I presented at my state’s annual library conference recently with two amazing colleagues, Becky Spratford and Alea Perez. The title of our session was The Call is Coming From Inside the House: How White Librarianship Protects Itself and Hinders Belonging. Alea initiated the idea and contacted me and Becky, and I really appreciate that she thought of me for this opportunity. Collaborating with two fierce, unapologetic folks like them was invigorating.
You can see the slide deck here; there’s a great list of resources at the end.
Attending this conference was emotionally difficult for me. In 2024 I left full-time library work following a fraught experience in a workplace that had left me feeling like I no longer wanted to exist. I’ve worked in many different types of libraries, from massive, well-funded organizations to much smaller and less-resourced ones. One common thread, though, was how dysfunctional and full of toxicity each one was.
There’s not time enough (nor emotional capacity) for me to recount every single workplace I’ve experienced and how they expressed their dysfunction. I’ve documented a lot of it on this blog and I’ll collect those posts for you so you can read them at your leisure. But I will tell you that for the longest time I thought I was the problem. And, for my managers and administrators, I was. But that’s their problem, not mine.
Going to a professional conference when you’ve worked in a field for long enough, and at a variety of organizations, can feel like a hellish version of “This is your life!” where they’ve pulled together people you remember fondly along with people who treated you so badly you felt suicidal in equal measure, and it’s just a luck of the draw which type of person you’ll run into in the coffee line or exiting the bathroom.
Because I have no fucks left to give and am observant, I was able to mostly avoid the latter type of person, except for a couple of choice run-ins. I no longer have any compunction about seeing a face and turning right back around and walking away. Life’s too short and my large heart is too fragile and precious to bother with that any more.
Conferences used to be a type of professional development summer camp, where you’d learn and get excited about your work afresh and get to see people you knew and liked and admired and bask in their presence. Now all I can think of is how embarrassing it is that we keep dancing around the issues and problems of our profession and keep asking the same questions and giving the same ineffectual answers.
The theme of the conference also set a bad tone for me from the start: You Belong Here. I laugh so I won’t cry again. I’ve never belonged in any library I’ve ever worked in. I’ve never really felt like I belonged anywhere.
I didn’t even belong in my own family, thanks to my father’s abusive tactic of separating us from our extended family for most of my young life. Things on that front have improved over the years, but you never regain that lost time. You can’t force an intimacy that should have bloomed over decades to suddenly flower long after the field’s been sown with salt. Still, there are some tender tendrils to nurture, and that’s going to have to be enough.
In school I was the farm kid bussed into town, the poor white trash that lived next to the most prosperous farmer in town who grew crops for huge corporations; in college I was a first generation student who had no idea what I was doing and had received such a sub par education to that point that my first Freshman English assignment came back to me covered in blood red ink—I’d never been properly taught how to write a paper and had to learn it with a quickness so I wouldn’t fail.
By the time I ended up working in libraries I’d learned how to pretty effectively pretend that I fit in. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was doing more than pretending—I was masking. In 2022 I was finally diagnosed with ADHD, adding that diagnosis to my previous ones of complex PTSD, anxiety, and depression. But I never felt comfortable, and I quickly learned that if I brought my whole, authentic self to work, things would inevitably turn bad.
Growing up poor instead of middle class was one of the first things I noticed that set me apart from my colleagues. In so many roles I had to push against the expectation that I would pay for work items—supplies, travel, etc—and get reimbursed. I can’t afford that. Why am I paying to do work that you’re paying for? One of the most embarrassing situations was when I had to tell a high level administrator—a white man who was making six figures—that I was completely and utterly unable to shoulder the expense of paying for conference hotel and travel and getting reimbursed weeks to months later. Why couldn’t the library pay for these costs instead? Why was I essentially floating a loan to a library with a budget in the multimillions? After hemming and hawing and having many important meetings, I was told that I would be granted a one-time exception and the library would pay for those costs and not make me wait for reimbursement. I was supposed to be grateful. I was pissed. (This man also told me that intergovernmental agreements were illegal, so totally earning that paycheck.)
