Interest Convergence, Intersectionality, and Counter-Storytelling: Critical Race Theory as Practice in Scholarly Communications Librarianship
In Brief: Despite the ever-increasing presence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) rhetoric in librarianship, library workers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are still underrepresented and marginalized. Critical race theory (CRT) offers the tools necessary to understand why the underlying racial power dynamics of our profession remain unchanged and to generate new ideas to move toward true equity and inclusion. This article presents applications of the theoretical frameworks of interest convergence, intersectionality, and counter-storytelling to the authors’ work with users and to our collegial relationships. As scholarly communications and information policy specialists of color at a predominantly white academic library, these three frameworks inform how we teach about scholarly practices, such as copyright and citation, as well as how we analyze and educate about the open access landscape. We also argue that a critical race theory lens can provide useful analytical tools to inform practice in other types of libraries and different kinds of library work, and encourage all library workers to engage with it as they seek meaningful change in their work settings and the profession more broadly.
By Maria Mejia and Anastasia Chiu
Introduction
As scholarly communications practitioners of color located in an academic library of a predominantly white[1] institution (PWI), we find that critical race theory serves as a cornerstone for how we relate to each other and to the profession. Multiple theoretical frameworks in this movement give name and shape to our approaches and to the racialized phenomena that we seek to resist. The themes of counter-storytelling, intersectionality, and a problematized approach to interest convergence speak most closely to the ways in which we practice CRT in our relationships and our work. We are members of a department consisting entirely of librarians who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color—a somewhat uncommon occurrence in our PWI and in librarianship more broadly—and this dynamic has shaped our CRT-informed practice. Collectively, as a department, we seek to set our own terms around what it means to be a good library worker and a good colleague. We work together to advocate for communities that are systematically excluded in scholarship and librarianship because our librarianship is for those communities. Yet, we must also contend with the fact that our institution’s support for this work is mainly a matter of interest convergence. To paraphrase Derrick Bell (1980), PWIs value and promote racial progress and racial justice work only insofar as it serves their political interest to do so. In our case, our institution benefits from the optics of our intersectionality as a woman and a non-binary person of color, taking on the labor of building inclusive services and an inclusive workplace. With this in mind, we take advantage of interest convergence as it suits us, while also prioritizing ourselves and each other in this environment. We empower each other to recognize when our institution is pushing us to do too much of the labor of inclusion and support each other in setting strong boundaries.
At the core of our scholarly communications work is providing services to researchers to help them navigate their scholarship and academic communities. These services include teaching scholars about common conventions that exist in the scholarly lifecycle, such as publication and citation practices. Many researchers are taught to see scholarly practices as pro forma requirements devoid of politics, but we seek to trouble this assumption. We recognize that scholarly practices exist in a capitalist, heteropatriarchal, white supremacist framework that reinforces the marginalization of BIPOC scholars and creators. With this understanding, we work with researchers to push back against the mainstream narrative to surface the counter-stories of those silenced in scholarly discourse. Relying on CRT as a frame, we attempt to build expansive conversations that recognize the racialized, gender essentialist, ableist, and capitalist politics of knowledge production, while making space for more liberatory, critically open, and equitable practices.
Critical race theory provides us with vocabulary, theoretical frameworks, and tools for many aspects of the collegial relationships and the services that we are building together. Our article will explore how we find our work and our working selves in CRT, applying the concepts of interest convergence, intersectionality, and counter-storytelling. We hope that our lived experiences in bringing CRT to practice will serve as an example for others looking to build environments where BIPOC library workers can thrive.
Definitions of Interest Convergence, Intersectionality, and Counter-Storytelling
We look at CRT and apply it in our practice with recognition that it is not a single monolithic model of race, racism, and anti-racism, but a fully-fledged social and scholarly movement with many strands and tenets, some of which differ significantly in their emphases. The ways that we inform our approaches to scholarly communications librarianship with CRT are not the only or definitive ways to apply CRT. Rather, they form a concrete example of approaching library work with an understanding of racism as an everyday phenomenon that is structurally embedded in individual interactions, institutional relationships, and macro-level policy. Three commonly used frameworks of CRT that we use as lenses for our work are the interest convergence dilemma, intersectionality, and counter-storytelling.
Interest convergence is a theory that posits that racial progress only happens when the political interests of BIPOC and white people converge. Derrick Bell (1980) originated this theory in his critical perspective of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He saw the Brown decision not as a result of change in legal reasoning or social norms around race, but as a result of temporary common ground between the political need of white people for optics of racial equity during the Cold War and the enduring equality needs of Black people. Bell concludes that although we can sometimes use interest convergence to push for useful changes, this approach also has serious shortcomings in fostering change in foundational racial power dynamics. Interest convergence does not only appear at the macro level of national policy, as in Bell’s case analysis; it also shows up in organizations and the labor conditions within them, including libraries and library work. Library organizations have been building rhetorical commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion for decades in response to BIPOC-led calls for change in professional organizations, and though these may be seen as progress, Bell’s articulation of interest convergence offers an explanation for the observable shortcomings of these organizational statements.
