. In light of this, it is hard to see how past and present curricula align with the purported promise of a liberal education.

Di Angelo (2011) characterised the defensive culture of western society when challenged to acknowledge white privilege. Gohr (2017) accused organisational structures of perpetuating institutionalised racism “by upholding white hegemony and normalizing whiteness and the white experience,” and that “to try and ‘solve’ the problem of diversity … rooted within the culture and structure, … which is inherently defined by and functions according to a white, unrepresentative worldview.”

Academic culture struggles to change because its authority rests on appeals to established authorities dating back along an unbroken line of intellectual while male thought going back to Antiquity. It recognises worthy new contributions to scholarship by their relationship from and grounding in the established literature of the academic tradition. Overlapping filters of academic style, argument formulation and later dissemination systems have excluded the contributions of women, BAME people, and anyone else not inducted into the ecclesiastical scholarship system. If change is to take place, academia will have to acknowledge its racist inheritance and effect a sea change in the culture of academic, welcoming ideas from much wider literary traditions and critiquing them on their own terms, not necessarily how well they fit the western scholarship model. This is further complicated by the danger of radical differentiation from the tradition: institutions of learning are required to look and feel like they fit into the tradition in order to share in the respect society has for the tradition of the educational process, which is revealed by the aversion to any change to be far more of a love of fetishistic ritual than learning itself.

So what should be done?

No-one pretends that overturning racism that is woven invisibly into the social consciousness as normal and thereby implicating the western world of complicity in a global racist conspiracy to persecute those hailing from elsewhere is a realistic business plan. However, if we are to end racism and close the attainment gap, we must recruit and promote more black academics and women, rebalance our collections, our teaching and our public discourse.

Real change is difficult and dangerous in our endemically racist society but the powerful diversity industry is working hard to turn critical calls for revolutionary changes in education, to balance collections and syllabi and to encourage critical examination of the impact of learning a biased canon, into a neutral and politically safe strategic exercise comprising worthy policy and objectives that history teaches us may well never be met (Chaudhury, 2019). In this way, decolonisation is threatened with being transformed at its inception from revolution to meaningless lip service.

The most dangerous norm in both librarianship and academia today is that very few people will acknowledge that there is a problem, or if there is that it is serious, endemic and so deeply rooted that it will likely survive even well-intentioned strategic initiatives such as the Equality Challenge Unit’s (ECU’s) Race Charter. It has been argued that engagement policies serve to further burden minorities while relieving management of the responsibility of dismantling the systems of oppression, leading to the argument that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. We are attempting to defang the snake by means of a politely worded strategic policy. What is needed is for the systems of governance to accept responsibility for the attainment gap and that it has long played midwife to racism in society. We must effect an all-pervasive sea change, including book-purchasing policy, revision of educational syllabi to take advantage of changing library collections and active measures to encourage a more diverse recruitment pool and diversification of library staff. The ECU’s approach attempts to right this balance by shifting responsibility from the oppressed individual to the institution but as this article attempts to show, such a change involves more disruptive change, expense and risk than institutions want to make. Even for those institutions who attempt to make changes, enforcement of preferred suppliers by the EU Procurement Directive and institutional procurement policies to ensure best value for money may limit the suppliers that can be used, and this in turn may limit the diversity of book stock available to be bought.

Brave leaders are needed to reach out to those above them, all the way to the top of the leadership hierarchy, each risking having their judgement called into question for standing up to the acceptable face of racism. It is easy to announce that with a policy and commitment to change that change must logically follow but an elementary understanding of the challenges of leadership shows that many such initiatives fail to be realised (e.g. Johnson et al., 2017).

Dispensing with a troublesome problem with a policy that is subsequently under-resourced is an age-old strategy for neutralising dissent and neutralising threats of change. Only, this matters. Such complacency cannot be squared with library ethics (Poole, 2019) that require libraries to work towards the equity of access and utility of information for everyone without heed to politics, religion or public morals. Faced with society and institutional prejudice, it is the duty of every librarian to advocate, teach, partner, recruit, disseminate, network and share resources in pursuit of institutional and sector-wide change, with a view to influencing wider social change. It is not acceptable to pass this responsibility to others and hope that they are successful.

An end to the silent book burning

The question is, now that we are finally waking up to this injustice, whether we will delegate responsibility to a small Equality & Diversity department and assume institutional processes will somehow right everything or whether each of us will each take personal responsibility to campaign, purchase, work, teach and reimagine our roles and influence policy formulation to prioritise the representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic groups to make the pursuit of racial equity a strategic priority. Universities prefer to neutralise the language of advocacy, rewriting calls for social revolution into polite, unemotional, “professional” business cases that are comfortable to read and downplay the systematic ongoing repression of non-white culture and thought. Such repression is so successful that it has become invisible. In the past, people made a show of burning forbidden books. Later, official censorship was used. Today, the systems of oppression have finally been successful because they have receded from view to become an invisible and accepted part of the way things work.

Many institutions have responded to demands to increase inclusion by promoting help services to BAME students and hosting a Black History Month display and similar diversity celebrations each year. They scatter a handful of new books by BAME authors haphazardly across the collection and write policies declaring our intention to preserve academia as a neutral space for academic discourse. All such efforts are tokenistic. An addition of even a hundred books to the average library collection is but a drop in the ocean. It does not raise the visibility of BAME literature, does not displace the white canon from its unchallenged position at the apex of scholarship, but it might serve to satisfy in part a strategic policy designed to sideline criticisms without the effort and risk of real change.

