Yesterday, I spent the day at the PLA pre-conference Advancing Racial Equity in Public Libraries presented by Gordon Goodwin from Race Forward. It was a really valuable day if learning as we looked at how institutional racism has contributed to inequity and how we can identify implicit racism and fight against it.
We discussed whether we agreed or disagreed with statements like “Hiring and promotion decisions should be based solely on merit”, digging deep into what those statements might mean to us and to our communities.
And as a group we identified some policies that might have unintended negative consequences for groups of people, demonstrating implicit institutional bias:
- Only providing outreach services to licensed daycares might miss children who stay with relatives or other caregivers: families who might really benefit from that outreach.
- Locating all your foreign language materials at a certain branch and instructing your patrons to go there may make them feel unwelcome at other locations and ghettoized.
- Requiring part-time workers to work flexible schedules and varied number of hours restricts you to a pool of workers who can make that schedule work (likely they are not counted on to financially support the family). Hiring for full-time positions from that part-time pool further restricts who you’re hiring.
- And, of course, LATE FINES which disproportionally affect the people who need the library the most.
Can you think of any policies your library has that might be unintentionally negatively affecting your community?
—Abby Johnson