The newly formed Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Round Table will host a webinar on Friday, Sept. 15 at 1pm (Eastern).

Workforce diversity, workforce management, knowledge organization, and the roots and causes of institutional racism in U.S. libraries.

This talk examines three critical factors that structure and perpetuate institutional and systemic racism in US libraries: (1) the erasure of the reality of early workforce diversity in the building of the nation and its institutions; (2) the central role of chattel slavery in the origins and development of modern management theory and practice; and (3) the inherent biases of systems of library knowledge classification and organization that originated in the Jim Crow era of US history. This wide-ranging historical overview and analysis aims to expose how libraries embody systems of discrimination and perpetuate them through standard and routine practices of knowledge collection, organization, management, and dissemination. It does not offer a specific prescription for remediating these complex problems. Instead, it aims to make librarians aware of hidden or ignored dimensions and mechanisms of structural inequality in libraries and librarianship.