A Road Map for Dismantling Institutional Racism in Libraries

©Widerstand Consulting
Do not copy or distribute without permission from Widerstand Consulting.

General Principles
o Work below the water makes work above the water sustainable.
o The order listed above is not completely chronological, but your work is
likely to fail, people of color are more likely to leave your library’s staff, and
you are more likely to succumb to backlash if you start above the water.
o Develop accountable relationships within and without the library as the best
possible way to ground your efforts.
o Recognize that dismantling racism helps you do your job as librarians better.
Full stop.

Top three initial actions you can take?

o Train your staff and board to develop common vocabulary, common analysis,
and common practice and vision;
o Do an anti-racism audit that is led by patrons, professionals, and community
members from the BIPOC community;
o Make public your commitment to anti-racism through your mission
statement, signage, and web presence.

Work Below the Water:

Mission, identity, and purpose
o Claim an anti-racist identity.
o Make that anti-racist identity public.
o Do the research needed into the racial history of your library; reckon with
that history; right the wrongs of that history.
o Practice a clearer, more specific vocabulary about racism and anti-racism.
o Conduct an anti-racism audit.

Structure
o Prepare your board or oversight body to support your anti-racism efforts
 diversify the board;
 provide anti-racism training to the board;
 ask the board to hold you accountable for initiating and carrying
through a 1, 5, and 10-year plan to dismantle racism in your
organization;
 develop that anti-racism plan.
o Have explicit conversations about authority and accountability and how they
are shaped and formed by race.
o Consider how you can develop accountability of your library to communities
of color.
 o Ask if your library’s structures are preparing you to resist OP, IDP, WP, and
OP? Evaluate whether those structures are helping or hurting those efforts.
Change the structures so that they can better support that work.

Constituency
o Ask:
 How is the constituency of your library named?
 Who are your patrons?
 How does the discussion of and history about your library reveal or
render invisible the naming of the racial identity of your constituency?

Work Above the Water:

Procedure
o Implement procedures that hold your staff accountable for embodying anti-
racism behaviors in the library.
o Establish procedures for responding to and challenging expressions of
racism as they appear at the library at all levels of the racism iceberg, not just
Oppressive Power.
o Set up procedures to prioritize BIPOC vendors.
o Participate in efforts to dismantle the racism implicit in the arrangement and
description of your library collections (i.e. subject headings and call
numbers). Connect with appropriate training for doing so.

Policy
o Conduct regular anti-racism audits for at least the first five years of your anti-
racism plan.
o Set a standard of evaluating all your anti-racism actions by results not
intentions.
o Develop standards that challenge the notion of “neutrality” which allows for
overtly racist white nationalists and other hate groups to access library
building resources.

Practice
o Conduct an inventory of cultural patterns within your library, especially
around time, conflict, dress, leadership style. See: “The Characteristics of
White Supremacy Culture.”
o Eliminate discriminatory practices and inherent privilege within your library
based on results of anti-racism audits.
o Improve and diversify your collections (and programming), being sure to
implement changes that local communities actually say that they want and
need rather than changes librarians think they want and need.

Program
o Challenge and invite the local white community to join the library in the
work of dismantling racism.
 o Support the local BIPOC community to empower and support their efforts to
dismantle racism.
o Create a welcoming and affirming space by making your anti-racism
commitments as a library apparent, transparent, and consistent.
o Develop programs that undermine IRS and IRO.
o Seek out additional ways to support white people and people of color as they
challenge racism.
o Develop relationships with local groups who are actively working to
challenge racism.
o Ask permission to go to the cultural, political, and meeting spaces of the
BIPOC community to listen and learn; avoid requiring them to go to your
cultural, political, and meeting spaces. Set aside funds to compensate BIPOC
leaders for their consultation and advice.

Personnel
o Enact and develop deliberate recruitment strategies to diversity your
library’s staff.
o Foster and build up local members of the BIPOC community to become staff
members
o Put mentoring practices in place to support BIPOC community members on
your library’s staff or who are enrolled in Library Information Science
programs.

Additional Anti-racism Training Resources available from:

www.widerstandconsulting.org