It's getting kind of hectic

I spent the better part of January trying to get my paper for ACRL 2017 into shape for submission and I am only now returning to the things I was doing before that. One of those things is working my way through Frances E. Kendall's Understanding White Privilege. This book has really helped me think about the privilege I have and how it has helped me advance in ways I am not always aware of.

In one of the chapters, Kendall talks about our natural inclination to see the places where we don't have privilege instead of the places where we do. She writes:

Because we measure our own privilege by looking at what other have received that we haven't, rather than at what we have that others don't, frequently it is hard to believe that we have access to power and influence because we belong to one identity group when we are so clear that we don't have power and influence because of our membership to another (108).

I immediately put this quote into conversation with the fact that as of 2009/2010, 87% of female librarians are white, according to some number crunching I did from this table off the ALA Diversity Counts 2012 report. There are certain intersections that this table hides, of course. But think about what kind of access to power and influence white librarians have, and then recognize how this statistic reflects what many of our marginalized colleagues already understand to be true about librarianship.

Because we measure our privilege against what others have that we don't, I have often looked at what I lack as a female librarian. My male colleagues have access to leadership opportunities and opportunities for advancement that I don't. And surfacing the difference in expectations for male and female leaders is absolutely a valuable conversation to have--and one that the LibLeadGender community has coalesced around. But what reading this passage in Kendall's book reminded me of is that when I think about this, I also have to consider the ways in which my whiteness and position in the middle class give me access to power and opportunities.

Memberships in professional organizations are expensive and yet they are often a requirement for volunteer service. I am able to pay those dues, so I have access to those volunteer opportunities. And as I look around at in-person meetings, I see a lot of people who look like me. Traveling to conferences is often costly--between registration fees, flight costs, and meals. I am fortunate that my library pays a portion of the amount that it costs me to attend multiple conferences in a year, but I am also able to pay the amount that isn't covered out-of-pocket. When I look at who is in the room with me at conferences, I see a lot of people who look like me.

It is worth acknowledging that certain parts of library professional associations shape policy and practice within librarianship. One such body that comes to mind is CC:DA, the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access. Housed within the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section of ALCTS, this committee serves as ALA's voice in the international conversation about cataloging policy. Being able to serve on that committee is contingent upon one's ability to afford to be a member of both ALA and ALCTS. Those who cannot afford to pay association dues or travel to conferences are excluded from important conversations about the future of librarianship.

The Unified Library Scene is about building relationships within libraries. As part of that work, I am committed to learning how to be an ally. One of the places where I have started in this process is honest self-reflection about the places where I benefit from my power and privilege. Anything I do before an acknowledgement of how I have benefited from my whiteness, my able-bodied status, and my middle-class status make my actions both inauthentic and oppressive of those I wish to be allied with. I would invite you, friend of the Unified Library Scene, to also engaged in honest self-reflection. If the idea of power and privilege is new to you, there is a body of work that exists on this topic and reading more about this should definitely be part of your self-reflection process If you're interested in understanding more about the intersection of privilege and librarianship, I would offer two articles as a starting point: April Hathcock's piece in Library Lead Pipe on diversity initiatives in librarianship. I would also recommend Angela Galvan's piece in Library Lead Pipe on the perpetuation of white, middle-class values in librarianship. If you have additional recommendations, drop them in the comments!

Stay positive,
Erin

No firm ground, but we ain't sliding

The Policy and Standards Division of the Library of Congress decided for a second time to reject white privilege as a subject heading. You can read their decision here. The part of their argument that is most salient to this blog post is: Numerous works about white privilege have been assigned the headings Race discrimination and Whites--Race identity, and the meeting wishes to continue that practise.

It is both completely understandable and completely perplexing that the PSD would reject this heading despite the fact that literary warrant exists. On the one hand, if the PSD believes that a combination of existing subject headings is sufficiently describes a concept they can make the argument against adding another subject heading to the thesaurus. On the other, it seems like the combination of subject headings that the PSD points to in their decision misses the mark.