Despite the growth of DEI rhetoric, libraries as organizations nevertheless continue to enact racial domination through our work and working conditions. As Victor Ray (2019) points out, race is constitutive of organizations; organizations “help launder racial domination by obscuring or legitimating unequal processes” (35). We see this in action when “diversity work” is coded in libraries as something to be done primarily by BIPOC separately from, and in addition to, everyday organizational functions, resulting in disproportionate influence and control of our time and labor. Moreover, interest convergence also encourages us to notice that racialized groups often do not reap the benefits of policies and measures for inclusion and equity, and in fact, racialized communities can be harmed in the halfhearted enactment of those policies and measures. Just as Bell points out that this was the case in school desegregation under Brown v. Board, Hathcock and Galvan point out that this is the case in libraries’ DEI efforts, such as the use of temporary job appointments as diversity hiring initiatives (Galvan 2015; Hathcock 2015; Hathcock 2019). These temporary job appointments increase staff diversity in the short term but do not disrupt the racial dynamics of predominantly white libraries in the long term, demonstrating the limits of interest convergence. We use this framework to approach librarianship with a critical understanding of where our interests truly converge and diverge with our organization’s, and to inform how we situationally advocate for equitable practices and policies.
One of the key steps in our advocacy for equity is understanding the multiple identities we embody and, therefore, the overlapping marginalizations that we face in a predominantly white profession and institution. We look to intersectionality as a framework for understanding the compounding effects of racial marginalization with other forms of marginalization (such as gender, class, etc.). Intersectionality rejects the tendency of institutions and individuals to treat these forms of marginalization as entirely separate spheres. The concept was originally coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) to highlight the shortcomings of workplace discrimination law in addressing discrimination that appears specifically at the intersection of race and gender. Sociologist Patricia Hill-Collins (2000) expanded upon it, identifying the organized interconnections between multiple forms of oppression and the experience of multiple marginalizations as having a compounding effect that constitutes a “matrix of domination” (43). Although the term “intersectionality” has become a buzzword in DEI rhetoric, it remains a useful theoretical framework for analyzing the experiences of BIPOC library workers who may also be queer, working class, disabled, and hold other marginalized identities. Examining our day-to-day experiences through an intersectional lens allows us to understand how the dilemma of interest convergence manifests itself in our work and professional relationships. When our interests do not align with our organization’s interests, developing and sharing counter-stories can be a powerful and necessary tool.
Counter-storytelling refers to the practice of telling stories that reflect marginalized experiences, histories, and knowledge in a way that challenges mainstream narratives or commonly-taught histories. In their foundational Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Delgado and Stefancic (2023) characterize narrative and storytelling as having the “valid destructive function” of illuminating preconceptions and myths about race and racialization that form the contextual backdrop against which BIPOC are marginalized and dehumanized (76). In our practice, we tell counter-stories that highlight how white supremacy is enacted in underlying philosophies and common practices of scholarship and librarianship. We use these counter-stories to move ourselves and others to center feminist and BIPOC knowledge and scholarship, as well as to resist and relinquish the everyday practices that serve white interests at the expense of BIPOC humanity. We also use counter-stories to develop counter-spaces where BIPOC library workers and users can build community with each other in honest, safe, and liberatory ways that resist the dominant gaze.
In summary, we use the frameworks of interest convergence and intersectionality to understand the conditions of our workplace and of academia in general, and we apply those understandings to construct counter-stories, with which to empower each other and the scholars we serve.
Applying CRT in Our Collegial Relationships
We are BIPOC library workers with many interrelated marginalized identities that affect how we approach our work. That being the case, applying the frameworks of CRT to our relationships with each other, with our entire department, and with colleagues across our library system is key to helping us understand our work environment and mitigate the effects of that environment on our minds and bodies. We work in academic spaces that are predominantly white, ableist, heteronormative, cisgender, and patriarchal, as information professionals who do not fit many or any of those dominant identities. It can be exhausting, but we lean on our CRT praxis to help ourselves and each other not only survive in this environment but also find moments to thrive and experience joy. By employing intersectionality and interest convergence to recognize and call out the white supremacist environment in which we work, we can build our counter-stories and even counter-spaces, to ensure that we set healthy boundaries and find fulfillment in our work together
As we apply CRT in our relationship with each other, we explicitly acknowledge and push back against the white supremacist culture that permeates every aspect of our workplace and our work (Quiñonez, Nataraj, and Olivas 2021). This requires that we recognize vocational awe and neutrality as key components of everyday white supremacy in library work. Vocational awe encourages us to sacrifice ourselves for a so-called sacred profession dominated by a white womanhood that neither of us can (or wants to) achieve (Ettarh 2018). Library neutrality is a myth that serves to disguise white supremacist ideas as normal (Chiu, Ettarh, and Ferretti 2021). Our very racialized presence in a white profession necessitates a radical pushback against vocational awe and neutrality for us to survive, much less thrive. Thus, part of our work as colleagues is to help each other call out those instances of white supremacy that would seek to appropriate our work and, in many ways, our very selves (Brown et al. 2021).
