On the whole week three's readings were about perception: As has been a complaint about library literature for quite some time, these cross-disciplinary examinations of gender and race were often couched in technical and administrative contexts that, while perhaps intellectually accessible to the general public and contributing to the cross pollination of LIS with other disciplines, have a rightful place in professional discourse.
The Radford piece about the Parker Posey movie Party Girl was an excellent framework to consider public perceptions and (stereo)typing with a limited theorist vocabulary, the Musmann article on racial library history pairs nicely with the Pawley theory-heavy article about the invisible benefits and assumptions of whites and the underlying mission and attitude of multicultural rather than its physiology.
Several times I was reminded of a conversation (ok, argument) I had with a friend's father whom I had just met. Whenever I repeat this story I must insist that I'm not creating a straw man out of him and that these paraphrases are 100% accurate because it is too implicitly classist and racist to believe: All human beings in this country, regardless of the conditions they were born into, have an equal chance to succeed and make a fortune. I probed deeper throughout our dinner as his wife and daughter gently tried to steer the conversation away from this subject but I sooo wanted to convince him he was wrong. I likened his position to social Darwinism--something I thought even the most conservative Republicans wouldn't dare admit to believing. Twins separated at birth, one placed in a wealthy family and one placed in a poor one, will achieve the same level of success? Apparently yes. So a smarter person in Ozarks or the Hood will achieve more than a mediocre person with family connections and collegiate legacies? Apparently yes. Mind boggling.
I am half black with a father and grandfather who come from a long line of Uncle Tom's (if you're mean about it) and have rarely felt my race. With few exceptions I don't fit black personality stereotypes and am often annoyed by ghetto behaviors from my all-black brethren but to pretend differences do not exist, as some would have us do, consigns us to a perpetual cycle of ignorance. Is it racist to speculate that the reason there are so many black men with fat white woman is because they're extroverted and hit on more women than timid white males and these women are unaccustomed to attention? Probably--but refusing to even consider more pertinent questions about race and professional disciplines is de facto prior restraint on knowledge.
Some of the scholarship behind those who deny the Holocaust, that is the systematic slaughter of many millions for genetic/social conditions, is devoted to people who delved deeper into the numbers and believe the tallies of those willfully killed might be one or two million lower. One foreign scholar visiting Austria was jailed for a year not because he said the Holocaust didn't happen but because he questioned the number of millions and whether the Nazis would have used precious fuel oil to burn Jews. That historian is lumped together with people who claim it never happened, that all the deaths were from unfortunate food and medical shortages, or that Jews had swimming pools, etc.
As an aspiring archivist with a BA in history I found the historical articles especially useful and informative. I particularly enjoyed it when these two interests merged in reflections on the historical record's gap and efforts to glean information. One of my classes readings from last week claimed "records are never innocent" since the influence of the creator always exists and actions committed usually allow conjecture for actions omitted. Implicit assumptions about race from a moderate librarian attempting to maintain segregation say as much as a Klan diatribe and give us a well rounded picture of where librarians have come from and how we may better ourselves. Intellectual completeness is essential to the profession but the perception of stereotypes shouldn't be discouraged unless they inhibit other goals like access or community service. For all the shushing and meticulous behavior of librarians in the media is really an acknowledgment that they're there to ensure equal access to the information civilization produces and that includes the often routine, mundane tasks for the benefit of society.
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