In this Issue
“Race, my race, has been one of the most defining forces in my life. But it is not something I always talked about, certainly not the way I do now.
But as I got older, as the successes I had reached for slowly became a reality, something inside me began to shift. ...And I started talking. I started to question, I started to resist, I started to demand. ...And once I started talking, I couldn’t stop.”
When I read Ijeoma Oluo’s book, So You Want to Talk about Race, I was dumbstruck when I read about the internal struggle and journey that eventually brought her to her current ability to talk about race. Frustration, fear, experience, and resistance all enabled her to use her voice to protest and educate about the systemic racism and barriers that have impacted her life. She was telling my story and trajectory as well.
I have been very fortunate in my life and career, but I would be remiss and inauthentic if I pretended that I haven’t struggled and haven’t experienced implicit and explicit discrimination. I have been victim to racial malinformation, and it has significantly shaped who I am and the work I do. And even with success, a voice, and a platform, it is still always a risk to discuss race and its deleterious and far-reaching effects (even after George Floyd and the anti-racism “reckoning”). But like Oluo, I have now reached a point where I have started to resist, question, demand, and write. I have to, for myself and for my profession.
With this in mind, I am taking my next risk with this essay. I was told years ago that I would never earn tenure with my teaching and research on equity, diversity, and inclusion – yeah, ok, been there, done that (three times, in fact). Then I was told that there is no room for talk about race when it comes to misinformation/disinformation (mis/dis), as if mis/dis is neutral. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the two seemingly disparate areas of inquiry are actually tightly intertwined, and if we’re trying to dismantle and combat mis/dis, we have to do the same with racism. The PIL Provocation essay I have written, “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies,” draws a direct line between the two fights and makes it crystal clear that they are not separate entities. So here we are.
I’m a big believer in naming things; we have to name things accurately in order to recognize and address them. Racism is a form of persistent malinformation, and we need to describe it and talk about it in this way. Racism and mis/dis are both plagues on our society, but mis/dis seems to be the current crisis of import, while racism is frowned upon but is still not being addressed at its privilege-hoarding and capitalistic roots. As I write in my essay, “We are in a malinformation crisis,” and “Information professionals and educators need to say that this is no longer acceptable, and we need to figure out how to reverse this trend.”
For those who have been discriminated against and silenced because of racist malinformation, now is the time for us to share our stories and demand change. For those who have not been discriminated against and silenced because of racist malinformation, I offer the words of Brené Brown: “In order to empathize with someone’s experience you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not how you imagine their experience to be.” Allyship is not prescriptive; in addition to empathy, it requires cultural humility and critical self-reflection.
I’m grateful for this opportunity to name names and merge these two areas of inquiry that have had so much impact on me as a teacher, researcher, scholar, and person. I hope that this exploration of context will provide additional understanding and urgency and provide new ways to discuss and strategize around these critical issues. I challenge you to start talking and rejecting sweet little lies – question them, resist them, and demand that they be rejected via truth, context, and critical cultural literacy.