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| Kelly Jensen: "neutrality is white supremacy" |
Quieting [of Pride in libraries] also happens more systematically. Numerous libraries have seen their right-wing boards craft policies related to affinity displays or programming. These policies target marginalized groups either intentionally, which we have seen in libraries where the far-right has simply taken over the library board and built the institution in their cult leader’s image, or they’ve been created under the guise of “neutrality.” But libraries aren’t neutral. Libraries have never been neutral, and libraries can never be neutral. They are unabashedly pro-library, which means being unabashedly pro-community and unabashedly pro-representation. Neutrality is bullsh[*]t. “Neutrality” is why far-right interests have run the train over libraries again and again and again. If libraries stand for nothing, they fall over easily again and again and again.
Neutrality is white supremacy. Until libraries understand that being political isn’t the same as being partisan, extreme partisan interests will declare the library as theirs and theirs alone.
....
At Columbia State Community College in Tennessee, a library’s LibGuide on LGBTQ+ terminology, flags, and organizations disappeared from the library’s website. It had been the library’s most-viewed guide, but the director heard from someone that they should remove it to “avoid any controversy.” The guide was not deleted, but it was unpublished. This is complying in advance, of course, and it’s also doing a tremendous disservice to an adult user audience. Who gets the safety of “neutrality?” Cishet white people.
....
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| Neutrality is white supremacy. |
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The first CRT tenet that we rely on, "racism as ordinary," is defined by Delgado and Stefancic as the idea that "racism is an ingrained feature of our landscape, it looks ordinary and natural to persons in the culture" (2017, 8-9). Because White Supremacy culture underlies the landscape of librarianship, and vocational awe and neutrality are arguably two of its most important mainstays, the assumptions, beliefs, and policies born from these values are seen as the norm rather than things to be challenged and ultimately transformed. Within this overarching tenet, we draw specifically on Alan Freeman's identification of a "perpetrator perspective" and a "victim perspective" in understanding White Supremacy, as well as Cheryl I. Harris's multifaceted approach to understanding whiteness as property. The second CRT tenet that we draw on to examine neutrality and vocational awe is "critique of liberalism," which pushes back against the idea that "equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations," yields an equitable social structure, and that "with the election of Barack Obama, we arrived at a postracial stage of social development" (Delgado and Stefancic 2017, 26). Specifically because the value of neutrality in libraries relies on these misconceptions, we italicize this term throughout the rest of this chapter to highlight the fallacy in the goals of neutrality-framed library work.
Due to a prevalent idea that "libraries are for all," there is a misconception that racial inequity does not affect libraries and requires no real intervention in libraries because people from all races, creeds, and walks of life are treated equally in the space. This idea is a central defense of neutrality; proponents of neutrality state that since we serve everyone, we must allow materials, ideas, and values from everyone. It also bolsters vocational awe, in that it forestalls meaningful critique of the field, particularly critique of its racial dynamics. As three People of Color, we have experienced on the micro and macro levels how librarianship weaponizes vocational awe and neutrality to uphold White Supremacy and further marginalizes communities of color. However, our very marginality allows a clearer view of the disconnect between the espoused values of librarianship and the reality of the field. We use this view to examine the current narratives of library work and, in a CRT tradition, to revise the history that has so long comforted the white majority of our profession (Delgado and Stefancic 2017, 25).
Many of CRT's tenets overlap, particularly to relate the following ideas: that White Supremacy is purposefully maintained over time and is not happenstance and that the dismantling of White Supremacy is poorly served by incrementalism and similar liberal methods of achieving equality. Incrementalism, as defined by Lindblom, is the method of change by which many small policy changes are enacted over time in order to create a larger broad-based policy change (1980). Incrementalism, as a method, will not be limited to public policy in this analysis but will also encompass the larger implicit and explicit cultural rules that define the field of librarianship.
Source: Leung, Sofia Y., and Jorge R. López-McKnight, eds. Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory. The MIT Press. The MIT Press, 2021. https://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2252069/book_9780262363204.pdf.
Within hours of last week’s Literary Activism link roundup post going live, a spokesperson from the NYPL’s communications department sent an email (to my personal email–something really unusual) expressing frustration that they were not asked for a comment and with “an urgent” request for a phone call.
....
I extended the offer to share what NYPL may wish to say in response to the carousel link. The spokesperson then responded with requests to take down the link, once again asking me for my phone number. I did not remove the link, though I did again offer to link to any public response they might give.
To be clear, we do not pull or censor our link roundups to allow individuals or entities to respond to information linked in these sources. Responses have been included in succeeding Literary Activism link roundups where appropriate.
At the center of any investigation into whiteness that uses the methodological tools of “Critical Race Theory is Cheryl I. Harris’s (1995) foundational work on whiteness as property and the “conscious selections regarding the structuring of social relations” (280). Harris’s profound insights into the workings of whiteness compel us to recognize that the construction of racial meaning has historically emerged—and continuously reemerges—as a structural formation co-constitutive with US nation building, the territorial expansion of American empire, and racial capitalist development. The goal of destroying White Supremacy, then, routes us on a path to destroying the property relation itself—that is, destroying the system of ownership and control that reproduces relations of domination. In this vein, Jennifer Brown, Nicholae Cline, and Marisa Méndez-Brady’s chapter, “Leaning on Our Labor: Whiteness and Hierarchies of Power in LIS Work,” asks us to think carefully about the political economy of library services—in particular, how the commodification of information, the bureaucratization of diversity efforts, and inequitable distribution of labor seamlessly function to enact changes that don’t actually change anything at all. This “stubborn resistance,” as they call it, is, indeed, both ordinary and extraordinary, impeding the actual work of dismantling systems of oppression. Such a recognition forces us to consider whether a liberatory LIS is even possible within the very system of racial capitalism.”
I have updated this to add in detail the openly Marxist and anti American statements of American Library Association librarians.
— Dan Kleinman @OccupyLibraries (@OccupyLibraries) July 20, 2026
These ALA librarians must be eliminated from any public jobs. Defund ALA is a minimum, first step. https://t.co/Tv3CbqUIkC
safelibraries.blogspot.com/2026/07/neutrality-in-libraries.html
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