Part of the white supremacist culture that we seek to name and dismantle is the widespread practice in academic—and by extension academic library—spaces to co-opt, tokenize, and undervalue our work as marginalized people (Brown, Cline, and Méndez-Brady 2021). More often than not, BIPOC academics are relegated to what Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (2021) refers to as the “emotional housework” of the academy, where we are expected to meet general academic standards while also providing much of the support work for our colleagues and students (189). We are not only responsible for completing the standard service, research, and librarian duties that are expected of all faculty members. Our institutions also expect us to take on the additional labor of building more inclusive spaces through mentoring, educating colleagues from dominant groups, and shouldering the burden on diversity committees and in diversifying faculty governance and search committees (Brown, Cline, and Méndez-Brady 2021).
This additional burden is true for academics like us who are tenure-track but has even weightier implications for those in more precarious positions, including contract and adjunct workers. As Dr. Prescod-Weinstein (2021) notes: “Researchers from minoritized groups, including gender minorities and especially those of us of color, face an extraordinary burden in academic spaces” (188). We find that to be the case for us at our institution, where our small department has often been overrepresented on search committees, diversity work, and other activities where the optics of a BIPOC perspective are seen as beneficial. These requests come fast and furious with no additional compensation for the extra work and little to no acknowledgement of the inequitable distribution of this labor. Using the CRT frameworks of intersectionality, interest convergence, and counter-storytelling/counter-spaces, we gauge each request as it comes in, and push ourselves and each other to consider what opportunity the request presents to make changes that benefit BIPOC in our library, weighed against how it will affect our individual and departmental capacity, as well as the precedent that it may set for other BIPOC in our library. We refuse and accept requests judiciously, and thus, can carve out joy and fulfillment in our relationships with each other and our work amidst the additional burdens a white supremacist environment places on us.
Applying intersectionality requires that we exercise care in acknowledging each other’s labor, respect each other’s boundaries, and give each other space to fully inhabit our intersectional identities at work as we see fit. We explicitly recognize that we are full human beings with interlocking identities that we cannot and often do not wish to leave at the proverbial door when we enter our workspaces. We each have different ways of embodying our marginalized identities at work and deserve to be treated with respect to our varying needs. We also acknowledge that our lives involve more than the work we do at our institution. We are caregivers and receivers; we are family and friends; we are whole people with ideas, desires, and commitments that go beyond our workplace. With this in mind, the intersectional care that we bring to the profession takes many forms, including building flexibility into our work schedules, using multiple modes of communication for meetings and information-sharing, or taking full advantage of the hybrid virtual and in-person work environment that surfaced during the earlier days of the pandemic. Our intersectional care also extends to a sensitivity to our feelings and focus as we approach our work; there have often been moments when we have had to postpone job activities to take time and space to check in with each other about heightened circumstances in our personal lives or the world around us.
Another way we employ intersectionality in our collective work is through intentionally surfacing and valuing that “emotional housework” which often gets invisibilized and devalued by our white institution. Together, we call out and celebrate the achievements we make in mentoring BIPOC students, teaching our white colleagues through our lived experiences, and all the labor we put into helping to make our institution a viable place for marginalized workers and learners. We not only surface this invisibilized work among ourselves, but we also do so with our colleagues across the institution, both formally and informally. We take the time to mention the emotional labor we are engaging in, especially when new requests for such labor come in, and we make a point of adding narratives of that labor to our formal documentation for promotion and tenure.
Finally, we apply intersectionality as we support one another in exercising boundaries when the institution wishes to exploit our labor and intersectional identities (Brown, Cline, and Méndez-Brady 2021). We keep each other informed as necessary about our schedules, workload, and personal life loads, and make adjustments as needed to allow any one of us to step back or forward as they are able. The purpose of this practice is never to force disclosure beyond what either of us wishes to disclose at work. Rather, it is to encourage each other to reflect holistically and to empower ourselves to decline new requests if needed to secure and maintain healthy boundaries in our work. We seek to interrupt the professional librarian norm that we must be selective in refusing requests for ad hoc or invisibilized labor; instead, we encourage each other to be selective in accepting these requests, particularly in times when we are stretched thin due to staffing shortages or simply because it is a busy time of the academic term. Overall, our intersectional approach to empowered boundary-setting is a form of “transformative self-care” where we build a supportive community to affirm our intersectional identities, validate our lived experiences, and push back against coerced assimilation to the surrounding white supremacist norms of our institution (Baldivia, Saula, and Hursh 2022, 137; see also Moore and Estrellado 2018).
In addition to intersectionality, we also use a critical approach to interest convergence to help us call out oppressive systems in our workplace and call forth more liberatory possibilities. From the CRT framework of interest convergence, we learn that antiracist work is only supported in white supremacist culture to the extent that it also provides a benefit to white supremacy (Delgado and Stefancic 2023). Employing this framework can, therefore, be a powerful way of pushing forward initiatives and changes that benefit us and our fellow racialized colleagues and do so with the support of our predominantly white academic library (Brown, Cline, and Méndez-Brady 2021; Aguirre 2010). However, we also recognize Derrick Bell’s original framing of the interest convergence dilemma, which teaches us that basing our pursuit of racial justice solely on the interests of white supremacy is no way to build toward liberation. We must instead take a critical approach to interest convergence that allows us to move forward an antiracist agenda within our white-dominated workplace without losing sight of our own ultimate goals and needs as BIPOC workers.
