Local approaches for intersecting inequalities

I wanted to be sure to read Confronting Intersecting Inequalities[i] before this class ended, because one of the authors, Dr. Kivisto, was my undergraduate advisor in Sociology. Like other readings, both the amount of information and its really wide-ranging implications were a bit overwhelming. The authors (Hanson, Kivisto, and Hartung) begin by discussing both income inequality and wealth inequality before explaining that both are compounded by race and gender. They examine seven of the many issues that stem from and feed back into these inequalities, including quality of life, food and nutrition, housing, crime, environmental risk, education, and social capital.

One of the things that struck me in reading this piece was not the information itself, but the age of the information. However, I know most of the main points remain relevant, even if the numbers may have changed since the 1990s. This Washington Post article updates one segment of the data specific to the experiences of Black women. We can also see another piece of the article, environmental justice, highlighted in this recent video of Vann R. Newkirk II at The Atlantic talking about environmental racism.

By the end of the chapter, I really felt like I was drinking from a firehose. Not only do each of the seven issues fan out into multiple individual problems of their own, but it’s clear that you could keep drawing out the branches of a tree of inequality. It feels as though the only thing keeping this chapter at its current length, or any similar reading on a similar topic, is just the extent to which the authors want to detail the many, many outcomes of all of these systems and lack of correction.

While the reading touches on crime, I was less familiar with one tangential concern that could be drawn from a few different parts of this reading. This is the issue of what at least one organization, the Prison Policy Initiative, refers to as prison gerrymandering. This is just one result of the mass incarceration referred to in the Hanson reading. Essentially, it seems to boil down to the fact that the census counts prisoners in the district of their prison, which then determines that district’s representation at local and state levels. However, prisons are typically located in areas where the prison population does not reflect the local community’s population. In effect, this amplifies the votes of the people who live in the prison’s host community and dilutes other areas’ votes. (This is totally new to me, so I hope my quick read of their website is doing it justice.)

The two images below are from a report published by PPI titled The Racial Geography of Mass Incarceration.

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The misrepresentation in the prison system as a whole wasn’t news to me, but this concept is just one of many examples of what can feel like a rabbit hole of injustice. It’s hard to know where to point the efforts of information professionals, if only because there are so many wrongs to be righted. One could take any one of the seven issues these authors outline and find multiple opportunities for programming, collection development, reference work, and institutional policy development. Like many other issues, I think ultimately the way to tackle this is by examining the needs and gaps within the local community as well as finding opportunities for community partnerships.

One organization that could make an interesting library partner (or vice-versa) in the community I moved away from two years ago is called the QC Empowerment Network. The group is based on the model an Omaha-area organization, and their aim is to connect black community members in a number of ways. So far, it seems to have looked a lot like many areas’ professional or young professional networks, offering monthly socials and a black business expo. However, they have also partnered with local schools and done other community-based programming. Networks like these could provide opportunities for libraries to partner not only with a new community organization, but also to possibly reach out to neighborhoods they tend to be underserving. Community organizations with a specific focus likely see the local issues with a different lens than librarians do, making it all the more powerful if libraries join forces with them.

 

[i] Hanson, S., Kivisto, P., & Hartung, E. (2007). Confronting intersecting inequalities. In S. J. Ferguson (Ed., 2016), Race, gender, sexuality, and social class: Dimensions of inequality and identity (2^nd ed., pp. 466-477). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

“Recast”, not “reproduce”

This week I read the abridged article by Patricia Hill Collins titled It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation[i]. Although not terribly lengthy, it is so rich with concepts that I have been furiously scribbling notes, going on Google search tangents, and lecturing my boyfriend as I read. There are a lot of really important issues packed in, and I’m having trouble focusing. So I’m going to take it down to something so local, it’s laughably trivial compared to the many other topics this reading could spawn.

That thing is this:  I don’t want an engagement ring. In fact, I don’t want a proposal. My partner and I are planning to be married within a specific timeframe. However, we are not engaged. Why? Because it’s 2017, and people still absolutely cannot handle a 30-something woman who doesn’t want a diamond on her left ring finger. Cannot. Handle. But apparently, people also can’t handle a woman interviewing for a job with an engagement ring that’s too big.

My response to anyone that challenges us – and my response to my non-fiancé when I first introduced this idea to him – was a simple question:  Why? If someone can give me a good reason to get a ring, I’ll seriously consider it. But it’s been months of these conversations now, and no one has come up with anything that interests me (since I’m just not really a jewelry person to begin with). In fact, some of the reasons are flat out offensive and eventually boil down to, as Collins puts it, controlling a woman’s sexuality. [Disclaimer: If an engagement ring is your jam, though, no judgments here. It’s not right for us, but we’ll be blindly following plenty of other wedding traditions that others could just as easily pick apart.]