When reading this decision, it seems like the PSD fundamentally misunderstands the concept of white privilege by deferring to the headings already being used. The idea of white privilege implicitly touches on discrimination and race identity to the extent that the privileges extended to white people as a result of their identity further margainalizes people who aren't white. But white privilege is not explicitly about either of those things. April Hathcock wrote a really great blog post about this which I think it well worth your time. In her post she writes " Privilege isn't about discrimination; it's about the automatic benefits and advantages that come from living in a system set up to value the lives, ideas, and expressions of one group over all others. You may be a staunch antiracist, but if you are white, you are steeped in WHITE PRIVILEGE. It is a reality of living in the systemic bias of our society."

Thematically related to this discussion of white privilege and systemic bias is Jarrett Drake's keynote address at the Digital Library Federation Liberal Arts Pre-Conference titled "Documenting Dissent in the Contemporary College Archive: Finding our Function within the Liberal Arts." In this address, Drake states

I doubt many of you here know about this history of black college and universities in this country, and I have that doubt for many reasons. The first is that most of you are white and can afford to be ignorant of blackness. The second is that many of our library and archive consortia--this one included--excludes our librarians, libraries, archivists, and archives at black colleges and universities, so even when you think you are immersing yourself within the field of librarianship, you remain blissfully unaware that there is a whole different world out there to which you are functionally illiterate. This unawareness is both a product and a reification of systemic racism, and it doesn't require racists whatsoever.

Both Drake and Hathcock point out that even those of us who believe that we are antiracist still benefit from our whiteness and that white privilege affords us the luxury of being able to be ignorant about aspects of blackness. Further, Hathcock argues that the decision not to name white privilege explicitly and add it to the thesaurus perpetuates systemic racism both in libraries that utilize the thesaurus and in the larger arena of subject cataloging.

Working both inside and outside of a system is important when thinking about how to create a more equitable and inclusive library catalog. While asking the Library of Congress to both change its most problematic subject headings and to add new headings to address issues of importance to our users is a key component of pushing back against the systemic racism inherent in our metadata creation standards, I would also argue that we can work outside of/around the system to add subject headings to records which both reflect the lived experiences of our users and the values to which we claim to adhere.  There are a lot of existing subject thesauri and the MARC standards allows you add a term from a thesaurus other than LCSH in field 650. Library of Congress publishes a list of source codes and has at the bottom of the document an example of how to construct a 650 field using one of these alternative thesauri. Additionally, the MARC standard allows you to utilize fields 69x for locally constructed thesauri that aren't on the source code list. So while LCSH is the (seemingly) most widely used thesaurus for published material, it doesn't have to be the only thesaurus a library uses to describe the about-ness of a resource. A particular community of practise could create its own thesaurus and use that to provide access to headings that the Library of Congress has chosen not to address.

I should note that this isn't a new idea. There's a reason that cataloger's love Sanford Berman.

I know I write a lot about how I think we should think about how much we rely on repurposed metadata and on how we should localize our cataloging practises to better meet the needs of our users. And I think that the use of alternative thesauri is a good place for us to do some thinking. As luck would have it, there are a lot of people in technical services librarianship already thinking hard about these issues. As April notes, Jenna Freedman and Netanel Ganin stand out as people whose efforts in this arena should be acknowledged. I am so, so grateful all of the people who speak so bravely and so boldly about the lived experiences of our users and who hold us accountable for the ways in which we fall short of doing right by them.

Stay positive,
Erin

And when I start to feel it making sense for me

So...let's talk about this story that circulated last week about the Representative from Tennessee who wants to introduce legislation to force the Library of Congress to reverse its decision to cancel the heading Illegal aliens and, in its place, use the headings Noncitizen and Unauthorized immigration. It seems likely that this proposed piece of legislation is little more than a push for attention by a person who is up for reelection. After all, what better way to make a name for oneself than taking on the bastion of political correctness that is Library of Congress.

I think this story surfaces, again, an issue that I've written about before: the Library of Congress is not the U.S. national library even though we in the U.S. library community treat it as if it were. We use the Library of Congress' thesaurus and classification scheme for subject cataloging even though many in the U.S. cataloging community have been talking for many years about its flaws and working for many years to try to correct "-ist" headings and class numbers.

And while it would be fun to talk more about the problematic nature of treating the Library of Congress as de facto U.S. National Library, I think that there is a more important issue that this story surfaces: cataloging is not a neutral act.

