Building Equity-Based Summers (BEBS) Podcast
In this monthly podcast we talk about topics that help library staff and communities build services that are equitable. Learn more about the project on our site: https://equitybasedsummers.org
Building Equity-Based Summers (BEBS) Podcast
Episode #12: Equitable Practices Require Acknowledging Intersectionality
Wondering how libraries can authentically serve their diverse communities? Join us as we delve into the ideas of intersectionality and its transformative power in creating equitable library services. Ivan Aquirre, President of the Reforma Inland Empire chapter, and Kym Powe, Children and Young Adult Consultant at the Connecticut State Library, join us as we talk about the importance of recognizing the multifaceted aspects of identity. Listen to our discussion on how libraries can move beyond rigid systems and embrace the fluidity of human identity.
Mentioned in this episode:
https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later
Building Equity-Based Summers is funded in part through the Institute of Museum and Library Services..
Hi everybody, welcome to our BEBS podcast Building Equity-Based Summers podcast. I'm Linda Braun and I'm one of the team who works on the Building Equity-Based Summers project in California and is part of our Institute of Museum and Library Services National Funding, and I'm here with some awesome people today to talk about intersectionality and I'm going to turn it over to my colleague and friend, lakeisha. Introduce yourself and then get us started, lakeisha.
Speaker 2:Thanks, linda. Hi everyone, I'm Lakeisha Kimbrough. I'm one of the team working on the building equity based summers work and really thinking a lot about how are we centering equity in everything we do, which brings us to one of the things that Linda and I have been talking a lot about, and we talk about in BEVS to some extent, is intersectionality. So, like Linda said, we'll be talking about that today, and joining us are two amazing folks, two of our favorite folks Ivan and Kim. Ivan and Kim, tell us who you are.
Speaker 3:Sure, I can kick that off. I'm Ivan or Ivan. If you're Spanish speaking, you could always call me Ivan. I'm the current president of the Reforma Inland Empire chapter. I am a branch manager for both the Calamason Cabazon Libraries, which fall under the Riverside County Library System, and I do a bunch of other stuff, but I'll pass it on to Kim.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm Kim Poe. I am the children and young adult consultant at the connecticut state library. We've been um beebs participants or bebs just we'll never figure that out um for uh, since uh, year one after it sort of rolled out of california, I also do a lot of random stuff and um most of it's probably on the internet so easily accessible.
Speaker 2:I love that. Thank you, Ivan and Kim, for joining Linda and I today, and I think we'll just kick off right Like we'll just get going. One of the reasons that Linda and I were like, oh, we should do a podcast, thinking about intersectionality and asking some questions and reflecting around how does intersectionality really show up in our work, don't really understand or haven't paused long enough to think about how the work of equity, the work of liberation is intersectional. And so we sometimes hear, oh, we're not really focused on that, we're focused on food justice, we're focused on disability justice, we're focused on, you know, just fill in the blank, right, and Linda and I will often kind of say, oh, we're curious how maybe some of those things intersect.
Speaker 2:What happens when they come together? Or you have, you're working with folks, you're bringing those margins to the center now, as Bell Hooks has invited us to do, right, what happens when we're talking about working with people in a holistic fashion? It means bringing all of who they are, which means all of the identities they hold, into a space, right? So, so, yeah, we just wanted to bring y'all together to maybe think this through what your experience has been, how you're supporting folks in your libraries in your areas to kind of hold libraries in your areas to kind of hold to hold working with. If we're bringing the margins to the center and if we're really doing true equity work, then we are wanting people to be their their whole self right.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, just wondering if you have thoughts about anything that I just shared so far, and then maybe we could even share a little bit about how Kimberly Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality what she says intersectionality is, and maybe that'll give us something to riff off of too, Linda, anything to add to that about why we thought intersectionality.
Speaker 1:The thing that comes to mind as you were talking about that, lakisha, is the way humans like to put things in boxes right, like, okay, we've got our disability box and we're just going to think about people who have a disability, or we've got our um lgbtqia box and we're just going to think about people who are in that box, right, and so it's a very common thing for humans, and perhaps Americans, to just think that way, and it takes. It's not easy to think about the person not just in a box. It's not easy to think about the person not just in a box, right, think about all the different parts of them that make them who they are. And in some ways, I think sometimes when we're doing working on equitable practices, we fall into the box because it is easy, right, and then I don't have to come up with some other idea, I don't have to learn more about someone or whatever, and so I think that's one of the struggles that we find, and it's systemic and it's cultural too, so that yeah.
Speaker 1:Ivan.
