“Tell Me Sweet Little Lies: Racism as a Form of Persistent Malinformation”
Discussion questions for reading groups

PIL Provocation Essay #2: “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies: Racism as a Form of Persistent Malinformation,” August 11, 2021 (3,026 words)
Author: Nicole A. Cooke, Invited Author, PIL Provocation Series
Read the author's reflections on what inspired this essay, August 11, 2021

Questions prepared by the PIL Provocation Series Team: Steven Geofrey, Barbara Fister, Alison Head, Kirsten Hostetler, and Margy MacMillan, Project Information Literacy (PIL) Team, August 16, 2021.

About “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies: Racism as a Form of Persistent Malinformation”

In this important essay, Dr. Nicole Cooke illuminates the close connection between information literacy and combating racism. Racism, Cooke claims, is essentially a long-term disinformation campaign that wields harmful stereotypes, falsified history, and malicious lies to preserve existing hierarchies and defend white supremacy. Learning how to identify mis- and disinformation is insufficient for countering the racist narratives that distort our society. The missing piece, Cooke says, is critical cultural literacy (CCL), which adds context to information in order to close the gap between merely identifying falsehoods and actively promoting justice.

This document provides discussion group questions for exploring the meaning of CCL, and the impact that incorporating CCL strategies into the classroom may have on teaching and learning.

Purpose and intended use of this resource

“Tell Me Sweet Little Lies: Racism as a Form of Persistent Malinformation” offers a wide variety of lessons about reconsidering information literacy instruction and incorporating CCL into teaching and learning to better equip students for the information landscape, rife with disinformation and malinformation, that they inhabit.

This essay makes an argument grounded in research while posing questions for the future: What new directions in CCL and higher education should we be exploring? What fundamental aspects of different student experiences with navigating information spaces have we overlooked? What fresh ideas can we advance to inspire librarians, staff, educators, researchers, students, and policy-makers?

These OA prompts are designed for an audience of people who work in libraries, other educators, and learners, to provoke discussion around the themes in the essay, suggest ways to advance teaching and learning in your institutional context, and open up new avenues for inquiry and experimentation. They are meant as a starting point, for you to choose which work for you and draw from in developing your own discussion questions.

For those who are setting up discussions, it’s vital to consider the needs of participants from marginalized and non-marginalized groups. For us at PIL, this meant recognizing the impact our own lack of team diversity has on our ability to be inclusive as we crafted our questions here. As Dr. Cooke importantly reminds us in her author’s reflection:

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.

Additional resources

Nicole A. Cooke (June 19, 2020), “Reading is only a step on the path to anti-racism,” Publisher’s Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/83626-reading-is-only-a-step-on-the-path-to-anti-racism.html

Amelia N.GIbson, Renate L. Chancellor, Nicole A. Cooke, Sarah Park Dahlen, Shari A. Lee, and Yasmeen L. Shorish (2017), “Libraries on the frontlines: Neutrality and social justice," Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=letfspubs

Norda Bell (2020), “Professional development in diversity, equity and inclusion: From add-on to ‘separate, but equal’ to diversity by design,” in Keren Dali, and Nadia Caidi (eds), Humanizing LIS education and practice: Diversity by design, Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429356209

Shayla R. Griffin, (February 6, 2021), “Where ‘diversity training’ goes wrong,” Medium, https://medium.com/@shaylargriffin/where-diversity-training-goes-wrong-10-essential-questions-to-ask-1217863eab04