With this tension in mind, we make use of interest convergence only when it best suits our needs of building an antiracist workspace while continuing to make material changes to the white supremacist culture that surrounds us. For example, when one of us served alongside our department’s senior leader on a committee tasked with providing recommendations for initiatives to aid new faculty with integration to the library, it was a priority to provide recommendations with a clear benefit to new BIPOC faculty. This approach was informed by a recognition that benefits to BIPOC faculty would also benefit white faculty. One recommendation was to create a scheduling system for more equitable sharing of service duties, such as committee work, informed by the heavy service loads of every member of our department at the time. For the sake of interest convergence, one explanation of the recommendation was that it would maximize faculty productivity since productivity is a priority for our white-dominated institution. However, with the antiracist goals and praxis of our department in mind, the recommendation also served as a means of helping to alleviate the excessive service load often placed on racialized academics, particularly BIPOC women, who formed a substantial contingent of our library’s new hires at the time. Thus, interest convergence helped to get the point across, but did not overtake our particular anti-oppression agenda. We saw some of the initial advantages of leaning into interest convergence as an active strategy when our senior leadership group accepted the recommendation. However, we also see some of its drawbacks, as we witnessed the recommendation come to faculty governance for consensus without success. To this day, we have not yet seen a scheduling system take shape, though we have certainly learned more about whose interests have influence in implementing various types of recommendations.
As we apply the CRT frameworks of intersectionality and interest convergence to name and push back against white supremacy in our workplace, we support one another in crafting counter-stories of what it means to be an academic library worker at a private PWI. We craft our counter-stories as a means of making our department what Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso (2000) describe as a “counter-space” where we can find some reprieve as racialized people working in a white supremacist environment (70-71; Masunaga, Conner-Gaten, Blas, & Young 2022, 16-17). In crafting our departmental counter-space within our academic library, we build a more liberatory community together and extend that to others within our institution and beyond.
Highlighted CRT-Informed Relational Practices
- Recognize that there are many ways to embody multiply-marginalized identities at work.
- Encourage keeping each other informed about needs for work adjustment without forcing disclosure beyond what is necessary or useful.
- Encourage selective acceptance of service requests rather than selective refusal. Think thoroughly about requests for committee and other voluntary service, weighing the opportunities of the request against its effects on individual capacity, departmental capacity (particularly for BIPOC department members who may pick up any slack), and the precedent that it sets for BIPOC service expectations across the organization.
- Build flexibility into work schedules.
- Use multiple modes of communication to meet and share information; take advantage of norms for virtual and in-person hybridity from the earlier days of the pandemic to enable colleagues to contribute their work.
- Practice attunement to heightened moments in the world and in colleagues’ lives, check in with each other around those moments, and postpone business as usual to support each other.
- Take time to acknowledge emotional and other invisibilized labor explicitly. Build narratives about the value of invisibilized labor in promotion cases.
- When creating bold new practices to improve work experiences for BIPOC workers, be aware of whose interests will influence their implementation, and proactively articulate their benefits for all workers.
Applying CRT in Our Scholarly Communications Work
Academic librarians are crucial in educating researchers about the importance of scholarly practices such as citation and copyright. As the scholarly communications and information policy department at our academic library, we regularly teach library information sessions and consult one-on-one with users about the myriad ways citation norms and copyright law can help scholars share their research with the public, thereby challenging a common misconception that these are perfunctory steps in the research process. However, we are also scholars in our own right and, as such, have a stake in challenging a conventional approach to these scholarly practices that privileges white, able-bodied, cisgender, and heteronormative perspectives over others.
In the digital zine “How to Cite Like a Badass Tech Feminist Scholar of Color,” Rigoberto Lara Guzmán and Sareeta Amrute (2019) challenge the established rules of citation in which the “scholar” and the “research subject” both contribute to the production of knowledge but only the contribution of the “scholar” merits acknowledgment through citation. The idea that citing is the key to engaging in scholarly conversation privileges writing over other forms of communication and assumes that all perspectives are given equal value in academia (Okun 2021). In reality, many academic authors cite marginalized scholars less often than scholars from dominant groups, erase the scholarly contributions of those outside academia, and deem certain kinds of knowledge unworthy of citation.
Instead of upholding a hierarchy of knowledge with “research subjects” at the bottom, library workers can challenge researchers to think beyond the mechanics of citation and to contend with the socioeconomic structures upholding this scholarly practice – who does academia cite and who does it exclude when it comes time to name the creators and keepers of knowledge? One way our department addresses this issue in instruction sessions is by discussing who the students cite in their research papers and asking if they are citing, or otherwise acknowledging, classmates with whom they have been in conversation during the semester. Since the answer is usually “no,” this creates an opportunity for a larger discussion about who else the students might be omitting from their list of citations and why they should expand their understanding of who is worthy of being cited.