While it's true that catalogers are taught to be objective in how they are taught to describe the objects they're tasked with cataloging, this feels impossible. One could argue that it feels less impossible in descriptive cataloging, because it is easier to be object about, say, the publisher of a book than the subject of that book. But this feeling of impossibility is even baked into our content standards, which leave room for "cataloger's judgment." In some cases, the standards reason, a cataloger will have to interpret a rule and apply it in a way that makes the most sense to them. Which means that even descriptive cataloging --the part of cataloging that is meant to have the greatest chance of objectivity--isn't actually all that objective.

And while it feels like a challenge to talk about objectivity in descriptive cataloging, it feels wholly impossible to talk about objectivity in subject cataloging. If the language itself isn't neutral, how can we be expected to be objective in our application of that language?

I have long thought that in addition to talking about cataloger's judgment, we should also talk about cataloger's bias. So, let's do that. One of the definitions Merriam-Webster gives for bias is "an inclination of temperament or outlook, especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment." And when we talk about cataloging--especially subject cataloging--that makes sense to me.

Catalogers bring to bear on the works they catalog a lifetime of lived experience. It is impossible to put away that lived experience in order to describe works in an objective fashion. And it is both disingenuous to library users and unfair to catalogers to continue to perpetuate this....lie. As a middle-class, white, cisgender woman, I can't put away my lived experience in order to describe the things I catalog--nor should I. And I shouldn't expect that my colleagues from marginalized groups to do the same.

So how do we reckon with this? How do we acknowledge cataloger's bias and then move through a flawed system in order to order the objects we are tasked with describing? I think we do it in two ways.

1. Appreciate the lived experiences of your colleagues and your users and think about how this is reflected in your metadata.
My experience with the heading Illegal aliens is different than someone who has lived that experience, which means I should believe them when they say that this terminology is dehumanizing. The same goes with any number of "-ist" subject headings. If someone tells you that the words you're using in your metadata to describe them invalidates their lived experiences, take that seriously. Don't dismiss it because their lived experience is not the same as yours.

2. Educate yourself and your users.
If you are unclear about your place in creating and maintaining oppressive systems, you have some work to do. I wrote before about how you have to understand your place in an oppressive system before you can dismantle it. Read everything you can and have hard conversations with you friends and your colleagues about white privilege and oppression. If you need a starting point for educating yourself, April Hathcock's blog has a lot of great posts on intersectionality and on doing the work.

If you have a relationship with library users, you should use every appropriate opportunity to talk about catalog records and bias and how the material you retrieve when you search is based on biased algorithms. It seems likely that making the catalog as transparent as possible for users will help them find the material they seek while navigating the biased language of subject headings. Emily Drabinski's article, "Queering the Catalog," is a great read when thinking about how to bring users into the conversation about metadata. And anything you can read by Safiya Noble is great for thinking about algorithmic bias.

There are a wealth of tools out there to help you get started in thinking about how to educate yourself and your users. If you have other ideas, feel free to drop them in the comments!

While coming to terms with cataloger's bias is both challenging and uncomfortable, it's unbelievably necessary. We cannot continue to believe that cataloging is a neutral act. And the quicker we move on from that point, the quicker we can help our users identify how to get the best information they need to complete the task at hand.

Stay positive,
Erin

When you rise above your fears

I finished reading Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom by bell hooks a couple of weeks ago. While hooks was talking about education and classroom spaces in her book, my mind made the leap to librarianship as it sometimes does. And I wanted to write a post for all of the friends of the blog who, like me, find themselves in a position of privilege more often than not.