Speaker 2:I saw that you look like you're ready to share something. It makes me also wonder how often that means we maybe gravitate towards the social justice area that we're most comfortable with. I'm going to pause there because Ivan Sure.
Speaker 3:Well, I was just going to kind of build off of what Linda was saying in terms of categorizing, putting people in boxes. Categorizing putting people in boxes, I think in library work specifically, from my experience, it's very like it's almost ingrained in us to try to organize things. Dewey, decimal system, everything needs to be in a place. If it's not there, then it's wrong, and I think that's where a lot of people get a little off the path. It's kind of like, well, organization needs to be structured and it needs to be this stagnant thing. But I think really, organization needs to be fluid, and to do that you do need to recognize a lot of the things that come with intersectionality, right? So I think it's almost like you have to counterintuitively tell staff and tell people that are involved in library work that, hey, you know how we hammer in, the fact that there's a whole organization system here. People aren't that, and so maybe we need to get away from that type of thinking to move forward with some of the things that we want to accomplish within libraries, and I'll kind of stop there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, hand it off to someone else. What about you, kim? How are you feeling?
Speaker 4:so, just like I think, when I think about librarianship and sort of you're right, ivan, right Of like this book goes, and we do it even more now, like now that we're not, now, we've been doing it for a while but the big thing is genrefying, right, like I've genrefied the library. This book is a mystery, so it goes in the mystery section. It's like, yeah, but it's also a little bit of sci-fi, it's also romance, it's also this. But we come up with these reasons to kind of put these books, which we are very comfortable handling, into certain boxes and spaces to make our lives easier, right, to make it easier to just point to the historical fiction or point to the fantasy, to sort of help someone get what it is that we think they need, and that comes with its own caveats, issues and thoughts.
Speaker 4:And I think, when you tie people into that one thing, I think that we do in librarianship a lot, especially when we're coming at public libraries in school and academic right that those public-facing library positions, when we talk about sort of the, the social services and people services that are a part of that, I think something that we've been taught to keep in mind, not only in libraries.
Speaker 4:This is very much a people thing as well. It's like, at the end of the day, people are people and we're just serving people, but people are never just people um, ever. And the idea behind that was was was I see how we got there right? Of people, these are just people, we're just serving people, but people are their experiences economically, people are their experiences racially, people are their experiences right. So that makes it a bit more complicated and I think, similar to genrefying and Dewey Decimal and all that stuff, I think we are just conditioned to want to make something easy and simple with the items that we work with in the library and the people that we work with that come in as well, and then we wind up in weird places.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I absolutely love um organizational fluidity. Ivan and Kim, as you were saying, we're genrefying things, right? I immediately went yes, that's exact. The same thing is happening in books and other materials that we do classify and it's not just books, right, like we, as humans, classify things and then we gravitate toward the piece of the classification that fits our current need or we're most familiar with or we're most comfortable with, but, however, we tend to then ignore the wholeness of that particular thing or that person, that human and in some ways, you know, I think, kim, when you were sharing that, I was thinking but then we're making people invisible, right? Or we're not creating that, that brave space for people to truly show up. We're like, oh, you can be vulnerable here, you can be courageous here, but if I can only do that in one aspect of who I am, I don't know how brave or how vulnerable or how courageous I can truly be. So, oh, yeah, beautiful, I love that. Thank you all.
Speaker 2:Linda, I saw you, you're, you're kind of, I feel like you're going. You're like, hmm, there's some richness there. What, what do you have?
Speaker 1:I was taking notes so that I wouldn't forget, because I know that I do that. So a few things came to mind. I love I want to do something with that phrase organizational fluidity. I just think we have to do that. But also, as you were, everybody was talking I realized and you know, this is my thing is you cannot Get out of the box with library services if you don't have relationships with people, because you won't know what someone's intersections are right or what whatever, unless you know them. And so that's the other thing that's going on, because you know, we talk all the time about building relationships and transformational relationships instead of transactional relationships, and so if we don't have those, we're just going to keep classifying everyone and being in the exact same place, and so, again, that's what takes time. Right, you can't just look at someone and figure it out, and I've made so many mistakes by looking at someone and making an assumption that it was incorrect.
Speaker 1:Yeah it's really not good, it's really not good.