The Cite Black Women Collective is an example of how scholars across the social sciences and humanities have put into practice Black feminist theories and applied those critical theoretical frameworks by disrupting “hegemonic citational politics” (Smith et al. 2021, 14). Citing Black women is at the core of the Collective’s mission, but their work extends further. The Cite Black Women Collective explains: “Our politics of collectivity demand that we strive to embody a particular kind of Black feminist thought, one that rejects profitability, neoliberalism, self-promotion, branding, and commercialization. We make intentional decisions to uptorn neoliberal values of hyper-individualistic profiteering” (Smith et al. 2021, 13). As librarians who are also tenure-track faculty, we must meet expectations of publishing and get cited by other scholars to achieve tenure and promotion. However, these expectations reinforce the profiteering we are trying to challenge.
Instead of succumbing to the pressures of a process shaped by white supremacist values, we approach our tenure and promotion portfolios from an intersectional, collective perspective by publishing in journals that prioritize BIPOC and other marginalized voices and citing scholars who challenge the status quo, regardless of academic status or institutional affiliation. Librarian Harrison W. Inefuku (2021) identified academic publishing as one of the main stumbling blocks for BIPOC scholars and argued that “the persistence of racism in the process creates a negative feedback loop that suppresses the number of faculty of color, resulting in a scholarly record that continues to be dominated by whiteness” (211). Publishing in an established academic journal and being cited as the first author carries prestige that increases our chances of achieving tenure and promotion, even though these do not directly correlate to the effort or creativity that goes into creating a work or the impact a work has on the larger scholarly field. Approaching the tenure and promotion process from a viewpoint shaped by CRT, particularly a problematized approach to interest convergence, allows us to make sense of these contradictions. Our tenure and promotion materials put interest convergence into practice by emphasizing how our institution has benefited from our CRT-informed work and, at the same time, making it clear that our work goes far beyond the DEI initiatives we may be involved with. We can then focus on creating a new path forward instead of trying to meet professional benchmarks that may not align with our values as BIPOC academic librarians informed by Black feminist practices. We might not be able to escape the hyper-individualistic, commercialized expectations of our PWI completely during the tenure and promotion process. Still, we can choose to deprioritize those expectations, pursue work that fulfills us, and share counter-stories in our tenure and promotion materials that highlight our contributions to the collective good over individual achievements.
In our roles as scholarly communication and information policy specialists, we encourage users to question how they consume information and how they create it. One of the ways we do this is by framing copyright as a mechanism to expand the reach of scholarship, not just to monetize creative works. In the age of the Internet, many students first encounter copyright when they learn that they have shared copyrighted material in violation of a social media platform’s rules and have their content taken down. Others may see how large corporations and individuals intentionally use copyright infringement claims to remove content and censor conversations on social media. Our job is to educate scholars on the basic principles of copyright. However, we take it a step further by challenging the use of copyright in ways that prioritize profit over sharing information.
Our department utilizes counter-storytelling when teaching copyright law to empower our students and colleagues to disrupt the power dynamics inherent in the academic publishing process. In doing so, the scholars we train learn how to maintain some legal control over their work and to prioritize the freedom to share their scholarship with communities on the margins of or outside academia over making a profit. In past workshops about research ethics, we asked graduate students to imagine a scenario in which they submitted their thesis for publication in an academic journal and had to negotiate the terms of their publishing agreement. One of the questions we posed to the students was whether they wanted to transfer their copyright to the publisher. The students unanimously responded that they wanted to keep their copyright. Their reasoning for keeping their copyright varied. A common thread, however, was that the students wanted the freedom to make their work widely available instead of having the piece they created stuck behind a publisher’s paywall. Even though it was an imaginary scenario, the students touched on an important reality for many scholars who want to share their work freely but ultimately have to compromise to meet the publication expectations of their institutions.
Authors who seek to make their research widely available for free while retaining their copyright may find traditional academic publishing challenging and instead turn to open access publishing. “Open is an expansive term and encompasses a series of initiatives, policies, and practices that broadly stand for ideals of transparency, accessibility, and openness” (Yoon 2023, “Introduction;” italics in the original). By publishing open access, scholars can reach readers unaffiliated with academic institutions or whose institutions have limited access to publications due to budget restrictions. In theory, authors who publish open access would not have to choose between reaching a large audience, one of the appeals of publishing in established journals, or keeping their copyright. However, we have seen how traditional publishers have co-opted the open access publishing model for their own profit-making goals by charging exorbitant fees and pushing authors to give up their copyright if they want to publish open access (Maron et al. 2019). We encourage authors who consult with us to be aware of this tendency toward co-optation of equity-oriented movements by for-profit publishers, and to think critically about whether the value of working with those publishers measures up to what the publishers will extract from them (and other scholarly authors) in the process.
Despite these challenges, open access has significant implications beyond intellectual property rights for BIPOC scholars, particularly those who engage in research about race, gender, sexuality, and class. Inefuku (2021) wrote: “With the growth of open-access publishing and library publishing programs, there has been a growth of opportunities to create journals dedicated to publishing subjects and methodologies that are ignored by the dominant publications” (205). While open access journals provide necessary platforms for scholars researching marginalized people or topics, Inefuku explained, these publications may not be given the same weight as traditional journals during the tenure and promotion process. Traditional journals still outrank open access journals, which limits the options available to authors who want to pursue open access publishing exclusively and allows cynics to dismiss open access publications as inferior. In addition, publications that rely on steep publication fees to publish open access reproduce the inequities of traditional publishing by making it harder for scholars with less funding to share their research.
