Dear family, friends, and fellow travelers,
I"m gonna be upfront and say that as we approach the 15th of Pride Month 2020 our household, and pretty much everyone in our circle, is feeling pretty battered. It's been a hard few weeks fill with days that felt like weeks. After a season that's felt like a decade. Black friends and colleagues are exhausted and hurting. Trans friends and colleagues are exhausted and hurting. My friends in Minneapolis are exhausted and hurting ... though, as supporters of police abolition, they are cautiously hopeful that the Minneapolis city council is discussing actual dissolution of the police department.
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.
Image: Our neighbors put out sidewalk chalk asking people to write socially distanced messages of protest along the street. There were messages all up and down the block. This one reads "Black Lives Matter."
Our household contiues to be materially secure and well. We are still working from home (though more on what the slow transition back to our respective workplaces may look like below), have a steady income and food on the table, cats to supervise us and ensure maximum naps, Yet the body blows keep coming and it's just hard to catch our breath. I keep waking up in the middle of the night to be furious at a random woman whose Tweet I saw a few weeks ago shocked -- shocked! -- because who could have predicted that a Trump regime would handle a crisis like covid-19 so badly.
Everyone. Everyone who ran themselves ragged during the 2016 election explaining a crisis like this would be handled so badly. Everyone who went to bed on election night filled with dread. Everyone who has spent the last four years running full tilt to care for our most vulnerable in the face of an administration and a broader coalition of GOP politicians who demonstrate over and over and over again that they are in power because they enjoy being cruel.
I Don't Know How To Explain That You Should Care About Other People.
Image: Waiting for pancakes takeaway at our local greasy spoon diner where in the "before times" we often ate Sunday brunch. This is a mirror selfie showing the empty tables and counter, and me wearing my cloth face covering (with its pins saying "fuck trump" among other socially-appropriate messaging).
A couple of weeks ago, one of the Black women I know re-Tweeted another Black women asking what kind of response white people want when they tell Black people, "I'm not racist!" My first response was to talk about how, as a white person, I try to take responsibility for fielding fellow white people who think this way and encouraging them to think about systemic racism, using this interaction as a moment for teaching and learning. And then I went away and thought about it some more and came back to the thread and was like, You know what? I don't actually give a fuck about how someone feels -- whether they feel racist or think racist thoughts on the inside. Because I will never be able to prove or disprove that statement. I can only assess the impact of their actions. And if their actions have a racist outcome -- particularly if their response to having that racist outcome pointed out is to cry, "But I'm not racist!" and cite the virtue of their intent -- then I don't want them in a position of power. And I don't want to waste my precious energy arguing with them about their intent. I just want them gone. Not from the human community, but from whatever position of authority they hold where they might have a racist impact with the budgets they control, the institutional power they wield.
Let's not waste our breathe trying to reform their feelings or their thinking.
Let's just fire them before then can harm more people.
Image: Teazle, hanging off the edge of the bed.
Image: Christopher, cuddling with Hanna.
One particularly painful episode from the past few weeks, for me personally, was the announcement by Library Journal that the recipient of the 2020 Gale/Library Journal Library of the Year award had been given to the Seattle Public Library for their racial equity work. While on the face of it this sounds wonderful, the problem for many of us -- LJ staff, reviewers, and folks within the broader library community -- was that in February of this year SPL had hosted an anti-trans group at their library, over objections of trans and nonbinary library staff and community members. Those of us who objected to the award pointed out that strides in one area (racial justice) doesn't give an institution a free pass when it comes to causing harm to vulnerable community members in other areas -- and, of course, that trans and nonbinary people of color are harmed by trans-exclusionary practices, meaning that racial equity work is fundamentally compromised by acts of trans-exclusion.
Library Journal, as of this writing, has doubled down -- twice -- on their decision.
As someone who has worked (in a largely voluntary, though sometimes paid capacity) for the publication since 2013, and who just last year was honored with a Reviewer of the Year award -- an honor that meant a lot to me because of what it represented in terms of my working relationships with editors who are in some cases also good friends -- the inability of the senior management to understand why their decision causes harm cuts deeply. I'm still trying to discern what the best path forward for me, personally, is -- but if LJ doesn't rescind the award by the end of June (which at this point it a highly unlikely outcome) I will be joining others who have pledged to "voluntarily rescind" their own LJ awards citing irreconcilable differences.
It's been hard, and sad, in a spring that didn't need one more hard and sad thing for any of is.
Image: I've gone deep, electric blue with the hair dye this season.
Both Hanna and I will be returning to our physical workplaces in a very limited capacity as Massachusetts and Boston gradually reopen for staff access. In neither case are our institutions looking at patron access over the summer. The Massachusetts Historical Society has decided that we will not be open to the public before September 8th (the Tuesday after Labor Day) at the earliest; Harvard University's libraries are a much larger knot to untie. But for now, we are looking at staff-only access. At my workplace, this means we have sorted the sixty-odd staff members into people who can do all of their work from home and the people who must have building access for some portion of their work (as someone who works with special collections, I and the rest of the reference staff need access to the building in some capacity). For those who do need access to the building, we've been sorted into three cohorts who will access the building in a three-week rotation. While in the building we will be practicing social distancing, wearing cloth face coverings, etc. The two work-from-home weeks are a re-quarantine to ensure that if anyone in the cohort gets sick there will be no cross-contamination and easier contact tracing. We are poised to withdraw into a total work-from-home environment once again if the public health situation in Boston warrants retreat.