Among other things, the third chapter of Teaching to transgress discussed how shift toward a multicultural classroom requires white teachers need to move past their fears to foster a space where white supremacy, sexism, racism, ableism, imperialism, homophobia, and transphobia are decentered. Throughout much of this chapter, I felt like if you replaced "classroom" with "library" and "teacher" or "educator" with "librarian," the arguments that hooks makes are as applicable to libraries as to teaching spaces. hooks writes early in the chapter:

Among educators, there has to be an acknowledgment that any effort to transform institutions so they reflect a multicultural standpoint must take into consideration the fears teachers have when asked to shift their paradigms. There must be training sites where teachers have the opportunities to express those concerns while also learning to create ways to approach the multicultural classroom and curriculum. (36)

Many librarians who are part of privileged groups see the damage that is caused in their communities by racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic thinking. But moving toward a vision of librarianship that is actively works against all of those "isms" is fraught with discomfort. We, the privileged, have to understand oppressive systems and our place in them before we can work to dismantle them. And more than that, we have to learn how to be good allies without expecting rewards for our efforts or drowning out the voices of those we wish to be allied with. We, the privileged, will screw this up--even when we're well meaning. And if we're being honest, we'll screw it up more often than we get it right.

When we do the work (hat tip to the always insightful April Hathcock), those of us with privilege often come to a place where we see oppression all around us and it causes us to feel uncomfortable. Later in Chapter Three, hooks addresses this discomfort, writing:

White students learning to think more critically about questions of race and racism may go home for the holidays and suddenly see their parents in a different light. They may recognize nonprogressive thinking, racism, and so on, and it may hurt them that new ways of knowing may create estrangement where there was none. (43)

What does it look like for librarianship to create a professional discourse where white supremacy, sexism, racism, ableism, imperialism, homophobia, and transphobia are decentered? Among other things, I think it means that we, the privileged, need to sit with our discomfort and do the work required to move past it. We need to hold each other accountable when we do things like using "fit" to cover up our racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic tendencies. Or when we have panels at national conferences that are filled with the same cis, heterosexual, white men. And then, after we've considered all of this, we need to come up with a plan for what we--individually--will do to change.

Even when I try to get it right, I fall short. But that doesn't mean I quit. I ask for forgiveness from those I've wronged and try to do it better next time. Because for whatever else you believe about the future of librarianship, we will be better if it is multicultural.

Stay positive,
Erin

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

Remember a couple of weeks ago when Rachel wrote about the value of preaching to the choir? I wholeheartedly agree. We haven't been up and running all that long, but I think that Constructive Summer is a safe space for us to tell our stories and challenge our beliefs. Hopefully in doing our own work, we challenge you to do yours as well.

ACRL's Dr. E.J. Josey Spectrum Scholar Mentor Program is looking for technical services librarians from academic libraries to volunteer to serve as mentors for Spectrum Scholar recipients. As a technical services librarian, I immediately went to the volunteer form. I want to do my part to help recruit and retain new technical services librarians--especially people from underrepresented groups.

The goal of the Mentor Program, as stated on its ALA webpage is:

to link participating library school students and newly graduated librarians, who are of American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino or Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander descent, with established academic librarians, who will provide mentoring and coaching support; serve as a role model in academic librarianship; and provide guidance in seeking a career path and opportunities for leadership in the profession.

I want to serve as a role model and help new technical services-minded librarians find their way in the profession, so I started to fill out the application. The questions asked about my ethnicity, my gender identity, and my physical disabilities. And these questions served as my light bulb moment that maybe I'm not the right person to do this job.

I'm a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered female. I basically check all of the white privilege boxes.

As much as I want to help mentor a new technical services librarian, my privilege definitely creates a lens through which I see librarianship. And I am pretty sure that the last thing a person who already feels like an outsider in librarianship wants to hear is another white lady telling them how to "do librarianship." Librarianship is overwhelmingly white. According to the 2012 edition of ALA's Diversity Counts, 104,392 of the 118,666 credentialed librarians were white. In academic libraries, 23,207 of the 26,954 credentialed librarians were white. That's 86%!

By using our privilege to put ourselves in positions of power--especially in positions where we give advice to new librarians--we shape a future of libraries that looks a lot like us. In a recent blog post about the amorphous idea of "fit" in libraries, Jacob Berg breaks down the idea of homogeneity in librarianship. Berg points to a Smithsonian article that states that diverse groups get better results when it comes to decision-making, problem solving, creativity and innovation, and scientific research.

All of this leads me to this place: just because I can be a Spectrum Scholar mentor doesn't mean I should. I do have advice and experience to share with a newly minted technical services librarian, but I also have biases that come from privilege.

