Ohio University Libraries offers this guide to our campus and local community as we grieve with the rest of the nation and world over the brutal killings of Casey Goodson Jr., George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the countless other Black people murdered in this country. We stand in solidarity with those who are protesting police brutality, racism, and white supremacy. Ohio University Libraries believes and will always affirm that Black Lives Matter.
Racism has no place on our campus or in our communities, but this guide is offered a vehicle for understanding and grappling with the legacy of colonialism and white supremacy in our country, in higher education, within our academic disciplines. We hope to provide resources for those at all stages of their journey towards becoming an anti-racist.
It's important to note that here at the Libraries we have work to do as well. Historically libraries have been spaces where the epistemological underpinnings of whiteness and white supremacy have been produced, preserved, and disseminated, thus producing and reproducing power relations within our settler colonialist society. As a profession, we are predominantly white, middle class, female, and Ohio University Libraries is no exception. We value the diversity of our community and strive toward empowering and connecting every single one of our users, and we acknowledge that dismantling and reimagining these structures is and must be a collaborative effort with our community.
This guide is an action that we can take for now, but our anti-racist work is not a box to be checked or a single goal to be reached, but a continuous, iterative process of rooting out racism from within our institutional, organizational, and cultural systems.
For more information, please refer to the Libraries Commitment to Social Justice. You can also use this form to recommend resources for this guide.
Read the OHIO Diversity and Inclusion statement on the killing of Casey Goodson Jr.
Many thanks to University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, University of Oregon Libraries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago John M. Flaxman Library, and The Ohio State University Libraries, whose guides were consulted over the course of this one's creation.