I also do not want to participate in the man-gagement ring non-trend that The Atlantic reported on a few years ago. Ditto the reverse proposal. I think the whole concept of a marriage proposal suggests a power dynamic that does not represent the way our relationship works or will ever work in the future. Simply trying to impose these things I’m not interested in on my partner seems counterproductive; as Collins states in her conclusion, people interested in progressing beyond the hierarchies she describes “might consider recasting intersectional understandings of family in ways that do not reproduce inequality” (303). Reversing gender roles in an oppressive power dynamic doesn’t make that power dynamic more acceptable.

Okay, you might be thinking, but what do these #firstworldproblems have to do with the LIS field? Plenty. Because if it’s this hard for people to think outside the box about a pretty insignificant material good, we have to be that much more aware of how the systems we use to serve patrons aren’t stuffed into that same, heteronormative box full of power dynamics based in race, gender, and sexuality. Does your software provide ways to tie family members together that aren’t based on gendered roles? How do you serve children living with aunts and uncles or grandparents? Children with unmarried parents who share custody and attend the same library? Children who will only ever be brought to a library by an unrelated adult in their life? What kind of independent access do kids have to your collection? Is your programming welcoming to families of all types – not just those in state-sanctioned or traditional relationships? What kinds of signals does the language you use in signage or paperwork send about the construction of a family? Is your library’s reach representative of all community members, or just certain neighborhoods or cohorts? Does your employee training include information about implicit biases so that professionals can more effectively interact with different patrons? If you’re in an academic library, are there ways you could help support students who are parents?

In short, are you serving not only the family in this video, but the ideals they describe? I’m not usually one for TED talks, but a line in that video struck a chord with me. Our guiding principle shouldn’t be to treat others as we’d want to be treated, but rather to treat them as they’d like to be treated. Even when we are trying to be inclusive, we might be performing the reverse proposal or the man-gagement ring equivalent of library activities – jamming new (to us) concepts of “family” into the old, familiar boxes. So, are you serving your patrons in the ways they want and need to be served?

 

[i] Collins, P. H. (1998). It’s all in the family: intersections of gender, race, and nation. In S. J. Ferguson (Ed., 2016), Race, gender, sexuality, and social class: Dimensions of inequality and identity (2^nd ed., pp. 439-442). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Facing mass incarceration head on

Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and the excerpt* based on it, describes the ways in which our criminal justice system has replaced overtly racist laws with a “system of racialized social control” (440) based in the skewed demographics of U.S. prison populations and the many rights we strip people of once they leave jail, prison, parole, or probation. The restrictions people face are very similar to those presented under a different excuse in the Jim Crow era, including disenfranchisement and difficulty in securing a job or housing. Because people of color and the poor are over-represented in the criminal justice system, their communities feel the weight of the criminal justice system disproportionately.

One of the difficulties in tackling this issue is knowing where to begin. There are issues with how people enter the system as well as the consequences when they leave. However, a couple of related campaigns have recently seen some victories — or at least some preliminary steps in the right direction.

The first of these is the #RaiseTheAgeNY campaign, which had the goal of raising the age at which people are tried for crimes as adults. In New York and North Carolina, 16- and 17-year-olds are automatically charged as adults despite the fact, as described by the campaign, that the cognitive development of adolescents is not yet complete. The stats compiled at raisetheageny.com include the fact that most of the crimes for which children were tried as adults were misdemeanors, and over 80% of 16- and 17-year-olds sentenced in New York are black or Latinx. Our criminal justice system is not well known for deterring recidivism, but the prospects for young people who enter the system as “adults” are very, very grim. Earlier this year, New York’s governor signed into law a change so that 16- and 17-year-olds will no longer be automatically tried as adults.

Another recent campaign raised funds to help bail black mothers out of jail leading up to Mother’s Day. They made an effective case in this video they released for what they called National Bail Out Day, and according to https://nomoremoneybail.org/, the coalition of organizations leading this campaign was able to bail out 100 women for Mother’s Day. As an article in The Root during the fundraising campaign noted, these were women who had not been convicted, but had been detained mostly for low-level crimes like loitering.  The author also notes that black women make up 44% of all women in jail despite making up just 12.8% of the total female population. After a successful Mama Bail Out Day, the coalition is now planning similar efforts for Father’s Day, Juneteenth, and Pride.

