by Peter Langella, December 2022

It's the first day of class in Social Justice Think Tank, one of the electives I teach as a librarian at a large public high school in Vermont. I'm standing in front of the room and there's an autobiographical slideshow on the screen to my left. I tell the students that I'm originally from Manchester, New Hampshire, a blue-collar former mill city that was once one of the largest textiles production centers in the world. I tell them about how my Irish immigrant ancestors on my mother's side worked in the mills and pulled our family up a few rungs on the social ladder with perseverance, ingenuity, and sweat. I tell them about how my entire childhood was filled with narratives about rugged individualism and meritocracy. I really sell it. I try to make them feel it. And then: I come clean and tell them that it was mostly mythology.

My Irish ancestors did work in the mills, and I'm sure they worked harder than I can know, but the whole truth is much more complicated. The fact is that my ancestors on my father's mother's side had been in North America since the 1640s. One of those ancestors is famous (I say infamous) for killing the Wabanaki leader, Polin, in 1756 in what is now Maine after Polin advocated that Wabanaki fishing access to the Presumpscot River, which had been dammed for mills by the settler colonists, be restored. Going further, the mills in Manchester weren't self-sufficient. It wasn't like they were weaving materials from local sheep farms. No, they were working with cotton—cotton picked by enslaved Black people on southern plantations. After slavery was abolished, it was the same cotton, picked then by exploited sharecroppers who were mostly Black and newly freed. My father's father worked for Sealtest Ice Cream, one of the organizations that Martin Luther King Jr. advocated boycotting for racist hiring practices. I went to a private high school founded by and named after William Dummer, a colonial-era royal Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, and I had no idea until I was an adult that Dummer was the one who first sent the settler colonists, like my ancestor, to what is now Maine by saying, "You are to take, intercept, kill & destroy the Indian Enemy in all Places where they may be found" (Trask 1901, 39).

These links between the past and the present are essential. As Queen's University gender studies professor Scott L. Morgensen has said, "Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. This means that settler colonialism is not something that happened in history. It is an ongoing and ever-changing structure that defines everything in settler states…" (Love 2019, 134). I'm a white, able-bodied, neurotypical, cisgender man. Because of these identities and others, and because of many of the embedded structures and norms of society, I have a great deal of privilege and social capital, both in my personal life and in my position as an educator and librarian, which I take very seriously. I must help my students engage with the true history of the United States, including its origin based on stolen land, Indigenous genocide, economic gain on the backs of enslaved people, and the codifying of white supremacy and institutional patriarchy into its founding documents.

From there, it's my job to ensure the "curriculum emphasizes the varied, powerful and creative ways that people have resisted oppression and built justice… careful to offer students models of action, examples of people just like them who have tried to change the world and sometimes succeeded" (Wolfe-Rocca & Nold 2022). As Dr. Judi Moreillon states in Core Values in School Librarianship: Responding with Commitment and Courage, "Our core values in librarianship [equity, diversity, inclusion, and intellectual freedom] are who we are and are evidenced in what we do. They are our source of strength and power. When we remain true to our values, we can respond more effectively in tough conversations and difficult situations" (2021, xi).

I only feel prepared to do this—to attempt to live out these core values and work with students to reconcile with our individual and collective pasts in order to build a better future—because I've committed to engaging with the continuum that is identity work myself. If you're looking to begin this journey, or to recommit or regroup, I suggest using Learning for Justice's Social Justice Standards (2018). The standards are grouped into four domains: Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action. Even though the Identity standards are geared toward students, they provide invaluable language to help us prepare ourselves to be more self-reflective, inclusive, brave. I'm going to review the five Identity Anchor Standards (Learning for Justice 2018, 5), comment on some of my reflections and actions, and offer questions and/or suggestions for how you might use them in your own identity work.

"1. Students will develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society."

For me, this relates to the power and privilege that comes with many of my identities, especially the intersections of white cismaleness. I want to consistently model that I am a pacifist, that I am able to share credit and airtime with others, that I'm committed to amplifying community members from historically marginalized and oppressed groups, that I'm a compassionate caregiver as a parent for my child, that I ask questions and try not to make assumptions.

Which narratives and norms related to one or more of your identities can you disrupt and reframe? How can you bring more of your true self into your library and school?

"2. Students will develop language and historical and cultural knowledge that affirm and accurately describe their membership in multiple identity groups."