Whether it was growing up in poverty, surviving abuse, or the justice sensitivity, I’ve never been able to stand by and stay silent in the face of injustice or malice, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem to others. Unsurprisingly, the past decade in this country has been excruciating to live through, and the more I’ve learned about the injustices of the past that I was never taught in school, the cognitive dissonance has become harder and harder to bear.
The only relief comes when I turn the valve and release some of the pressure on my heart and mind, and that release involves speaking up and using my voice.
The trouble is, when you finally speak up and point out problems, then those with power are called out and will have to do something to solve those problems. And for whatever reason, a lot of people in library leadership don’t want to solve problems. They don’t want systemic issues uncovered. They don’t want to face the truth that they are often bereft of moral and ethical courage. They don’t want to acknowledge that they went into leadership for selfish reasons—to gain control and power and have the authority to wield it over those who are less powerful.
You know what’s always an easier problem to solve? The one who speaks up. It’s way easier to write up the employee who points out that the Adult Services Manager seems to dislike teens and actively doesn’t want to serve them appropriately than it is to deal with that manager who has proven, over decades, to be stubborn and unpleasant when his authority is questioned. It’s easier to subjugate the lower level female employee who brings up the real problem than it is to do the hard work of rehabbing a white male manager—even though working on this manager would be the best thing for the teens in the community. Because who gives a shit about teens, right? Making their stupid TikToks and being obnoxious and loud—why do they need a space in the library to be themselves and feel welcome? Why would we allocate staff and resources to babysitting hoodlums?
I give a shit. I give all the shits. Teens act out because life is hard. They’re going through one of the hardest stages of life during one of the most fucked up periods of history ever and they deserve care and concern and space in their library.
But it’s easier to tell me to shut up, because even though I actively fight against behaving the way that nice white lady librarians act, I was still raised and socialized as a woman and that conditioning is hard to fight against, and I’ve learned over time that people like me can only push so hard. If I were a man, it would be a different story. But I’m not, and so when I spoke up about how we were treating teens or LGBTQ staff or any other marginalized group, I’d get nods and murmurs, oh thank you for bringing that up, hmm, we should think about that—but after the meetings were over, the energy was not spent on addressing the issues I’d raised, but on how to placate me enough to get me to shut-up.
While I’ve never belonged, I’ve often proven valuable enough that I would be placated for a while, but after enough time seeing that nothing was really changing, I’d continue speaking up, and leadership would finally reach a breaking point where my skill, talent, and experience just wasn’t enough to outweigh my incessant demands that people be better and do better.
I know that you’ve worked with someone like me. I know that you and other staff quickly learned that I would say the thing, and so you’d encourage me, but you’d never add your own voice. You allowed me to do the work, take hit after hit, and while privately you’d let me know you agreed, that you appreciated me speaking up, you never joined me. You never let it be known that you agreed with me, that you’d noticed the same things, that you also wanted problems to be solved, not just ignored.
And then one day I was gone, and you felt the loss. You heard the silence. You felt the weight begin to press down, since no one was there anymore to turn the valve and release at least some of the pressure.
This is the experience of someone in libraries with a lot of privilege. I’m white. I’ve scrabbled my way up to middle class. My queerness and my disabilities are invisible to most. I should fit in with the nice white lady librarians who make up over 80% of the profession.
But I don’t.
Because of the ADHD (or whatever else, not wanting to waste time?), I need to communicate clearly and be communicated with clearly. But white (Midwestern) women especially loathe direct conversations. It’s not “nice.” Fuck nice. You’re indirect because you’re afraid, insecure, and often know that you’re in the wrong.
“Indirect communication is not “nice.” It’s ineffective. Notice that leaders most often communicate indirectly in difficult situations. In fact, their tendency to communicate indirectly, hedge, use verbal crutches, second guess themselves, and talk way longer than they need to, increases linearly with the degree of difficulty they perceive that the receiver will have receiving the communication. […]
Indirect communication doesn’t come from a place of generosity or kindheartedness, as most indirect communicators tell themselves. Indirect communication is a symptom of unexamined fear on the part of the speaker […].
Indirect communication comes from a person not trusting themselves or their ideas. It is a way to prioritize maintaining a connection with another person, however shallow or false, over actually communicating what’s true for them and risking the other person’s disapproval.