Open access exists within the capitalist landscape of academic publishing, an industry that, like librarianship, is predominantly white and gatekeeps scholarship that does not uphold whiteness (Inefuku 2021). Our department promotes open access and sees its potential to make academic publishing more accessible to scholars that publishers have historically excluded. When publishing our own research, we prioritize open access publications and publishers that support self-archiving (or green open access), which allows us to easily share our research with the public for free. At the same time, we recognize that open access is not intrinsically equitable. Analyzing open access, and scholarly communications more broadly, from a critical and intersectional perspective allows us to simultaneously imagine the possibilities and see the stumbling blocks in the path toward equitable academic publishing.
Highlighted CRT-Informed ScholComm Practices
- Teach researchers to recognize that their scholarly choices are political.
- Challenge researchers to engage with scholarly practices beyond their simple mechanics, and contend with the underlying socioeconomic structures that privilege white, nondisabled, cisgender, and heteronormative perspectives over others.
- Encourage researchers to step out of their comfort zones of conformance with scholarly norms and traditions, and step into growth zones around citation politics, publication outlet choices, negotiation of publishing contracts, and more.
- Tenure-track practitioners (particularly BIPOC) should find a balance between meeting the expectations of their institution’s requirements, contributing to the growth of scholarly norms that recognize independent scholars as scholars, and BIPOC counter-stories as worthy of entry into the scholarly record.
- Tenured practitioners should work to establish institutional norms that affirmatively value scholarly practices that critically engage with the racialized legacies of traditional scholarship and the scholarly publishing ecosystem, and model those norms for their colleagues without tenure.
- Engage with growing collective analysis of how for-profit co-optation impacts open access and the movement for equity in academic publishing, and be prepared to articulate nuance based on that analysis when explaining scholarly practices to researchers at all levels and in all contexts.
Looking Forward: A Case for CRT Application Across Library Settings
One of the most insidious outcomes of stock stories of diversity is that it is often assumed that the plain and simple presence of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color represents justice and dismantlement of white supremacy. But white supremacy is not merely manifested in rare, egregious incidents in environments where BIPOC are minoritized; it is normalized across everyday life, and can often operate and have impacts on BIPOC even without a predominating presence of white people within an organization (Delgado and Stefancic 2023). Shaundra Walker (2017) gives an example of this by examining the patronizing and white-supremacy-serving history of 19th-century white industrialist philanthropy on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and its lasting impacts. From Walker’s incisive critique, we draw an understanding that white supremacy thrives best in the absence of interrogation of norms and practices, and indeed, some of the most hurtful forms of white supremacy are the ones that BIPOC may enact on each other when we have not questioned the everyday norms and practices of our fields. That understanding deeply informs our efforts to go beyond the confines of what is typically defined as scholarly communications work in libraries and to work with library users to challenge traditional views of scholarship and open access. A CRT-informed analysis of library work and workplace culture is applicable across all types of departments and institutions. It’s important to note that although our application of CRT is in the particular setting of a large private PWI, a CRT lens can also inform work at institutions with numerically significant populations of BIPOC employees and users, particularly students of color. It can also inform others’ work in different functional areas and institutions with different racial dynamics from our own.
Another facet of our collective application of CRT that may be useful to others is our use of it as a lens to understand our services for users and our collegial relationships within our organization. Because a common pitfall in DEI work is to focus on departmental services and neglect internal workplace culture, it is particularly significant that library workers tend to both of these aspects carefully and intentionally, rather than choosing one at the expense of the other. Library workers can approach work with an underlying awareness that organizations enact racialization (knowingly or not) through practices like heightened surveillance of how BIPOC workers spend their time, heightened expectations of care labor from BIPOC women without recognition of it as added workload, and more. These are normalized “business as usual” practices. We recognize that library workers’ prioritization of each other as BIPOC colleagues must be expressed first and foremost by pushing back against these “business as usual” approaches. Among library workers at large, one way to enact equity values is to help each other protect work-life boundaries by judiciously refusing requests for labor that cannot be accommodated without compromising capacity for self-care. This is not a way of justifying deprioritizing collegiality, nor is it refusal simply to exercise the power to refuse, both of which are common narratives that implicitly penalize BIPOC employees’ refusal to perform demanded labor. Rather, it is a way of recognizing that white supremacy deeply informs the cultural expectations of library work to provide service even when it compromises our physical and mental selves (Okun 2021). These cultural expectations will not graciously recede as a result of institutional commitment without action, nor even as a result of incremental and partial action toward values alignment. As Espinal, Hathcock, and Rios (2021) point out: “It is clear that we need new approaches. It is not enough to continuously demonstrate and bemoan the state of affairs [of the profession’s racial demographics]; we need to take action, another tenet of CRT” (232). These actions must encompass library workers’ relationships with each other as colleagues in addition to our services to users.