So instead of serving as a mentor, I want to signal boost the opportunity. I am not sure I have an abundance of street cred or clout, but I want to use whatever I have to share this opportunity with you. If you are a technical services librarian from an underrepresented group, I urge you to apply to be a mentor for a Spectrum Scholar.

I'm trying to do the work to build a future of libraries. And sometimes that work requires me to challenge my beliefs and, as a result, go a different way. Building the Unified Library Scene isn't easy, but doing awesome things never is.

Stay positive,
Erin

On Actions and Perceptions

On Wednesday, Erin's wrote that Words Can Get Weird while friend of the blog @winelibrarian wrote a post that is not so unrelated, It's My Library and I'll Cry If I Want To. Taken together, we get a conversation about effective leadership and perceptions, which seems to be impossible to divorce from a conversation about gender. It's true that especially in positions of leadership, perceptions of actions are highly colored by conceptions of gender. It's also true that the entire profession has been in a highly gendered position in regards to the nature of our work and professionalism. I want to complicate a tiny bit more with my thoughts on pragmatic actions.

Now, on a personal level, I operate along these lines where in my head I am also navigating space as a queer queer (as opposed to a queer man or a queer woman.) I say in my head, because it I can't speak to how people perceive me negotiating the space. I can make some assumptions about how people see me and I can try to influence how people view me as a person and a professional, but, frankly, I don't have the time or energy to engage in what is often a fruitless and frustrating effort. So I operate on the premise that we have very little control about how people perceive us.

What we do control are our actions. Now, surely we modulate our actions depending on the environment and people we are interacting with. For instance, I am wearing a sweatshirt today, because I have no meetings. This is something I might not do if I had a different job or for any number of other reasons. My perceptions of my role as well as my understanding of how others may be perceiving me plays a key role in my choices in what I wear (and in everything else).

So the question is "how willing am I to modulate my behavior in order to alter perceptions of me?" and the answer is "exactly the minimum amount necessary in order to accomplish my goals." The question of how I am perceived in a highly gendered culture and what I do to alter that culture is a separate (often concurrent, but separate) struggle. What determines the minimum amount is a consideration of whether some kind of behavior would actually change perceptions of me in a way that makes it easier for me to accomplish my goals. It is harmful and pointless to change my behavior, probably in ways that affect my self-perception, if the end result does not create a changed environment. However, if changed perceptions do help accomplish personal and organizational goals, we have a different story. This is a path much narrower for women and other marginalized groups.


I think we'll leave it at that for a Friday Musing.

Keep rockin'
Rachel

From The Outside

I've been involved in a few space planning projects now, and it always seems that we are surprised at how we look when we see ourselves reflected back through the eyes of outsiders we've invited. Architects and other outside consultants can offer a view that we can't get from our own entrenched positions and that is a good thing.

Outsiders only know what you tell them and what they can see. When you see yourself through their eyes, you can get a good look at the foundational narratives of your organization: the stories you tell yourselves. These can be good or bad, but they are foundational in a way that makes them hard to uncover during day to day business. When what they see and what they hear don't align, that gets drawn out in discussions and narratives. You find yourself being asked to clarify why things that conflict with your narratives exist.

Outsiders don't have a vested interest in the organization. They can't retaliate directly against anyone, and can anonymize issues. If you let folks talk directly to the architects, consultants, etc, either individually or in peer groups, you can get feedback that might never get spoken aloud in other contexts.

A colleague of mine recently invited an "equity consultant" to come and work with their department. The consultant held a day of open forums for undergraduates, graduates, untenured tenure track faculty, adjunct faculty, women, faculty of color. The forums were open to those groups specifically, and afterwards he reported back what he had heard to the administrators and leaders in the department. The result was a deconstruction of the narrative of "we've got a few issues but we're doing okay" based on hearing comments that people only felt comfortable making in a safe space.

Even when a consultant isn't hired specifically to address issues like "are we a truly equitable workplace" or "what are our foundational narratives," when you pay attention to the organizational dynamics that go on when an outsider is involved (especially for an extended period like with an architect), you can learn a lot about your organization.  And, most importantly, you can use that information to start to make changes to be a better organization.