Speaker 2:And, linda, I think, as you're saying, that we do as humans, we will ascribe intersections to people, right? So my ascribed intersections may not be my avowed intersection, those things that are placed on me, things that people think about me based on their first seeing me or the first thing when they hear me speak, or that kind of thing. It's what other people put on us based on a whole lot of things. Right, we won't go into all those things. And then avowed is who I say I am right, who I say I am based on my experiences, based on maybe even some internalization of healthy and unhealthy messages, but all the things. And so I think that that often can happen too, that we'll look at someone or people, look at us and like, assume gender, assume racialized identity, assume ability level, assume a bunch of things, and then maybe work with us or interact with us based on how they think we identify or their assumed intersections for us, right? So, ooh, linda, that yeah, yeah, that just made me think, too, of how we often do that and I want to share. I don't know how many of our listeners know the name, kimberly Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality, and it actually Kimberly Crenshaw's background is in law, and so the coining of the term for her was actually more about trying to show how legal decisions and things in the law often don't hold the wholeness of people the wholeness of people. And she has a paper that she wrote some time back and she analyzed three different legal decisions and was trying to show yeah, okay, but we can't say that in one case there were Black women who had brought suit against their employer and the judge ruled against them and said well, they're women and they hire women, and they were trying to argue well, we have to take into account the racialized experience of these women at this particular place. And so that led her to think about what happens when we think about the fullness of who a person is. And since then we know that the term has really entered mainstream right, and folks think about it. And Kimberly Crenshaw at I think it was a meeting for National Association of Independent Schools we can look that up later, linda, I actually have a link, I'll put it in there.
Speaker 2:But Kimberly Crenshaw says that intersectionality is just a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality and disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and they create obstacles that are often not understood within conventional ways of thinking about anti-racism or feminism or whatever social justice advocacy structures we have. It's a prism for understanding certain kinds of problems and I think we've kind of grown that into helping us understand that an elder who is an elder Korean multi-language English speaker is going to have a very different experience than a young, second or third generation Korean multi-language English speaker. Right, and that's just a couple of intersections, that's not all the intersections of who those people might be. And so we've also just holding that and also holding in that, helping us hold the complexities of being human right, so understanding that we all are sometimes operating from places of quote unquote privilege or quote unquote power and simultaneously are part, are experiencing oppression. And what do we do with that?
Speaker 2:When I have to, as a human, then begin to say oh, oh, what's that mean? In this particular situation, I'm perceived as holding or having power and may also not be heard because of something somebody has ascribed to who I am, based on what they see. So just really interesting. I think I'm going to shush Maybe folks have something to say about that. Folks have something to say about that, but I'm curious. I am curious what that means for how we then think about how we relate to our communities, how we listen to the communities, how we, if we hold those things, how might we begin to truly engage with ourselves right, like what does exploring intersectionality ask us to do for ourselves, so that we can then do that for communities and truly bring the margins to the center?
Speaker 3:That well, you brought up a lot of good points and it's like oh, whoa, which? Where do I, where can I jump off of? But I think something that was brought up was how we assign intersectionality or intersectional identities to people, and the funny thing is we also do the well in doing that. Right, we had an Asian American kind of book display going. It wasn't for Heritage Month, it was literally just hey, here's this cool little part of our collection. We want to bring it to attention in this community. Blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 3:Someone then approached the display and was like are there even any Asian people here? Like are there any? Do they even live here? Like why are we having this here? And that's where the whole intersectionality thing is. It's like well, no, your idea of what you think is and isn't in a community is not the actual reflection of that community. And you're kind of erasing like somebody's whole experience, their whole heritage, their history, whatever it is, because different people can intersect with an identity in different ways. Um, and yeah, that was just kind of one of my thoughts while you were preaching. Going it was.
Speaker 4:It was amazing it's kind of rambling there I think you just had a lot to say and that's that's great. But also I'm like, can I write something? Will I remember all this? And it's time for me to say anything. We're gonna find out, um, and, and I think I, I think I kind of thought of this when linda was talking, but I think maybe it ties into some of what you're saying.
Speaker 4:Like youisha, I don't know, let's see what comes out of my mouth, but just sort of taking all that in and doing a lot of listening, I think something that comes to my mind when I think about intersectionality, that bravery piece that we brought up, and some of that bravery sort of meeting, really a relationship foundation. Um, I know, you know, as someone who sits in just so so many sits across so many intersections, um, in a field that it's not always too, it's not always easy to sort of be in an estate that it's not always easy to kind of be in, when I think about that relationship piece, I think absolutely we need relationships in order to have a foundation where someone can express bravery. What I also think is there is an educational and knowledge-based piece that is also needed at the same time, if not before. So you know. I know that there are people that I might have really strong relationships with but still might hold bits and pieces of myself from right, even though we have a strong foundation, because they might be lacking or I might know that they're lacking in education around something else, right, and I think that education piece is equally important and perhaps even needs to come before we begin to embark on the journey of building relationships with people who have different experiences from us, so that we walk into, we begin the journey to build these relationships with as much knowledge as we possibly could have built. Right, um, so um, in my community, the community that I live in and at one point worked in, there are a lot of um, english as a second language speakers.