There is some danger in getting too sentimental about the ways libraries and other information professions can help with these issues. We might talk about beefing up after-school programming to keep teens productively busy, critical collection development as a way to show people they are valued in the culture, or programs for families to help with some of the burdens faced in poor communities and communities of color. These are all good goals. However, I’m really drawn to some of the more direct, tangible actions being taken.

Along the lines of Mama Bail Out Day, one local project that has caught my eye is the Storybook Project. Through this program, incarcerated parents and grandmothers can select one book per child per session. Trained volunteers record the parent reading the book, and then a CD of the recording is sent to the child along with a copy of the book. The program recognizes that incarceration not only places the convicted in a pretty vicious cycle, but it affects entire families. This is one small way to help families stay connected while encouraging good reading habits.

While this program isn’t run by a library, it doesn’t seem like a stretch for some libraries to be able to adapt the idea. There are many other ways libraries could consider partnering with incarcerated populations, as well as ways to help provide transitions once people leave the criminal justice system.

 

*Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow. In S. J. Ferguson (Ed., 2016), Race, gender, sexuality, and social class: Dimensions of inequality and identity (2nd ed., pp. 439-442). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Addressing sexual harassment

In a 2002 journal article, sociologist Beth A. Quinn* described an interview-based study of sexual harassment at work. Based on these interviews and other literature about sexual discrimination, Quinn concluded that “girl watching”, performed by heterosexual men in the workplace, served the purpose of allowing the men to continually construct their own masculine identities within the social structure. In order to do this, men needed to objectify the women, because an object doesn’t require empathy. Because of this objectification, the men were less likely than women to see certain behaviors as harassing. This leads to tension (at best) in the development and enforcing of sexual harassment policies in the workplace.

Many parts of this article reminded me of a Bustle post from about a year ago titled Why Won’t Men Leave Me Alone When I’m Trying to Read in Public? The author, Lindsay Merbaum, begins by describing a scene in which a man was incredulous that she would bring a book to a bar and read, alone. Although the comments eventually subsided, she expected them to pick up again when the man’s friend left the bar. Instead, the man just kept to himself and his phone. “Apparently my activities were only worth interrupting when he had an audience,” Merbaum noted. This aligns with Quinn’s findings that this type of behavior is performative and occurs within a group dynamic.

Merbaum continues to describe similar stories, both hers and other women’s. Merbaum asserts that, “something ugly happens when a solitary woman enters public space”. That something is men’s negative reaction when a woman is seen to be subverting the heteronormative gender roles that would not have her act as an autonomous individual in public. Quinn found something similar, as described in the section of her article titled, “The Problem with Getting Caught”. Here she explains that when the woman asserts herself in a harassing situation, whether it is just returning a gaze, speaking back, or choosing anything other than passivity, then suddenly the object has become a subject. This creates a negative response from men because “objects do not object”.

Is this reaction confined to the group dynamic that Quinn studies, though? My lived experience as a cisgender woman, and the increasing visibility of other women through hashtags such as #yesallwomen and the popular video 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman (and it’s many spinoffs and parodies) tells me that the group dynamic might explain some of these interactions, but does not entirely explain what is going on.

This is important in the library and information fields partly because it’s important in every field that employs people who identify as women. Institutions need to have thorough, well-reasoned, enforceable and enforced sexual harassment policies in place. This is true for coworker interactions, but is also important when a staff regularly interacts with a large group of people unregulated by employment policies, such as patrons. There is no shortage of stories of sexual harassment between coworkers, as well as librarians being made to feel uncomfortable by patrons’ comments or actions. Institutions also need to think about how they address patron-to-patron interactions, when appropriate.

This is being addressed in some areas. There was a #publibchat hosted by critlib about the sexual harassment of library workers last January. But the need seems greater than the response so far. Merbaum’s article relayed a story that I think a lot of librarians and other information professionals would relate to, which includes the line, “I confess that because of his age, I felt compelled to be polite to him.” Service professionals of all stripes, including librarians, widely shared Twitter user @charlubby’s creation at the bar where she works (posted at the end of this page, with some NSFW language). And the stories of particularly woman-identifying librarians being told to smile, often by male patrons, also abound. In a professional setting, we generally can’t take the #SmileForJoe route, so policy needs to be in place, ready to back us up.

 

*Quinn, B.A. (2002). The power and meaning of “girl watching”. In S. J. Ferguson (Ed., 2016), Race, gender, sexuality, and social class: Dimensions of inequality and identity (2nd ed., pp. 523-533). Los Angeles: CA, Sage.