At its core, indirect communication is a symptom of a (usually unexplored) insecurity that one will be rejected.”
Read that article. That article says so many things I’ve been saying and struggling with for years.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in meetings with managers, supervisors, directors, etc, and I’ve listened to them talk around and around an issue, and I could tell they thought they’d really accomplished something when they’d finished. And they had: they’d done a great job at leaving me confused about what they actually wanted from me and what the hell I was supposed to do going forward.
“You might be an indirect communicator. And the honest truth is, for most people, that’s probably fine. Unless you’re leading an organization, in which case you are probably already aware of the tremendous cost of communicating indirectly, because your entire organization is likely ripe with passive aggressiveness, unmet expectations, and frustration. After all, the psychology of the leader is the psychology of the organization.”
Every library I’ve ever worked in had issues with communication. This was the common thread. One library I worked at was investigating getting something completely innocuous—some kind of software, I think?—and they felt the need to give it a codename. A codename. It’s a library, bud, not a fucking James Bond movie.
Here’s the thing: if you can’t talk to your staff openly about a new piece of software, how are you ever going to talk about:
- Racism
- Transphobia
- Censorship
- Bomb threats
- The first amendment and intellectual freedom
- Anti-Blackness
- The Creamy, Curdled Whiteness of Librarianship
- Pay inequality
- Why so many (incompetent, laughable) men hold top roles in an overwhelmingly female profession
- People being kidnapped off of the street by secret police
- How no one gives a fuck anymore about a mass disabling event
These are all real issues in libraries and the world today, issues that have been ebbing and flowing for decades, and we have to talk about them. Because you know what? Libraries and librarians exist in the world and that world impacts them personally and professionally every fucking day.
But so many library leaders actively or unconsciously (I’m not sure which one is worse) decide to ignore all that shit and instead focus on their employees who speak up and make their insecure asses uncomfortable, and try to get them to shut up. Oh, sorry, I mean, improve their performance.
Because it’s all a performance. No matter how many times they spout the empty platitudes in meetings or emails from HR, no library employer wants you to bring your whole, messy, authentic self to work, no matter how much that messy self makes you a good librarian who can effectively serve your patrons with compassion and grace. Because it reminds them of how weak, timid, insecure, and ineffective they are. They want you to perform the role of good little worker, who never needs to go the bathroom to cry because of the cruelty in the world, who doesn’t mask anymore because it makes you look “unapproachable”, who does what they’re told but who also comes up with creative ideas—but not too creative, you’ll make your boss feel bad!
Libraries are not for everyone. It would be nice if they were.
I must repeat it: I have an immense amount of privilege when it comes to libraries. I’m white, cis, straight presenting, with disabilities that I can hide (but no longer want to because that takes up SO MUCH FUCKING ENERGY that I want to use other ways). I should be able to succeed. I should be able to get by.
If I can’t move safely through libraries, what hope is there for Black librarians? Openly queer librarians? Anyone who is further away from the white middle class nice lady ideal? White librarians should be ashamed every fucking day that there is a library Green Book to help BIPOC library workers avoid the worst libraries for people of color:
“The name “Green Book for Libraries” is a riff off of and homage to the Negro Motorist Greenbook, published by Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966 as a guide for Black travelers seeking safe and welcoming accommodations in Jim Crow America. Our version of the Green Book for Libraries has a similar aim—to help identify those workplaces in LIS that provide safe and welcoming environments where BIPOC can thrive.”
I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that they’re aren’t a hell of a lot of libraries that fulfill that mission.
If you’ve read this far, I have to assume that you want to do something. You want to do better. That’s all we can do.
Here’s a simple way to do better: speak up.
You can start by echoing the voice of a braver person. Say “I agree.” Then move to being the first to speak. Start finding the other voices that need boosting. Speak together. Unionize.
Libraries should be for everyone. And I believe they can be. But not until we learn to talk about the hard things, heal the long time wounds, and resolve to move forward, together.
And remember: libraries aren’t neutral. Neutral is bullshit.
Hi, Miss Julie 
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