Speaker 4:There are a lot of people who've immigrated from from other countries, for whatever reason, right, I don't know the reason, it's none of my business, but I would hear and see interactions where people library workers made assumptions about these folks who were here in our community, assuming that they must be here in this community because they were fleeing from some war-turned country or some abusive situation or some something, because they don't actually know anything about this group of people, right, and haven't taken the time to learn anything about this group of people. You sort of take little bits of knowledge that you might have gleaned from like a TikTok or like a news station or like something we might have learned in history class, you know, 20, 30, some odd years ago. And now, as I think you might've mentioned Lakeisha, we are. We are granting this an intersectionality or an idea to someone that did not ask for it and it might not belong to them. And I think a lot of that can come from a space of I'm going to and I'm going to say the. I'm going to say the word with the true definition of the word, but ignorance so not the term ignorance in the sense that it might be used to insult someone, but from this space of. This is just a thing that you don't know. You don't know, you know right, there's a whole lot of stuff that I don't know, the. I don't know how to fix my shower head that's spraying water all over the place. Could I Google it? Maybe, have I? No, so right now I still don't know how to fix it.
Speaker 4:And just sort of tying into that, I think, some people who do sit in some marginalized identities. I have this conversation. When I talk about teens a lot, the teens can see, feel and vibe what a person does or does not know and the assumptions that they are and are not making about them, and that's the same for marginalized identities. There might even be people who are sort of giving you an opening to say is this, is this?
Speaker 4:Let's say is, is, can I, can I? Maybe? Um, but if the person on the receiving end doesn't have the sort of knowledge and education based to sort of have an understanding of what's going on, despite what type of relationship someone might have with that person, they still might not be comfortable enough at that moment to sort of share their vulnerabilities or bravery. Um, which is just, it's just another way of work. The thing that I love so much about like knowledge and information is that you know, unlike, unlike you know when, when we all started school. So much knowledge is at your fingertips. And what's even better for us as library professionals is we have the training to be able to identify credible information from something you might want to dig a little deeper into right Opinion pieces, versus something that's factually based and informationally based, and I think we just have to do some of that groundwork so that we can ultimately get to the space that we want to be with the community members that we serve.
Speaker 2:Well, Kim, I really love and appreciate all that you have both just shared there. And, Kim, I'm thinking about the ways that maybe we sometimes might engage in some of that education acquiring or that knowledge acquiring and then forget that just because we know that doesn't mean that everyone has had a similar experience or that that they've interpreted that thing the same way. Right, like so it's. It's an invitation to remember. Yes, I need to do my own homework and my own work and then not generalize it and spread it across this whole group. We're asking people to work y'all, oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think what I love too is that once they do the work right, is it the duty of the privileged to then remove their own power right or share their power Absolutely Like okay, great, you did the work. Great, you know you have something up on someone else, but what are you going to do with that knowledge, right?
Speaker 2:Well, ivan, is that part of the work? I would argue it is that part of the work, then, is saying, now that I'm really aware of this and have some understanding, I have to figure out how to share this, how to dismantle this and reconstruct something that is more equitable and more towards liberation, that reading an article, watching a TikTok, watching an Instagram reel, crying and using a box of tissues is not the work right. It's helpful to get us going for the work. Maybe it's helping to launch or sustain our work. And I know, yes, crying y'all please do not get me wrong Crying is healing, right, like we sometimes do need to cry.
Speaker 2:And we know scientifically that tears of joy are different than tears, of sadness, are different than tears, you know. So, we know that and we know that that is one of the means by which we heal. So I'm not minimizing that, I'm not minimizing learning through the means of TikTok or Instagram or, you know, watching a YouTube video, but those things in and of themselves are not the work right. And so, yeah, ivan, I think that's really beautiful to consider and remember is when we do acknowledge the places where we have been assigned or given privilege or power based on a particular identity or aspect of our identity? If, how is that not supporting the liberation of all? If I'm not thinking about how to use that in a way ourselves again so that we can do it for others?
Speaker 2:Because if we're not doing that work for ourselves and I think that's one of the things that's that's really hard or challenging is we often look outward right. It's like, okay, we can fix everything outward, but if we're not doing the work on ourselves, nothing's really gonna shift, because we're still gonna be operating from those same mindsets and those same perhaps unhealed wounds, those same kind of places. Ivan, linda, kim, you are all so beautifully amazing. Just thank you for the time and the questions and wondering and being curious. This has been really beautiful.
