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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2022
Advisory: this chapter contains an offensive term to identify a historical book title.
In a 1930s child psychology study in the USA, White children were tested on their perceptions of ‘race’ by being shown a picture of a library. After glancing at it they had to answer a number of questions, among them: ‘what was the Negro doing?’ In fact, there were no Black people in the picture at all, but the answers all ran in a similar vein: ‘He is busy scrubbing the floor’, ‘He is dusting the bookcases’. As Pieterse points out, no child said ‘he is reading a book’ (Pieterse, 1992, 11).
Introduction
Our concern in this chapter is to develop our thinking through our personal history of racialisation, learning and working in White educational spaces in order to explore the call to decolonise academic libraries. Toni Morrison posits that higher education is an ‘unabashedly theological and consciously value-ridden and value-seeking moral project’ (cited in Law, Phillips and Turney, 2004, 7). Much of Western archival methodology is embedded in colonialism and imperialism with a cultural bias towards Eurocentricity, Christian values and the Enlightenment, and therefore libraries are not inherently neutral spaces. We argue that libraries, as collectors and producers of White heteropatriarchal knowledge, are culpable in legitimising and reproducing colonialist and racist ideologies. As Nina de Jesus (2014) suggests,
realizing the emancipatory potential of the library as institution would require breaking and disrupting the system of intellectual property and other aspects of capitalism, especially the publishing industry. It would require disrupting the empire's mechanisms for creating ‘knowledge’ by being more than a repository for imperial knowledge products. It would require supporting Indigenous resistance to the settler state and working towards dismantling anti-Blackness.
(de Jesus, 2014)As Black educators in a post-1992 London institution (University of East London, UEL) we are committed to the decoloniality of education and the dismantling of institutional Whiteness. In the same way that there have been calls to decolonise the university curriculum, the university library must be considered along the same lines. It is not appropriate to attempt to decolonise one part of an institution but leave all others steeped in Whiteness.
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