personal

Further Tales (on Armistead Maupin)

I personally have gone from being both a crime and a mental illness to someone whose homosexuality is now my strongest value. — Armistead Maupin

I honestly don’t know if queer folks who didn’t come of age during the time when AIDS was a death sentence, when Queer Nation, ACT-UP, and the Lesbian Avenbers were out in the streets fighting, dying, kissing, and fucking for revolution, can really understand how drastically things have changed in such a short period of time.

I’m reminded in large ways, like when marriage equality passes in a red state, but I’m also reminded in small, very personal ways, like when my boss talks about her (female) partner in staff meetings and nobody blinks an eye.

My mom used to say “Keep on livin’” whenever I made a crack about her advanced age, but now I know she wasn’t only talking about age. She was talking about lived experience and the wisdom you gain through survival.

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libraries

“Of what had I ever been afraid?”

The librarian twittersphere* has been (rightly) up in arms about a number of things having to do with gender, sexism, intersectionality and privilege over the last few days. Some discussions have pushed a number of us right over the edge, causing outbursts like the one I uttered this morning:

In my frustration, I somehow overlooked that this shared outpouring of words, thoughts, and emotions was not only very necessary, but healing. I felt connected to, heard, and validated by these women and men who stood up to say “Not on my watch,” or “Here’s where you’re wrong,” or even simply “We tried. We have a long way to go. We welcome dialogue.”

It reminded me of something Audre Lorde once wrote in her essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”:

“(F)or every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact…Within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle or otherwise, conscious or not — I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.”

I have frequently felt out of place in this profession, felt too coarse, too brash, too outspoken, too unrefined, too, too, too. And what I’ve come to realize is that these little arrows of insecurity and vulnerability are part of a much larger skirmish that I’ve fought my entire life against a society that not only made me feel unwelcome, but that had little interest in my success or survival.

This is familiar, this battle. I have seen it all before, and I have — we have taken on bigger foes than those that would end us, and we have won.

We are so powerful. We can do so much.

Thank you for pulling my coattails and reminding me just how full of the right stuff we are.

*Is this a thing? Can we make it a thing?

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Photography

A Photography Break

Now that walking is difficult, I don’t pick up my camera much. The act of photography was something that was connected with walking about town, and as much as I love riding my bike, I don’t get quite the same feeling when shooting from behind the handlebars.

Today is the first day in a really long time that I’m pleased with something I shot. Click to see larger versions.

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libraries

What Does It Mean to Work “In Tech”?

Lately it seems most of the commentary that stimulates my thinking happens on Twitter. Or maybe it’s because that’s where I spend most of my time. At any rate, a couple of tweets got me thinking about what it means to work “in tech.”

I’m a SXSW veteran, although I haven’t been back in about five years. While I wasn’t ever on a Blacks in Tech panel, I don’t think it’s a stretch for me to say that I was there when the panels were getting off the ground. But I wasn’t a developer, I only puttered around with code in my free time, and my work was largely in the user experience/usability/information architecture sphere.

I went to library school because I was interested in the organization of information in online spaces (and because it was cheaper than biz school). I worked as a graduate student assistant in the department’s IT lab, where I ghosted computers in between every term, set up space on the LAN for students, and provided hardware and software support to my colleagues. Before that, I’d worked in technical support at an internet service provider where I helped people troubleshoot their internet, and later, cable modem connections. I moved into the web hosting department, where having to set up FreeBSD machine from scratch (including the desktop environment of your choice) was a condition of employment.

I’ve written shell scripts, and I’ve been the equivalent of a junior server administrator. These days, I’m an assistant manager in the digital services department at a major urban library. But would you say that I work “in tech”?

Discussions about core technical competencies for librarians and library technical staff are de rigueur these days, and as often happens in many of these discussions, someone makes the claim that it is absolutely necessary that librarians learn to code, because being able to build our own stuff is the future (I guess).

But is it, really?

What if, instead of asking people to only focus on the hard skills of coding/being a maker, we asked people to learn more about ways they can use technology to their advantage? What if we didn’t only privilege production, but we made room for mediation, collaboration, and interpretation? What if we decided that knowing how can we use this technology in the service of our patrons and other staff is just as important a skill as knowing how to using a vendor’s API to build a web app that is tailored for your specific library’s needs?

Knowing how to write — and interpret — code is a solid marketable skill. But so is knowing how to talk tech. Splitting hairs on whether someone who knows how to use a laptop is a real techie is an artificial distinction, and y’all know how I feel about distinctions that keep us apart.

Future-ready librarians won’t (only) know how to code, they’ll know how to speak the language and adapt it in such a way that everyone in their audience – from the most experienced, to the least – will be able to easily understand technology and it’s uses.

Additional reading that inspired this post: “You Don’t Need To Learn To Code & Other Truths About the Future of Careers” by Sean Blanda.

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culture & society

Calling In: A Less Disposable Way Of Holding Each Other Accountable

When confronted with another person’s mistake, I often think about what makes my relationship with this person important. Is it that we’ve done work together before? Is it that I know their politics? Is it that I trust their politics? Are they a family member? Oh shit, my mom? Is it that I’ve heard them talk about patience or accountability or justice before? Where is our common ground? And is our common ground strong enough to carry us through how we have enacted violence on each other?

