Anti-Racism Guide: Resources for Education and Action

(2019 - updating) Developed by Karla J. Strand, DPhil, MLIS, Gender and Women’s Studies Librarian at the University of Wisconsin System
This bibliography is number 89 in the series “Bibliographies in Gender and Women’s Studies.”

Espinal, I., Sutherland, T., & Roh, C. (2018). A Holistic Approach for Inclusive Librarianship: Decentering Whiteness in Our Profession. Library Trends 67(1), 147-162. doi:10.1353/lib.2018.0030.

This article examines racism and the culture of Whiteness in academic libraries in three major areas of public services: space, staffing, and reference service delivery. The authors perform a critical discourse analysis, drawing on critical race theory, critical geography, critical education, and social psychology to examine foundational library scholarship and professional standards.

This research explores what the lived experiences of people of color who work as academic librarians are.

“Developing a critical consciousness involves the recognition of system inequities and being aware of the damage these inequities over time.”

This article reflects on an exercise developed to enable students to identify the ways in which white privilege is embedded in archival institutions and to collectively strategize concrete steps to dismantle white supremacy in their own archival practice.

This article also examines critiques of information literacy and then proposes some ways to emphasize antiracist pedagogy in the information literacy classroom

This article examines the ways in which whiteness controls diversity initiatives in LIS.

Access through your library's VPN

Anti-oppressive publishing in LIS, essays and books.

Nataraj, L., Hampton, H., Matlin, T., & Meulemans, Y. N. (2020). “Nice White Meetings”: Unpacking Absurd Library Bureaucracy through a Critical Race Theory Lens. Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship, 6, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v6.34340

April 2021. Although the University Libraries has taken affirmative steps to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, the persistent racial and social injustices of our time demand more of us.

WOC+LIB is a place for WOC and POC to express innovative ideas, transformative work, commentary, critiques, personal experiences, original research, and other professional literature.

Protestors call for the removal of five statues of Christopher Columbus strewn across New York City.

According to historians, the opposition to racist Confederate monuments and statues is as old as the statues themselves.

The late Maurice Berger, an art critic and curator whose work was devoted to racial justice in the art world, searingly critiques the tokenism of influential galleries, and high-profile art shows. As a white critic, he emphasized the importance of self-reflection and self-critique: “Not until white people who now hold power in the art world scrutinize their own motives and attitudes toward people of color will it be possible to unlearn racism."

Article from ArtNews criticizes contemporary art that co-opts Black experiences and trauma for profit and perpetuates the exploitation of those experiences and presents them as a branding that can be sold for profit.

Artist and activist Carrie Mae Weems discusses her series "Scenes & Takes", which features sets from network television series that centered African-American and Black individuals, and how it arose from her joy at the cultural shift to more Black representation in media.

From the Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at the University of Texas at Austin, they are "highlight creative expression of Black people from across the Diaspora"

From their website: this database documents examples of street art from around the world that have emerged in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd as part of an ongoing movement demanding social justice and equality.

2017 JSTOR article and podcast on the events in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. A wave of racial violence destroys an affluent African-American community, seen as a threat to white-dominated American capitalism.

The economic drivers and consequences of mass incarceration from the Prison Policy Initiative.

The Middle Ages (500-1500 CE) have shaped Western imagination for hundreds of years, both positively and negatively. Recently, medieval ideas and imagery have been co-opted and used as propaganda by white nationalists and other extremists groups. Why are they doing this? What impact does it have? And how can we change the conversation?

(MoC) is a professional organization of a diverse group of scholars working across the disciplines in Medieval Studies.

In the Middle is a blog by and for medievalists of color and the medievalist community at large. It includes posts by medievalists, primarily people of color, on race in the middle ages, and the confluence of race, politics, and history.

The “Implicit Racial Bias and School Discipline Disparities” report seeks to uplift implicit bias as a possible contributing factor to the racialized discipline disparities seen in K-12 education.

This groundbreaking study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality provides—for the first time—data showing that adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers, especially in the age range of 5–14.

Research guide by UC San Diego Librarian, Jenny Reiswig, on library resources and services for BILD 60 students.

This selection of articles provides overviews of health-related research in which racism was the major focus. Each title links to the full text article, and provides links to related articles.

The Mission of C4DISC is to work with organizations and individuals to build equity, inclusion, diversity, and accessibility in scholarly communications.

This toolkit is different from previously published C4DISC toolkits: although its access is not limited, it has been created by BIPOC in publishing, and is intended to be a resource primarily for BIPOC.

Panelists: Gisela Concepción Fosado, Editor, Duke University Press; Melanie S. Morrison, Director, Allies for Change

The AUPresses annual conference has been one of the many sites where conversations about “diversity within publishing” have proliferated in recent years. In many of these discussions, there is a strong tendency to focus on “diversity” (an outcome) instead of anti-racism (a practice). The panelists discussed what it means to shift towards an anti-racism framework, drawing on panelists’ experiences within and outside of publishing. The panelists will also discuss some of the specific issues that people of color face in our industry. As part of this work, panelist Gisela Concepción Fosado reported on a focus group research project looking at the experience of people of color who work at university presses across the country. She also drew from data collected by the Gender Equity and Cultures of Respect Task Force in their recent survey.

