Thinking about diversity, equity, and inclusion at the IDEAL ’19 Conference

Last week I attended a great conference, IDEAL ’19: Advancing Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility in Libraries and Archives in Columbus, Ohio.  The conference, formerly known as the National Diversity in Libraries Conference, was sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), as well as the host campus, Ohio State University.  Over 600 people attended – most involved in some capacity in academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada.  There were many discussions, presentations, and workshops on all aspects of diversity, inclusion and social justice, and it was difficult to pick and choose which sessions to attend.  Some highlights I did attend were:

• Becoming better allies via the communication recovery model, presented by Jesus Espinoza and Larry Wentzel from the University of Michigan.
• Reading race: using book discussions to start dialogues on white fragility and other racisms, presented by Harrison Inefuku and Susan A. Vega Garcia from Iowa State University.
• Exploring racial equity (about the Racial Equity Institute), presented by Jennifer Garret, Gerald Holmes, and Mark A. Puente
• Pathways to leadership for librarians of color, a panel discussion which I was honored to moderate with 4 library leaders: Courtney Young, Shali Zhang, Lori Harris, and Gerald Holmes.

I was really energized by the dynamic opening and closing keynote speakers!

    The opener was Kimberlé Crenshaw, Professor of Law at UCLA and Columbia Law School, who is a leading authority in the area of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law.  She coined the term “critical race theory” and has done a lot of work around the concept of “intersectionality.”

 

The closing speaker was Nicole Hannah-Jones, a journalist for the New York Times who focuses on racial injustice in her reporting.  She was a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2017, and she is one of the writers behind a major series called The 1619 Project that debuts today (August 13, 2019) in the NY Times.  This project memorializes the 400^th anniversary of the landing in America of the first ship carrying enslaved Africans. The NYT says, “The goal of the project is to deepen understanding of American history (and the American present) by proposing a new point of origin for our national story.”