Social Justice in Libraries

Definition of Social Justice Library

A social justice library: acts constantly and iteratively to create an environment that welcomes all people, engages in ongoing reflection and continuous learning, designs equitable services, empowers the community to engage with these issues and collaborates with others to transform systemic injustices, all with the aim of increasing representation of underrepresented identities in collections, programs and services
 

Below are some of the terms we have come across during our training. If there are any additional terms you would like to be added to this, please let me know! (Definitions will be added shortly)

• Social Justice - equal rights and equitable opportunities for all (source)
• Interpersonal Racism - composed of racist beliefs, a racist individual, a targeted individual, and a racist act (source)
• Institutional Racism - the ways that corporations, governments, and organizations produce racially unequal outcomes through policies that seem neutral (source)
• Systemic Racism - the way that racial inequities can flow from one arena to another within a system (source)
• Structural Racism - how entire systems of racism interact (source)
• Cultural Humility - a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and self-critique, to redressing the power imbalances in the patient-physician dynamic, and to developing mutually beneficial and nonpaternalistic clinical and advocacy partnerships with communities on behalf of individuals and defined populations (source)
• Implicit Bias - a form of bias that occurs automatically and unintentionally, that nevertheless affects judgments, decisions, and behaviors. (source)
• Microaggressions - daily commonplace, subtle behaviors and attitudes toward others that arise from conscious or unconscious bias. Not only can microaggressions affect one's access to power, resources, and opportunity, but they could also contribute to the persistent disparities faced by marginalized groups (source)
• Equity - recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances (source)
• Disability Justice - [a] framework [that] calls attention to the ways that ableism is linked to multiple other systems of oppression. This centers on the needs and voices of “disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others.” (source)