 Keep Rockin'
Rachel

Christmas is the Worst

I couldn't be in deeper agreement with the wonderful School Library Journal opinion piece by Kendra Jones, Ditch Holiday Programming.  In summary, her argument, which you should read and consider deeply, goes, you aren't expert enough to offer any holiday programming and your attempts at inclusion are misguided and possibly offensive.  I'm telling you, it's true.  I don't want your token menorah. I really don't want your tree and there is no language that makes me believe your tree isn't Christian.

Here's the thing, though. Christmas is the worst. The. Worst. And I don't even care. There is a reason why we let Christmas slide when it is (because it is?) the most all-encompassing and DEEPLY religious time of year. There is a lot of talk about how there is this secular Christmas. Look, you just said "secular Christmas," so it isn't secular. It's Christmas and even non-religious, agnostic and athiest Christians celebrate it. There are hundreds of winter holidays. Their presence in the same season does not imply that they are related to one another. Conflating other winter holidays into a Holiday Season is an erasure, a sublimation, an added slight.

So Christmas is everywhere, but I don't even care. I mean, whatever. Have it. I grew up in a non-religious American family. I got winter presents. There was a tree. I wouldn't do those things now, but I feel no need to stand up and demand a space at this time of year. I mean, it's great if you want to advocate to your peers on my behalf, but this is not a moment when I want to stand up and shout about what it feels like to be systematically excluded and to have my faith elided into yours. (Ḥanukah is NOT CHRISTMAS, it is not even close, not even in the same town.) If you ask me I'll explain (or refer you to the article above), but I'm not about to pitch a fit about it.  It's not important to take a stand on this hill.

Not on a hill that will be defended to the death. Why would we chose that moment, that thing, to take a stand on? No, it's a time for retreat every year. Because there is no way that we'll ever win this in a way that will mean anything really. Meanwhile, there are real things that we need to stand on: Can you adhere to your religious obligations without taking vacation days (are you allowed vacation time for this?)? Do you have to explain yourself if you do get to take time off work? Do you breathe a sigh of relief every time you see your religious building still stands, is not vandalized? That's just this fall, that's not counting every day things, and not counting the people that literally want me dead. So take the tree. It's a good reminder that I'm never truly welcome here. I'm not going to fight it. I'm saving my energy for a fight that matters, a fight that may save my life or livelihood.

You Never Know Who Is In The Room

I was required to go to a training last week as part of a wonderful campus initiative to improve awareness and response to sexual assault and sexual violence. The training was conducted by the fantastically amazingly awesome Juliette Grimmett, who I cannot say enough good things about. Since I've written on being the only one, I want to talk to you today about how it feels to be seen and heard. How powerful it is, especially when you're not expecting it.

And we don't expect it. That's the nature of being in a marginalized group. You get used to not being accounted for, you expect it, you develop strategies for dealing with it.  So when Juliette conducted an entire training session with attention to using gender neutral terms and being inclusive of gender non-conforming folks throughout our three-hour session, without making any kind of deal, just as her way of being, I was blown away. I really was. At first I thought "oh that's nice, nice to hear these things," but as the session went on, I started to feel... safe.  This was all on the acts of one person, nobody else in the room (to my knowledge) had made any kind of special commitment to being gender inclusive. Nobody else was being forced or even asked to be gender inclusive. Having one person speak in an inclusive way without being asked and without making a huge deal about it in a room of dozens of people told me that at least this one person, I could trust. It made me think: maybe there is a world where this is the norm, maybe we can get there.

This is the weight of it: I felt that I should thank Juliette because I have NEVER seen that before, and I went to tell her, and when I did, I cried. That surprised me. I don't know that it surprised her, but it probably reinforced what she told me, which is that she does it because it is important to her.

I'm telling you this story because it is an example of the kind of profound impact we all can have, every day, by being careful about and attentive to our language. You can create a space where someone feels safe, feels heard, feels at home.  It is so easy, especially as we live busy lives, to use lazy and dangerous language. You, me, we might think, I will be careful to use inclusive language when it is appropriate.  But look, you never know who is in the room. You don't know their entire story. When you are careful all of the time, you will surely happen upon a staff member, a student, a teen, a colleague, someone who will be changed. Someone who will be open to working with you because they know you care about language and you care about them because you use careful language.

