Authenticity vs. Professionalism: Being True to Ourselves at Work

Abstract

For early-career librarians of color, academic librarianship contains a number of unspoken and unacknowledged expectations. While it is widely recognized that the majority of librarianship is white and female,1 there is still a lack of action that directly addresses the consequences of this dearth of diversity. In fact, we have seen through personal experience that some attempts to remedy this problem have resulted in further marginalization of librarians of color in the workplace. The American Library Association (ALA), among other professional organizations, continually calls for academic and public libraries to increase the representation of marginalized professionals on library staff and to create diversity and inclusion initiatives. These efforts have put increasing expectations on libraries to also diversify programs and collections, and to become more inclusive spaces. However, carrying the burden of planning, promoting, defending, and/or assessing the work of social justice often falls to the very marginalized professionals that institutions struggle to recruit and retain. This tokenization results in the shouldering of invisible and emotional labors that burden us further; we operate at a deficit working under these conditions, as this toll then affects the -isms we experience while embodying our intersecting identities in the workplace.