I start “call in” conversations by identifying the behavior and defining why I am choosing to engage with them. I prioritize my values and invite them to think about theirs and where we share them. And then we talk about it. We talk about it together, like people who genuinely care about each other. We offer patience and compassion to each other and also keep it real, ending the conversation when we need to and know that it wasn’t a loss to give it a try.

A couple of people mentioned (on Twitter) that they couldn’t believe how calm I was in the intersectionality post and in the conversation that spurred it. I used a feminist twitter meltdown as a model of behaviour I didn’t want to follow, but it was the piece “Calling In: A Less Disposable Way Of Holding Each Other Accountable” by Ngọc Loan Trần that also helped me to keep my reactions in check.

(Also: Black Girl Dangerous should be required reading.)

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libraries

On Privilege, Intersectionality, and the Librarian Image

Thanks to some conversations I’ve had with Lisa Rabey, Andromeda Yelton, and the members of #libtechwomen, I’ve been thinking about intersectionality in librarianship a lot lately. A blog post by Andy Woodworth provided just the jumping off point I needed to publish some of these thoughts.

While airing grievances, Andy touched on the idea of professionalism in librarianship, and how, in his mind, it is tied to a person’s appearance. He wrote:

(H)ow you look and act around the community you serve matters. How you dress is up to you, but if you step outside of the people’s expectations as to how [insert your kind of librarian] should look it’s going to take work to show them that you are a competent professional. It’s not up to them to expand their definitions, it’s up to you to do the work that will prove those definitions are wrong.

I take issue with this perspective, because I think it perpetuates inequality in librarianship, and it privileges a specific group. I’ll try to explain why.

The demographics of this profession fall largely along white, cisgender female lines. So much so, that if you search for images of librarians, white cisgender women will make up the vast majority of your search results.

Anyone who falls outside the white cisgender female model defies expectations of what it means to be a librarian by simply existing. Even male librarians represent an expansion of the definition.

In my case, you see evidence of this expectation when patrons approach a white colleague at the reference desk instead of coming to me for help because I don’t fit their model of what a librarian looks like. I’ve been told this also happens to male librarians.

Regardless of what I wear or how I act around some members of the community I serve, my race will always place me outside of the norm. When we place the burden of of being the exception on those who fall outside of the norm, we are furthering an agenda that supports the idea that whiteness is the highest standard, indeed, the only standard that should be used to measure suitability.

Rather, I think the responsibility lies with the community as a whole to demonstrate that differences (race, gender, sexual orientation, able-bodied, etc.) aren’t just deviations, but are representative of much stronger, deeply entrenched power relations that must be challenged and dismantled if this profession hopes to diversify.

We can have conversations about purple hair and tattoos and whether they don’t represent a professional image, but we shouldn’t have them without drawing parallels between these superficial differences and the (in some cases) immutable differences that we are born with, or that are central to our identity.

This is what intersectionality means. The intersection between and within these differences presents us with an opportunity to work toward a more beneficial and productive dismantling of the structures that work to keep us apart and distrustful of each other.

I am a woman who works in library technology (to an extent), so I am very interested in discussions, conferences, and panels on gender in library technology. However, by focusing the discussion only on gender, it’s as if I’m being asked to disassociate the other parts of my identity (i.e., race) because it isn’t viewed as a universally shared experience. It reinforces the privilege of white cisgender women, and when we support this privilege, we fail to appreciate how these implications for my professional success and standing intersect and interact.

But I don’t want to give the impression that discussions about intersectionality are only about the ways we continue to fail each other. As The Angry Black Woman writes, intersectionality is “also about taking in on yourself to learn, to form better bonds, to understand, to change yourself the way you’ve asked others to change.”

That’s what I’m hoping to do with this post, to create a space where we can discuss these concepts inside (and outside) of professional contexts with an eye toward dismantling those structures that work to keep our profession from diversifying.

(h/t to Chris Bourg for letting me ride her coattails.)

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Uncategorized

Spice Up Your Life: A Diverse List of Library/Tech Speakers

My good friend Tiffany B. Brown had this to say earlier this morning:

 

This tweet and the Tristan Walker interview in question were in my mind when a friend and colleague asked me to put together a dream speakers list that the library’s Policy & Planning group could use for possible speakers. This list is by no means exhaustive, and it was pretty much just made up of people I know personally and/or people I admire and have seen present at other events.

If you’re a friend of mine and you’re not on this list, it’s probably because I know you don’t like/aren’t jazzed about public speaking, not because I don’t think you’re any good.

Here’s the list:

The demographic breakdown:

If I were to revise the list (and I may), I’d try to incorporate more Canadian voices/perspectives on this list, because library, privacy, and intellectual freedom issues differ so greatly between the United States and Canada.

Tristan Walker said  ”If you’re not including what will be the majority demographic in our country at the table in positions of leadership, your company just could not be destined for the level of success it should be destined for.”  As someone from a woefully underrepresented demographic in my profession, I’m always thinking about ways to make library events more inclusive. I think some fantastic, creative thinking about technology and how it affects our lives happens within our profession, but I also think that some of the best thinking happens outside of libraries. The division between corporate culture and libraries, while still great, isn’t as much of a contentious point as it used to be; however, I made a conscious choice to include technologists who espouse a more human approach to the role and reach of technology into our personal lives.

Tiffany might’ve said “get some black friends,” but knowing her as I do, I’m sure she’d agree with me if I expanded that to “Get some black, brown, Asian, queer, international friends, too.”

 

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