Dreaming Revolutionary Futures: Critical Race’s Centrality to Ending White Supremacy

Abstract

Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods dangerously lacked a centering, and critique, of white supremacy, as a structure of domination; we see the continuation of that active avoidance, or a progress approach through liberal or multicultural frameworks that do not precisely identify roots of racialized oppression in critical librarianship currently. In this essay, we reject progress narratives depicting the profession as having arrived, or even moved further, to a critical space, paying particular close attention to the absence of white supremacy, not only in the text Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods but in critical library instruction. We then explore our teaching and learning experiences against, and through, white supremacy—while interrogating, and responding to critical library instruction—by drawing on critical race theory, emergent strategy, and cultural and race- centered pedagogies that offer humanizing and sustaining ways of understanding and being. Finally, we close by moving towards an urgent confrontation with white supremacy, carrying radical hope and imagining liberatory futures for ourselves, communities, libraries, and world.

Keywords

• critical race theory
• racism
• white supremacy
• library instruction
• identity
• race-cultural radical pedagogy