It isn't just that it's the right thing to do, it is that the biggest impact is going to happen when you least expect it. So let's be open by being careful. Let's make the world that I didn't dare hope existed. Let's go.

Keep rockin',
Rachel

On Being The Only One

For a long time, I worked in towns and schools where I was the only one or one of a very small group. I want to talk about what that feels like. I've been thinking about this and saving it up, but recent discussions have made me realize that I should put out what I'm thinking and then keep talking about it periodically.

I'm Jewish and I'm queer, which are both identifications where, arguably, I can pass. There are definitely instances where not saying anything puts me in a position of privilege that would be much more tenuous if I would have been more overt about those identities. I tend to think that from my appearance people will assume that I am queer (I do have what Cecily called an "alternative lifestyle haircut"), but that's not always the case. Religion is definitely something that is easy to avoid, hide, and play along with.

I won't speak about the kind of self-harm that would come from deciding to actively hide these parts of my identity, but know that I have felt keenly aware of my otherness many times in many places, and that there was a time when my default was to be quiet and to let people assume that I was like them. And I know I can perpetrate the same wrongs done me.

Two things I've been thinking about recently, and I'll just put them out there as a start to this exploration:

The first was about how important my visibility was to students as a young queer faculty member. Representation matters. I had never considered the fact of my being, and being in a place, nothing more, could have such an impact on young lives. I really don't know how to explain that realization. It is something I'm too sure our colleagues of color also understand. Seeing the power of representation and the impact it has on students makes me more willing to stand up and be vocal and visible. Looking at them gives me the courage to do it when I might otherwise pass quietly into a position of privilege.

Secondly, I've been reflecting on how we in colleges and universities especially don't meet the mark in terms of treating diverse colleagues humanely. I mean, as humans. I can't tell you the number of times I've had discussions with nice white ladies who are fully intent on inclusion and diversity which are marked by their excitement to meet me! I really do want to believe their intent, and I know that often their experiences are limited by circumstance as well as individual choice, but I walk away feeling like, "if you're really excited to meet me, why do you treat me like a pokémon?"

These are just two thoughts I've been thinking recently. I want to take these and put them out there from my own perspective knowing that they are only representative of my experience, but also knowing that there are many more individual and collective stories. To realize a holistic profession, we need to recognize whole people, and to do that we need to constantly work on how we relate to each other, our institutional colleagues and students, and personal stories can be an important part of that. They have been for me as I struggle with how I relate to myself and to others.

So, tell me what you think. What do you think about representation, about tokenism (pokéism as I will now call it), about how to get better as people and as a profession? What do you think about the new iPhone? What do you think?

Keep Rockin'
-Rachel

Lazy and Dangerous

At the time, it really annoyed me how persnickety Professor J. Pablo Silva was about having clear antecedents. There was to be no "this" or "that" or "it" in your paper. As a reader, the text should be clear as to what it is referring. As a writer, you need to know what you're actually talking about. Clear referents make for a clearer argument. Now, more than ten years out of college, "you have to say what you're talking about" is one of the things I am happiest that I had driven into the depths of my psyche. You can't just talk about stuff. You have to be clear.

It's human nature to want to classify things together and establish some shorthands, but there is a danger implicit in simplifying our world. Some twitter conversations from last week come to mind.

Thoughts on Thinking

Every time I rolled with Kevin in jiu jitsu, he tried to give me a chance, but I ended up getting choked out anyway. My jiu jitsu buddy's first words to me were, "you're a thinker, I can tell," after choking me out. It's true, am a thinker.  I like to know things, I like to know how things fit together, I like to know how to do things well.

Our Hero, back right, survives jiu jitsu

Academia is full of thinkers, but I've been pondering how I'm different than most of my colleagues. Sure I'm a thinker, but I'm a doer too. For me, the purpose of thought is to guide action. Data are there to inform the best course of action. I want to get right to getting it done. I don't like meetings without agendas, I don't like discussions straying into many divergent tangents, I don't see the point of all that talking if it has no immediate result.  So I find myself often in meetings thinking "Yeah, but what are we gonna DO?"