Questions or comments? Drop us a line at: projectinfolit@pilresearch.org.in

Discussion questions

1. In “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies,” Dr. Cooke challenges us to develop the “knowledge and cultural humility to ascertain and articulate the larger contexts of racist malinformation.”
   1. What is meant by both “knowledge” and “cultural humility”?
   2. How do the challenges posed by these terms intersect with your positionality (identities, privileges, advantages, and disadvantages) in the work that you do?
2. “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies” focuses on the persistence and pervasiveness of racist malinformation that “comes through media, textbooks, religion, celebrated holidays, pop culture, and so many other venues.”
   1. Where are you vulnerable to exposure to racist malinformation?
   2. What impact does it have on your life?
   3. How does it impact your work with learners?
   4. What aspects of your identity make it easier for you to recognize racist malinformation?
   5. What aspects of your identity make it easier for you to ignore racist malinformation?
3. Dr. Cooke sums up the current crisis: “We are bombarded with racist/racialized malinformation and conditioned to think that it’s normal and acceptable.”
   1. What steps are you taking to address your exposure to racist malinformation?
   2. Are there information sources you avoid?
   3. Are there sources you seek out?
   4. Are there ways we can push back against the systems of publishing and disseminating information that make malinformation so pervasive?
4. In “Tell Me Sweet Little Lies,” Dr. Cooke introduces the idea of Critical Cultural Literacy (CCL), and argues that we need to integrate CCL into today’s curriculum to combat the proliferation of racist/racialized malinformation.
   1. As you begin to unpack this new term, what are “the various power dynamics and power structures in relationships as information is provided and received” that you are actively aware of in your own work?
   2. Based on this, how does CCL challenge you to interact with those power dynamics and structures as you encounter information that is presented through them?
5. Dr. Cooke writes, “CCL requires critical self-reflection and the desire for equitable information and non-racist perceptions of others. We have to reexamine and reimagine everything we’ve been taught and ask ourselves ‘What perspectives and voices are missing from what I think I know?’ When we examine our own identities, privileges, and disadvantages, we are better positioned to have empathy for others and do the work of dismantling racist malinformation with CCL.”
   1. What voices and perspectives are missing from your perspective and experiences?
   2. What steps are you taking to find and include them in your learning and teaching?
   3. What pathways do your identities, privileges, and disadvantages open up to undertaking a CCL approach?
   4. What barriers do your identities, privileges, and disadvantages present to a CCL approach?
6. Dr. Cooke states that CCL goes beyond critical information and media literacy by weaving in political, design, historical, emotional, and racial literacies to interrogate the contexts in which information is created, presented, and interpreted. Reflect on your own competencies in each of these individual literacies. (It may be helpful to work through a typical teaching example.)
   1. Which literacies do you feel most comfortable with in your teaching and research?
   2. Which literacies do you feel least comfortable with?
   3. What support do you need to strengthen all of these literacies to work towards feeling confident integrating critical cultural literacy as a holistic approach in your work?
7. As Dr. Cooke notes, “information consumers may not be cognizant of it, but they are surrounded by malinformation and need to be aware and proactive about the racist malinformation that ravages their environment.”
   1. Recognizing that we as educators are also embedded in an environment saturated with racist malinformation of which we may be unaware, how do we raise our students’ ability to recognize racist malinformation in their own environments?
   2. If you have been “discriminated against and silenced because of racist malinformation,” how has that experience shaped your approach to teaching?
   3. What potential harmful effects could these discussions/activities have for teachers or learners from marginalized groups?
   4. What steps can you take to reduce these harms?
8. The phrase “information literacy” was first used in the 1970s and its meaning has changed over time. Reflect on your understanding of what information literacy means in today’s terms.
   1. What does taking a holistic approach to CCL add to your understanding of information literacy?
   2. In what ways does CCL collide or intersect with that understanding?
   3. How would a CCL approach change the way you teach information literacy?
9. What role do popular news websites play in the “consistent repetition of malinformation”? For example, how did the representation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement through images and videos on certain news sites, such as The New York Times, Business Insider, or Fox News, frame narratives around the George Floyd protests in 2020? Considering that information presented through the press may be viewed as more or less authoritative, reliable, or trustworthy by different readers, how did the visual messaging of certain recurring images from the BLM protests elicit certain responses from readers?
10. Information literacy instruction is often presented in a single session focused on preparing students to find and evaluate information in the context of a particular course’s learning goals. How could you use a CCL approach to enrich student understanding in a course that is not obviously focused on racial discrimination, even in a single session? For instance, say you used an example that contextualizes vaccine hesitancy among marginalized populations in a science course or included background on discriminatory crime data in a statistics class. If much of your instruction is limited to single course sessions, how would you incorporate CCL?
11. People do a lot of learning beyond the classroom. While traditionally information literacy instruction is delivered in classroom settings, do you see ways of partnering with student organizations, campus DEI programs, on-campus events, or off-campus community engagement opportunities that might provide a platform for learning about the connections between information literacy, malinformation, and racism? Are there potential partners you can identify for developing such programming?
12. Dr. Cooke offers several challenges for reframing our interactions with information in the classroom, including the need to “decolonize education and socialization,” “prioritize different and diverse perspectives and voices,” and “stop the glamorization and worshiping of Western norms.” Reflect on your own discipline and communities of practice.
    1. To what extent are conversations happening in your field about changing the predominant narratives in its research and teaching practices to respond to the challenges Dr. Cooke presents in the essay?
    2. To what extent do you think these conversations have been successful in changing those narratives?
    3. Based on your experiences, what additional work needs to be done in your field to work towards this change?