Many other themes that appear in our application of CRT in our services and working relationships can apply to different library settings as well. For example, informed by the primary CRT tenet that racism is normalized across everyday norms and practices, library workers can strive to take an expansive approach to the practices we encourage our users to engage in, to avoid reproducing the same racialized dynamics that have always existed in each sector of library services. In our context as scholarly communications practitioners, we recognize that many scholarly communications departments focus primarily on open access and authors’ rights, often with an orientation toward open access at any cost, and we encourage scholars who work with us to approach open access critically, and to also consider racialized dynamics in their citation practice. We encourage practitioners in other sectors of library work to consider how common practices in those sectors reproduce racialized inequity, and redefine their services and approaches accordingly.
Although the practices of another library department in a different library setting from our own might be completely different, the same CRT analysis could also lead to a new imagination of the underlying values, scope, and practices of that department’s services. We do not simply share space and work together as a department of BIPOC colleagues; as Nataraj et al. encourage, we also work together to recognize how racialized organizational norms and bureaucratic standards impact us (2020). An overall goal in this work of callout and pushback is to support each other in resistance through rest (Hersey 2021). How might CRT inform your understanding of your work and your organization? How can you use it to interrupt “business as usual?”
Conclusion
We write this against the backdrop of persistent attacks on critical race theory, a term that right-wing politicians co-opted and turned into a white supremacist dog whistle for any effort to educate about race or address systemic racism. We also write this at a time when genocides are being openly perpetrated in Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other places in the world, while those in power violently suppress vocal opposition to these egregious acts of oppression. These bans—on teaching CRT, on calling out deadly oppression across the globe, on sharing counter-stories in solidarity—cannot be separated from the everyday marginalization we experience as library workers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
Our systemic exclusion from and marginalization in librarianship, a predominantly white profession, means that BIPOC employees face inherent risk when challenging standard scholarly and cultural practices. Even libraries that profess to value marginalized perspectives in their DEI statements fail to translate these words into action and, instead, shift the burden of DEI work onto the relatively few BIPOC library workers that they hire (Brown, Cline, and Méndez-Brady 2021). This burden increased significantly after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism, which motivated many institutions to create additional DEI committees and working groups (Rhodes, Bishop, and Moore 2023). Like other academic libraries, our employer released a “commitment to anti-racism” statement in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests, but the statement was never updated after 2020 to outline what concrete actions the organization took, if any, to enact meaningful change for its BIPOC users and employees. The statement was eventually removed from the library website in 2025. Much as the burden of DEI work increased after 2020, it has become even more complex as libraries have begun hiding, watering down, distancing themselves from, or retracting these statements since 2024, often while maintaining the same expectation that equity-oriented labor is still necessary for organizational optics and that BIPOC will carry it out.
The tools of interest convergence, intersectionality, and counter-storytelling shape how we interact with each other and our communities, ultimately helping us navigate the profession in ways that resist white supremacy, capitalism, and individualism. We hope that libraries move beyond the existing model of hiring token BIPOC library workers and expecting them to diversify overwhelmingly white workplaces and instead question why the profession remains so white despite decades of DEI work. In an environment that is at best resistant and at worst actively hostile to any disruption of the status quo, placing the onus of diversity work on BIPOC library workers is ineffective and violent. Although our experience working in a department consisting entirely of BIPOC is rare, we believe that others can learn from how we have carved out our own space and see the potential for building communities of library workers who prioritize living over simply surviving. Our mere presence at a predominantly white institution is not enough to dismantle the racism that thrives in academic libraries such as ours; CRT provides us with frameworks and inspiration to enact meaningful change at our institution and in the field of librarianship more broadly. We call on all library workers to do the same. With the tools that CRT has to offer, we can build new visions of librarianship that benefit everyone and work toward them together.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to our publishing editor, Jess Schomberg, and the editorial board for their flexibility, guidance, and expertise throughout the publication process. We would also like to thank our reviewers, Brittany Paloma Fiedler and Charlotte Roh, for their invaluable feedback and enthusiasm. This project would not have been possible without the encouragement of our manager and associate dean, April Hathcock, who has built a rare departmental culture that deeply supports our efforts to build community and create a healthier work environment. Many thanks to her!
References
Aguirre, Adalberto, Jr. 2010. “Diversity as Interest-Convergence in Academia: A Critical Race Theory Story.” Social Identities 16, no. 6: 763-774. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2010.524782.
Baldivia, Stefani, Zohra Saulat, and Chrissy Hursh. 2022. “Creating More Possibilities: Emergent Strategy as a Transformative Self-Care Framework for Library EDIA Work.” In Practicing Social Justice in Libraries, edited by Alyssa Brissett and Diana Moronta, 133-144. Routledge.
Bell, Derrick A. 1980. “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma.” Harvard Law Review 93 (3): 518–33. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/no-volume/brown-v-board-of-education-and-the-interest-convergence-dilemma/.
Brown, Alexandria, James Cheng, Isabel Espinal, Brittany Paloma Fiedler, Joyce Gabiola, Sofia Leung, Nisha Mody, Alanna Aiko Moore, Teresa Y. Neely, and Peace Ossom Williamson. “Statement Against White Appropriation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color’s Labor.” WOC + Lib. https://www.wocandlib.org/features/2021/9/3/statement-against-white-appropriation-of-black-indigenous-and-people-of-colors-labor?rq=fiedler.
