“You will deserve this anger/hurt/frustration/wrath of the people of color you’ve offended. … even in the midst of your hurt and bewilderment, you will be careful not to dismiss the reality of the people you’ve offended. You will resist the urge to defend yourself, shut your mouth, and listen.” (April Hathcock, “You’re Gonna Screw Up”) There was a lot of reading to do before trying to figure out what I would write in response to Meredith Farkas’s November 2019 blog post “When libraries and librarians pretend to be neutral, they often cause harm” and her May 2020 column in American Libraries, “When Speech Isn’t Free.” An entire issue of the Oregon Library Association Quarterly, the blog Reading While White, a School Library Journal article summarizing Ishizuka and Stephens’s “The Cat Is Out of the Bag,” Debbie Reese’s “Indigenous Critique of Whiteness in Children’s Literature,” and more. It’s still not enough. As a white man who is woefully undereducated on underrepresentation of marginalized groups in kid lit and its impact on members of those groups, I have to work extra hard to overcome a life immersed in white privilege and white culture.
Or do I? Heather McNeil doesn’t seem to think so. According to her last word on the subject (an article positioned at the end of the OLAQ issue on equity, diversity, and inclusion and seemingly meant as a final judgment on the current state of affairs), it’s all gone too far. White folks are tired of being told they’re wrong. We want to receive acknowledgment for trying, and we want marginalized people to accept reasonable limits. McNeil ends her article with the story of an African-American woman in West African garb hugging her and calling her “Sister” after McNeil delivered a lecture on African stories. That’s what she wants: a reward for the effort without further criticism.
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AuthorJeffrey Babbitt, MLIS, is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Wayne State University who is pursuing a career as a librarian in Michigan. Subject Headings
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June 2021
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