Summary of key arguments

• Celebrating diversity is not the same as decolonisation. Diversity addresses who is employed and recruited by an organisation; decolonisation addresses the much deeper questions of what an institution does and how it does it. Decolonisation does not care for motives behind organisational behaviour but addresses the adverse impact that they have on local communities.
• The arguments against real decolonisation raise difficult and uncomfortable questions in a language of advocacy that fragile white professional institutions find worryingly unfamiliar but to neutralise this language is to change the message and downplay the urgency of change.
• Organisational integrity, transparency and self-awareness together with critical reflection, collaboration, outsourcing and perseverance at both strategic and operational levels are all required to effect meaningful and lasting change. This process may be expected to involve asking and honestly answering some very uncomfortable questions if meaningful, lasting change is to be taken seriously.

Recommendations

• Rebalance the staffing mix so that library staff come to better represent the racial mix of the communities they serve.
• Inspire curiosity. Draw attention to diversity in collections and perspectives at every opportunity. Include racially diverse examples in example searches and exercises. Draw the attention of students to the overarching dominance of white male authors in scholarly discourse and the conventions that maintain their supremacy: how this helps quality assurance in scholarly publications but also excludes more diverse perspectives.
• Carry out critical user experience studies focused on understanding how ways of working adversely impact BAME staff and students. Cognitive mapping and focus groups may reveal where BAME students feel most comfortable in the library and why, informing the planned decolonisation of spaces and services at the same time as collections and
• Press for syllabus decolonisation to be made a strategic priority. Coordinated institution-wide action comprising simultaneous capital investment bids to replace less important white authors with representation from other scholarly traditions and cultures coordinated through reading lists with widespread syllabus change.

• Record and monitor complaints. Complaints and negative feedback from all sources should be recorded, collated, monitored and reviewed to establish trends in reporting. Ideally, this should include capturing whether complaints and comments come from less privileged groups, in order to identify hidden bias and track the influence of white privilege, so that it may be reduced or, preferably,
• Encourage BAME mentorship. Encourage BAME staff to join the staff mentoring network, particularly with a view to offering BAME staff a BAME mentor, if they so choose.
• Promote BAME mentorship. Offer BAME mentors to BAME staff and BAME buddies and staff mentors to
• Introduce inclusion and decolonisation benchmarking. Introduce digital benchmarking tools for module and course reading lists that measure the diversity and decolonisation of reading lists alongside the existing standard for accessibility. Similar measures have already been introduced at the University of Kent (aps42, 2019; “Decolonise UKC”, 2019).
• Go further. Further ideas for action have been suggested by Dale-Rivas (2019).

References

aps42. (2019, February 14). Dr Jivraj secures further award for Decolonising the Curriculum Project [blog post]. Kent Law School News. Retrieved from https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/law-news/2019/02/14/dr-jivraj-secures-further-award-for-decolonising-the-curriculum-project/

Chaudhuri, A. (2016, March 16). The long read: The real meaning of Rhodes must fall. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/16/the-real-meaning-of-rhodes-must-fall

Dale-Rivas, H. (Ed.). (2019). The white elephant in the room: Ideas for reducing racial inequalities in higher education. Retrieved from https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/HEPI_The-white-elephant-in-the-room_Rep o rt-120-FINAL-EMBAROED-19.09.19.pdf

Decolonisation not a commodity. (March 12, 2019). The Herald (South Africa). Retrieved from https://advance.lexis.com/document/

Decolonise UKC: Through the kaleidoscope. Retrieved from https://decoloniseukc.org/

Di Angelo, R. (2011). White fragility. The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3), 54–70. Retrieved from http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249

Dykes, F. B., Postings, T., Kopp, B., & Crouch, A. (2017). Counselling skills and studies (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Gohr, M. (2017). Ethnic and racial diversity in libraries: How white allies can support arguments for decolonization. Journal of Radical Librarianship, 3, 42-58. Retrieved from https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/5/33

Greiner, L. E. (1989). Evolution and revolution as organizations grow. In D. Asch, & C. Bowman (Eds.), Readings in strategic management (pp. 373-387). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20317-8_25

Ishaq, M., & Hussain, A. F. (2019). BAME staff experiences of academic and research libraries. Retrieved from https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/BAME%20staff%20experiences%20of%20 academic%20and%20research%20libraries_0.pdf

Johnson, G., Whittington, R., Scholes, K., Angwin, D., Regnér, P. (2017). Exploring strategy: Text and cases (11th ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education.

Le Grange, L. (July 11, 2016). Decolonisation involves more than simply turning back the clock. The Conversation. Retrieved from https://advance.lexis.com/

Piker, S. (2019). Engineering change in collection development: A techie liaison librarian’s role in a liberated library campaign. SCONUL Focus, 71, 6-12. Retrieved from https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Samuel-Piker.pdf

Poole, N. (2019). Diversity within the profession: Speech to CILIP West Midlands Members Day. Retrieved from: https://www.cilip.org.uk/page/DiversitywithintheProfession

Turner, C. (October 25, 2017). Cambridge University ‘decolonisation’ row spreads to host of other courses. The Telegraph. Retrieved from https://advance.lexis.com/

Universities UK. (2019). Black, Asian and minority ethnic student attainment at UK universities: #closingthegap. Retrieved from https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2019/bame-student-attainment-uk-universities-closing-the-gap.pdf

About the author

This feature article was written by David E. Bennett, a member of the #uklibchat team.  The article was written in a personal capacity.  The views included do not necessarily reflect those of the #uklibchat, his employer or any other body.

About philoslibris

Chartered librarian, #uklibchat committee member and Web Officer for library accessibility consortium CLAUD. Interests include tabletop gaming, martial arts, graphic design, reason, humanistic philosophy, creative and critical thinking, evidence-based practice, lgbtq+ rights, accessibility, diversity, equality and inclusion, and finding simple ways to improve everyone's experience of life.

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