I believe that "affirm" is the key word in this standard. I've named some of my identities, and so it's no surprise that I've had little trouble finding affirmations for much of who I am in history and culture. After all, white cismales have long dominated our public spheres: as the protagonists in almost every book I read, the main characters in almost every show and movie I watched, the politicians elected to executive office in my city, state, and nation. They're still disproportionately taking up far too many leadership roles in society. And so we must work with intention in our libraries and schools to provide affirmation for all students. An updated book collection isn't enough. A few newer, more relatable books in an English class aren't enough. Our goals around the values of equity, diversity, inclusion, and intellectual freedom must flow out from our spaces to transform the curricula, practices, and policies of our schools. For example, my colleagues and I sometimes close the library to the general population in the name of equity. In these instances, we allow specialized student clubs and communities access to the space without interruption. Just as the basketball team gets unfettered access to the gymnasium each day, we can create space for our activist students to hold events and trainings as if they were signing out a private space at a public library. This is not exclusion, but inclusion at a very high level. These students deserve to know that who they are and what they care about are the most important thing, at least some of the time.

How many of your students feel affirmed at school each day, and what can you immediately change to make sure that number goes up exponentially?

"3. Students will recognize that people's multiple identities interact and create unique and complex individuals."

I'm demi-pansexual. This is an identity that I felt but didn't have words or context for when I was in middle and high school, which meant that I certainly didn't feel affirmed in this identity. I was a star hockey player then, and,in addition to my lack of education around the topic, the existence of toxic masculinity and societal norms in a heteronormative patriarchy caused me to hide that part of me out of fear of not being accepted. Looking back, I am quite sure that I wouldn't have been accepted. I now co-advise two clubs at my school, the Gender Sexuality Alliance and the Racial Alliance Committee, and they share a common goal of helping our community embrace each individual's uniqueness and complexity.

What part of your identity have you been suppressing—no matter how small—because of ideological and institutional oppression or your internalized version? How can you begin to express yourself in the library, and how can you help students do the same?

"4. Students will express pride, confidence and healthy self-esteem without denying the value and dignity of other people."

As part of my upbringing in New Hampshire, I was taught to fear the Puerto Rican and Dominican communities that lived across the river from my neighborhood. We lifted ourselves up, in part, by putting others down. That was flat-out prejudice and racism and it conditioned bias inside me. I've learned over many years to recognize that particular bias and reject it, but it's still there. To this day, if I come across a group of—and I'm going to use stereotypical, exclusive language here—"tough looking" people blaring Spanish hip-hop, something inside me clicks, and I can hear my uncles making horrible comments. I pause, I recognize this as my bias, and I reject it. I don't let it control me. I move forward with a more open mind. We are better able to recognize our implicit biases when we immerse ourselves in learning about our own identities and social conditioning, identities that are different from our own, and the history of power, privilege, and oppression. As we keep learning and recognizing, it becomes easier to reject a bias and move forward in a different way. The bias may still be there to some degree, but our reaction to it can change; and, by rejecting our biases and changing our reactions, we can limit the impact of our prior social conditioning by adding new experiences on top of it.

What are you thinking right now? How does this relate to you or your community?

"5. Students will recognize traits of the dominant culture, their home culture and other cultures and understand how they negotiate their own identity in multiple spaces."

This is the last of the Identity Anchor Standards, and this is where everything comes together. This would probably sound like a cliché to any other audience, but I know it won't sound that way to you, my fellow school librarians: I read a lot. I read books of all kinds—picture books, chapter books, novels, nonfiction, poetry, comics, audiobooks!—sometimes for entertainment, of course, and also to try to figure out my place in the world.

Keep reading as much as you can for as long as you can. I haven't discovered another way to learn so deeply. As author Kate DiCamillo said in her 2014 Newbery Medal acceptance speech, the work of books and stories is to "make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries and contradictions of ourselves and of each other… hearts that know how to love this world."

This is not easy work. This is incredibly hard work. And yet we must "stand up today and tomorrow for and with the students, educators, and families in [our] care—for the hard things that can lead to social justice for all" (Moreillon 2021, xiv).

It starts with self.

Works Cited

DiCamillo, Kate. "Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech." American Library Association Annual Conference Newbery Caldecott Banquet, Las Vegas, June 29, 2014. https://www.ala.org/alsc/sites/ala.org.alsc/files/content/awardsgrants/bookmedia/newbery-14.pdf

Learning For Justice. "Social Justice Standards: The Learning for Justice Anti-Bias Framework." Southern Poverty Law Center, 2018. https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/LFJ-2111-Social-Justice-Standards-Anti-bias-framework-November-2021-11172021.pdf.

Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon Press, 2019.

Moreillon, Judi, ed. Core Values in School Librarianship: Responding with Commitment and Courage. Libraries Unlimited, 2021.

Trask, W.B., ed. Letters of Colonel Thomas Westbrook. George E. Littlefield, 1901.

Wolfe-Rocca, Ursula, and Christie Nold. "Why the Narrative that Critical Race Theory 'Makes White Kids Feel Guilty' Is a Lie." Hechinger Report (August 2, 2022). https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-why-the-narrative-that-critical-race-theory-makes-white-kids-feel-guilty-is-a-lie/.