Brown, Jennifer, Nicholae Cline, and Marisa Méndez-Brady. 2021. “Leaning on Our Labor: Whiteness and Hierarchies of Power in LIS Work.” In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 95-110. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0007.
Chiu, Anastasia, Fobazi M. Ettarh, and Jennifer A. Ferretti. 2021. “Not the Shark, but the Water: How Neutrality and Vocational Awe Intertwine to Uphold White Supremacy.” In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 49-71. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0005.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, rev. 10th anniversary ed. Routledge.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6: 1241-1299.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. 1995. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. The New Press.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. 2023. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 4th ed. New York University Press.
Espinal, Isabel, April M. Hathcock, and Maria Rios. 2021. “Dewhitening Librarianship: A Policy Proposal for Libraries.” In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 223-240. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0017.
Ettarh, Fobazi. 2018. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018 /vocational-awe/.
Galvan, Angela. 2015. “Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias: Whiteness and Librarianship.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, June 3. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/soliciting-performance-hiding-bias-whiteness-and-librarianship/.
Guzmán, Rigoberto Lara, and Sareeta Amrute. 2019. “How to Cite Like a Badass Tech Feminist Scholar of Color.” Points (blog). Data & Society, August 22. https://medium.com/datasociety-points/how-to-cite-like-a-badass-tech-feminist-scholar-of-color-ebc839a3619c.
Hathcock, April. 2015. “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, October 7. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2015/lis-diversity/.
Hathcock, April. 2019. “Why Don’t You Want to Keep Us?” At the Intersection (blog), January 18. https://aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2019/01/18/why-dont-you-want-to-keep-us/.
Hersey, Tricia. 2022. Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Inefuku, Harrison W. 2021. “Relegated to the Margins: Faculty of Color, the Scholarly Record, and the Necessity of Antiracist Library Disruptions.” In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 197-216. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.001.0001.
Laws, Mike. 2020. “Why We Capitalize ‘Black’ (and Not ‘White’).” Columbia Journalism Review (blog), June 16. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php.
Maron, Nancy, Rebecca Kennison, Paul Bracke, Nathan Hall, Isaac Gilman, Kara Malenfant, Charlotte Roh, and Yasmeen Shorish. 2019. Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications: Creating a More Inclusive Future. Association of College and Research Libraries. https://doi.org/10.5860/acrl.1.
Masunaga, Jennifer, Aisha Conner-Gaten, Nataly Blas, and Jessea Young. 2022. “Community Building, Empowering Voices, and Brave Spaces Through LIS Professional Conferences.” In Practicing Social Justice in Libraries, edited by Alyssa Brissett and Diana Moronta, 14-27. Routledge.
Moore, Alanna Aiko, and Jan Estrellado. 2018. “Identity, Activism, Self-Care, and Women of Color Librarians.” In Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS, edited by Rose L. Chou and Annie Pho, 349-390. Library Juice Press.
Nataraj, Lalitha, Holly Hampton, Talitha R. Matlin, and Yvonne Nalani Meulemans. “Nice White Meetings: Unpacking Absurd Library Bureaucracy through a Critical Race Theory Lens.” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship 6 (2020): 1-15. https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cjalib/2020-v6-cjalib05325/1075449ar.pdf.
Okun, Tema. 2021. “White Supremacy Culture Characteristics” White Supremacy Culture. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html.
Prescod-Weinstein Chanda. 2021. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter Spacetime and Dreams Deferred. Bold Type Books.
Quiñonez, Torie, Lalitha Nataraj, and Antonia Olivas. 2021. “The Praxis of Relation, Validation, and Motivation: Articulating LIS Collegiality through a CRT Lens.” In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 197-216. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0018.
Ray, Victor. 2019. “A Theory of Racialized Organizations.” American Sociological Review 84, no. 1: 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122418822335.
Rhodes, Tamara, Naomi Bishop, and Alana Aiko Moore. 2023. “The Work of Women of Color Academic Librarians in Higher Education: Perspectives on Emotional and Invisible Labor.” up//root, February 13. https://www.uproot.space/features/the-work-of-women-of-color.
Smith, Christen A., Erica L. Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Whitney N.L. Pirtle, and The Cite Black Women Collective. 2021. “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement).” Feminist Anthropology 2, no. 1: 10–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12040.
Solorzano, Daniel, Miguel Ceja, and Tara Yosso. 2000. “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students.” The Journal of Negro Education 69, no. 1/2: 60–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2696265.
Walker, Shaundra. 2017. “A Revisionist History of Andrew Carnegie’s Library Grants to Black Colleges.” In Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science, edited by Gina Schlesselman-Tarango, 33–53. Library Juice Press. https://kb.gcsu.edu/lib/3.
Yoon, Betsy. 2023. “A Genealogy of Open.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, March 1. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2023/genealogy-of-open/.
[1] We choose to capitalize the “B” in Black and to lowercase the “W” in white. We capitalize Black in recognition of its use to describe shared struggle, identity, and community, including a history of slavery that erased many Black people’s knowledge of their specific ethnic heritage (Laws 2020). We do not capitalize white because we see whiteness as a construct that only exists in opposition to racialized communities, and is only used to claim shared identity and community in white supremacist contexts.