For those of us in the building, reference and reproductions work will be our primary tasks -- with no patron access to the collections while we are closed to the public we have implemented temporary high-volume workflows to provide PDF scans of material at the folder, box, and volume level in order to give people as efficient and afforable access as we can while still keeping the lights on and paying our staff. We have a backlog of requests for materials we've been unable to process since the MHS closed, so that will likely occupy us for much of July and August -- September will arrive before we have time to blink.
Image: My Stardew Valley farmers are doing well. This is Lydia Lyrica with her pony named Angora. One of the goats is also photobombing the snapshot -- not sure whether that's Cambric or Calico.
Image: Scarf in progress for the auction -- a squashy scarf in pride rainbow colors!
The rest of June will see me occupied with the details of the Auction 4 AWE Fund (opens July 1st!) and ramping up my return to work on the Ida B. Wells biography, 45,000 words of which are due (sob) on September 1st (sob) and which my brain has been unable to put any sustained effort into since the pandemic arrived in Boston and our lives were thrown into a muddle. Wells -- who just this spring won a posthumous Pulitzer -- did a lot of activist work that resonates in this current moment, which is a sobering reminder of how the white supremacist bones of our nation remain unbroken in the century since her death. And as I continue to ponder what it will look like to step back from Library Journal involvement, I have a few reviews I committed to pre-SPL debacle that I'll be wrapping up: The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics by Janet R Jakobsen (as amazing as I thought it would be); The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite (beekeeping and ladies falling in love); A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations by David A. Harris (abolish the police. yes really. I'm serious.).
Image: Some of the titles currently in my Kindle queue.
In more playful realms, I'm looking forward to the arrival of the unicorn yarn I ordered last week from Fully Spun and enjoying Outcrossing (1920s England, magic, romance...) recommended by a friend. Also, this was the cupcake that I had yesterday in honor of Boston Pride.
Image: Rainbow cupcake topped with buttercream frosting and rainbow sprinkles. Made by Oakleaf Cakes.
What if instead of trying to stop crime by investing in heavily armed agents of the state we invested in meeting everyone's basic needs?
Image: The peonies have been simply gorgeous this year.
Stay well, be kind.
~Anna
I"m gonna be upfront and say that as we approach the 15th of Pride Month 2020 our household, and pretty much everyone in our circle, is feeling pretty battered. It's been a hard few weeks fill with days that felt like weeks. After a season that's felt like a decade. Black friends and colleagues are exhausted and hurting. Trans friends and colleagues are exhausted and hurting. My friends in Minneapolis are exhausted and hurting ... though, as supporters of police abolition, they are cautiously hopeful that the Minneapolis city council is discussing actual dissolution of the police department.
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.
Image: Our neighbors put out sidewalk chalk asking people to write socially distanced messages of protest along the street. There were messages all up and down the block. This one reads "Black Lives Matter."
Our household contiues to be materially secure and well. We are still working from home (though more on what the slow transition back to our respective workplaces may look like below), have a steady income and food on the table, cats to supervise us and ensure maximum naps, Yet the body blows keep coming and it's just hard to catch our breath. I keep waking up in the middle of the night to be furious at a random woman whose Tweet I saw a few weeks ago shocked -- shocked! -- because who could have predicted that a Trump regime would handle a crisis like covid-19 so badly.
Everyone. Everyone who ran themselves ragged during the 2016 election explaining a crisis like this would be handled so badly. Everyone who went to bed on election night filled with dread. Everyone who has spent the last four years running full tilt to care for our most vulnerable in the face of an administration and a broader coalition of GOP politicians who demonstrate over and over and over again that they are in power because they enjoy being cruel.
I Don't Know How To Explain That You Should Care About Other People.
Image: Waiting for pancakes takeaway at our local greasy spoon diner where in the "before times" we often ate Sunday brunch. This is a mirror selfie showing the empty tables and counter, and me wearing my cloth face covering (with its pins saying "fuck trump" among other socially-appropriate messaging).
A couple of weeks ago, one of the Black women I know re-Tweeted another Black women asking what kind of response white people want when they tell Black people, "I'm not racist!" My first response was to talk about how, as a white person, I try to take responsibility for fielding fellow white people who think this way and encouraging them to think about systemic racism, using this interaction as a moment for teaching and learning. And then I went away and thought about it some more and came back to the thread and was like, You know what? I don't actually give a fuck about how someone feels -- whether they feel racist or think racist thoughts on the inside. Because I will never be able to prove or disprove that statement. I can only assess the impact of their actions. And if their actions have a racist outcome -- particularly if their response to having that racist outcome pointed out is to cry, "But I'm not racist!" and cite the virtue of their intent -- then I don't want them in a position of power. And I don't want to waste my precious energy arguing with them about their intent. I just want them gone. Not from the human community, but from whatever position of authority they hold where they might have a racist impact with the budgets they control, the institutional power they wield.
