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.
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 (2nd ed., pp. 466-477). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
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