Publishing is a central aspect of an academic career. The quality and impact of a faculty member’s research program is judged primarily through the quantity of publications and perceptions of value assigned to their publication venues. Systemic inequities in academic publishing make can it difficult for authors from marginalized identities—whether defined by ethnicity, gender, geography, language, nationality, race, or other identity—from making contributions to the scholarly record. These inequities create obstacles for faculty from marginalized groups from continuing and advancing in their careers.

Blog post from the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) is a feminist, anti-colonial lab specializing in monitoring plastic pollution. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Vol 3 No 2 (2017): Science Out of Feminist Theory Part 2: Remaking Science(s) Critical Perspectives

Royal Society of Chemistry

By Jaime Ding, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Library Digital Publishing Fellow

Croom, Natasha N. "Promotion Beyond Tenure: Unpacking Racism and Sexism in the Experiences of Black Womyn Professors." The Review of Higher Education, vol. 40 no. 4, 2017, p. 557-583. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/rhe.2017.0022

Roh is a scholarly communications librarian with expertise in publishing, institutional repositories, open access and open education, copyright and author rights, intersections with social justice.

Thomas Mboa is a social scientist with interests in the Maker Movement, social Innovation, Open science and Scholarly Communication

Inefuku is the Digital Repository Coordinator at Iowa State University.

Raju is the Director (Research & Learning) at the University of Cape Town Libraries

Gosztyla ML, Kwong L, Murray NA, Williams CE, Behnke N, Curry P, et al. (2021) Responses to 10 common criticisms of anti-racism action in STEMM. PLoS Comput Biol 17(7): e1009141. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009141

What can institutions do to overcome unintended cognitive and systems biases? Assemble diverse teams to bring a range of perspective and experiences into decisions.

Several prominent publishers said they did not track the race and ethnicity of the researchers contributing to their platforms.UCSD and UCSF researchers among the authors interviewed.

by Charlotte Roh and Vanessa Gabler (2020)

The theme for 2019 was Equity in Scholarly Communications and outputs include:
* Feminist Framework for Radical Knowledge Collaboration
* Bringing Equity and Diversity to Peer Review
* the Labor of Open
* Toolkits for Equity in Scholarly Communications

This study evaluates the role of demographics in facial recognition algorithms, finding that the rate of false positives- and therefore potential security concerns- is much higher for those of Asian and African descent than those of Caucasian descent.

"Can my cultural background influence how effective I am as a designer? The short answer is an emphatic yes! " ...This talk is for people who work in international teams and want to collaborate better across cultures."

This article from the Law Enforcement Museum talks about the 150-year period of slave patrolling as a major factor in the development of modern policing in the American South

Full text of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, legalizing seizure and punishment of slaves who attempted to escape their slavery.

This text examines the formation of municipal police departments and their role in protecting elite interests from pre-policing forms of social control such as Southern slave patrols.

This article looks at the strategies of police in minority communities, suggesting a modern model of empowered, cohesive communities and sensitive, responsive police agencies. They find that neither condition currently exists in minority communities.

This study finds that introductory texts to criminal justice erase the relationship between slave patrols and modern policing.

This article tests the theory that police brutality & increased presence in minority communities today stems from the troubled history of American policing and the Black community.

This article discusses and explores the perpetuation of de facto segregationist policing and its impact on minority communities.

A resource list of titles to begin learning why we should consider defunding the police and redirect resources into community-based safety and security.

In this Zoom scholarly chat from Dream Defenders, Angela Davis, Cherrell Brown, Derecka Purnell, and K Agbebiyi discuss the underpinnings of racism in policing in America and explain why we need to work to abolish the police.

The Sentencing Project works for a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system through groundbreaking and expository research, media campaigns, and strategic advocacy for reform. Read their publications on racial disparity and injustice in the criminal justice system here.

This NAACP fact sheet looks at sentencing and incarceration trends in America and lays bare the racial disparities within.

This article connects the stressor of increased contact with the criminal justice system and high rates of Black incarceration to Black infant mortality, arguing that the criminal justice systems' treatment of Black communities undermines maternal and neonatal health.

Morsy and Rothstein present mass incarceration in light of its effects on Black children's performances in school, arguing that "criminal justice policy is education policy".

Richard Rothstein talks with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" about housing as a state-sponsored policy of segregation and his book "The Color of Law".

A short history and definition of redlining in the United States as a government policy promoting de jure segregation.

This interactive map gathers data from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation on neighborhood ratings, used to determine how desirable a neighborhood was by its current population and to asses risk of home loans. Data collected between 1935 and 1940.

This project explores the legacy of redlining through maps of San Francisco, the East Bay, and San Jose, showing how formerly redlined areas are now gentrifying.

This paper studies the long-term effects of redlining policies, indicating that their effects persist decades after such practices were formally discontinued.