Let's not waste our breathe trying to reform their feelings or their thinking.
Let's just fire them before then can harm more people.
Image: Teazle, hanging off the edge of the bed. Image: Christopher, cuddling with Hanna.One particularly painful episode from the past few weeks, for me personally, was the announcement by Library Journal that the recipient of the 2020 Gale/Library Journal Library of the Year award had been given to the Seattle Public Library for their racial equity work. While on the face of it this sounds wonderful, the problem for many of us -- LJ staff, reviewers, and folks within the broader library community -- was that in February of this year SPL had hosted an anti-trans group at their library, over objections of trans and nonbinary library staff and community members. Those of us who objected to the award pointed out that strides in one area (racial justice) doesn't give an institution a free pass when it comes to causing harm to vulnerable community members in other areas -- and, of course, that trans and nonbinary people of color are harmed by trans-exclusionary practices, meaning that racial equity work is fundamentally compromised by acts of trans-exclusion.
Library Journal, as of this writing, has doubled down -- twice -- on their decision.
As someone who has worked (in a largely voluntary, though sometimes paid capacity) for the publication since 2013, and who just last year was honored with a Reviewer of the Year award -- an honor that meant a lot to me because of what it represented in terms of my working relationships with editors who are in some cases also good friends -- the inability of the senior management to understand why their decision causes harm cuts deeply. I'm still trying to discern what the best path forward for me, personally, is -- but if LJ doesn't rescind the award by the end of June (which at this point it a highly unlikely outcome) I will be joining others who have pledged to "voluntarily rescind" their own LJ awards citing irreconcilable differences.
It's been hard, and sad, in a spring that didn't need one more hard and sad thing for any of is.
Image: I've gone deep, electric blue with the hair dye this season.Both Hanna and I will be returning to our physical workplaces in a very limited capacity as Massachusetts and Boston gradually reopen for staff access. In neither case are our institutions looking at patron access over the summer. The Massachusetts Historical Society has decided that we will not be open to the public before September 8th (the Tuesday after Labor Day) at the earliest; Harvard University's libraries are a much larger knot to untie. But for now, we are looking at staff-only access. At my workplace, this means we have sorted the sixty-odd staff members into people who can do all of their work from home and the people who must have building access for some portion of their work (as someone who works with special collections, I and the rest of the reference staff need access to the building in some capacity). For those who do need access to the building, we've been sorted into three cohorts who will access the building in a three-week rotation. While in the building we will be practicing social distancing, wearing cloth face coverings, etc. The two work-from-home weeks are a re-quarantine to ensure that if anyone in the cohort gets sick there will be no cross-contamination and easier contact tracing. We are poised to withdraw into a total work-from-home environment once again if the public health situation in Boston warrants retreat.
For those of us in the building, reference and reproductions work will be our primary tasks -- with no patron access to the collections while we are closed to the public we have implemented temporary high-volume workflows to provide PDF scans of material at the folder, box, and volume level in order to give people as efficient and afforable access as we can while still keeping the lights on and paying our staff. We have a backlog of requests for materials we've been unable to process since the MHS closed, so that will likely occupy us for much of July and August -- September will arrive before we have time to blink.
Image: My Stardew Valley farmers are doing well. This is Lydia Lyrica with her pony named Angora. One of the goats is also photobombing the snapshot -- not sure whether that's Cambric or Calico. Image: Scarf in progress for the auction -- a squashy scarf in pride rainbow colors!
The rest of June will see me occupied with the details of the Auction 4 AWE Fund (opens July 1st!) and ramping up my return to work on the Ida B. Wells biography, 45,000 words of which are due (sob) on September 1st (sob) and which my brain has been unable to put any sustained effort into since the pandemic arrived in Boston and our lives were thrown into a muddle. Wells -- who just this spring won a posthumous Pulitzer -- did a lot of activist work that resonates in this current moment, which is a sobering reminder of how the white supremacist bones of our nation remain unbroken in the century since her death. And as I continue to ponder what it will look like to step back from Library Journal involvement, I have a few reviews I committed to pre-SPL debacle that I'll be wrapping up: The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics by Janet R Jakobsen (as amazing as I thought it would be); The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite (beekeeping and ladies falling in love); A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations by David A. Harris (abolish the police. yes really. I'm serious.).
Image: Some of the titles currently in my Kindle queue.
In more playful realms, I'm looking forward to the arrival of the unicorn yarn I ordered last week from Fully Spun and enjoying Outcrossing (1920s England, magic, romance...) recommended by a friend. Also, this was the cupcake that I had yesterday in honor of Boston Pride.
Image: Rainbow cupcake topped with buttercream frosting and rainbow sprinkles. Made by Oakleaf Cakes.What if instead of trying to stop crime by investing in heavily armed agents of the state we invested in meeting everyone's basic needs?
Image: The peonies have been simply gorgeous this year.
Stay well, be kind.
~Anna