Institutional Oppression Research Articles

Strengthening Community Responses to Economic vulnerability (SeCuRE): a protocol of an HIV status-neutral pilot randomized clinical trial with transgender women of color in Detroit, Michigan

BackgroundIn the United States (US), transgender women of color experience cyclical, interlocking systems of structural and institutional oppression rooted in racism and transphobia, which fuel economic vulnerability. Together, cycles of intersecting racism, transphobia, and economic vulnerability create conditions that give rise to extreme HIV inequities among transgender women of color. Microeconomic interventions — designed to improve financial standing by increasing income generation and access to financial resources through entrepreneurship, cash transfers, and training — have the potential to address structural factors underlying HIV inequities. Over the past few years, several trans-led organizations, including the Trans Sistas of Color Project, have integrated microeconomic strategies, specifically emergency assistance, into their programming. The aim of the current study is to conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a definitive subsequent RCT and explore initial evidence of an enhanced microeconomic intervention to increase income generation and improve HIV prevention and care continua outcomes.MethodsThis is a two-arm waitlist randomized controlled trial in which transgender women of color will be randomly allocated to either usual care that includes the Trans Sistas of Color Project’s existing microeconomic interventions, which includes the following: (1) US $250 in emergency assistance and (2) peer support to obtain legal gender affirmation (i.e., legal name and gender markers on identification documents) or the enhanced microeconomic intervention that includes usual care and will be enhanced to include the following: (1) 12 weekly educational group sessions on economic empowerment (i.e., job acquisition, income generation through micro-business, and financial literacy) and HIV prevention and care, (2) employment-focused mentoring, and (3) an unconditional grant (US $1200) for use towards acquiring self-led or formal employment. Participants in each condition will complete a baseline survey prior to randomization, a follow-up survey immediately following intervention completion, and 3-month survey after intervention completion. Participants will also complete qualitative exit interviews within 1 month of intervention completion for both conditions.DiscussionThis study will be one of the first US-based pilot randomized clinical trials that builds upon existing community-led solutions to economic vulnerability to address HIV inequities. Findings will provide the necessary groundwork to examine intervention effectiveness in a future large-scale trial.Trials registrationNCT06212544.Protocol versionSeptember 25, 2024, version 2.

Whose Side Are We On? Toward an Emancipatory Ethic in Critical Arts-Based Research

The renowned U.S. sociologist Howard S. Becker, writing in 1969, posed the ethical question: Whose side are we on? In the context of continued structural inequalities in the distribution of power and wealth and individual and institutional oppression, in terms of class, race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation, this question remains as important as ever. The article, in advocating a robustly partisan approach, offers an emancipatory ethical framework continuum and an empirical example, from the authors’ critical arts-based research with undocumented Mexican Americans, to support and inform critical researchers, committed to working with oppressed groups against discrimination and for social justice.

"I'm here. We're here. My people and I exist": Exploring the psychopolitical experiences of Black immigrant college students attending predominantly White institutions.

Despite the ever-growing presence of Black immigrant college students in the United States, little is known about their unique campus experiences or their mental health outcomes as it relates to psychopolitical determinants of well-being. This qualitative study aimed to explore the unique psychopolitical experiences of 14, first- and second-generation Black immigrant college students attending predominately White institutions in the United States. Using the theoretical frameworks of critical race theory, intersectionality, and psychopolitical validity to guide our study, a phenomenological approach uncovered six themes and 11 subthemes: (1) collective well-being, (2) relational well-being, (3) individual well-being (purpose; health and wellness; critical consciousness), (4) collective suffering (neocolonialism, oppressive policies, and political violence; institutional oppression; barriers to mental health care), (5) relational suffering (implicit racial bias, stereotypes, and microaggressions; violence and brutality), and (6) individual suffering (ethno-racial trauma; isolation; school-related stress). We highlight implications for practitioners working with Black immigrant college students such as providing culturally responsive mental health care and advocating for decolonized and antiracist trainings at predominately White institutions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Repression breeds resistance: A call for a methodology of radical solidarity and love to respond to the prison industrial complex and academia's eugenic tendencies

This collaborative autoethnographic article traces psychology's complicity in systems of oppression while highlighting pathways toward liberation. An expression and embodiment of radical solidarity, this article is the product of a research collaboration between an incarcerated justice advocate and a critical psychologist. Critical autoethnographic methods are leaned on to lift experiences of prison as an oppressive institution and illuminate forms of resistance. We strategically and deliberately co-created this methodological approach to joyfully render prison walls metaphorically porous, to seep through surveillance mechanisms (both within the prison and academia), and to build liberatory worlds through our words. Situating mass incarceration as an extension of colonial displacement and enslavement, we dialogically examine how psychology has upheld white supremacy through the illusion of objectivity and neutrality. Psychological concepts like critical consciousness and resilience are re-theorized to center embodied, collective struggles. Calling for psychology to move beyond apologies toward deep structural change and distributive justice, we advocate for centering the experience of those historically excluded in knowledge construction, resource allocation, and leadership. Imagining a psychology of love and solidarity, we urge dismantling oppressive institutions through pedagogies of radical solidarity. Our collaboration—across prison walls—models methodologies of mutual aid, conscientization, and power sharing to build a liberatory psychology.

Examination of Marriage, Power, and Female Liberation in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber

This article offers a critical reading of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, highlighting her portrayal of marriage in patriarchal societies as an institution rooted in control and submission. Carter illustrates that women under this oppressive institution are reduced to possessions manipulated by men. The mother who defies the stereotype of the passive woman presents a vision of liberation led by women themselves. This study explores the way Carter uses strong female figures to deconstruct and challenge the traditional narratives and aligns with feminist perspectives that advocate for women’s autonomy, resilience, and self-realization.

Black Women in the Ivory Tower: Institutional Oppression and Intersectionality

Black Women in the Ivory Tower: Institutional Oppression and Intersectionality

Are we (in)visible?: Toward a critical understanding of Asian women faculty experiences in U.S. sport management

ABSTRACT Research question How do Asian women faculty’s intersecting identities influence the ways in which they identify, fulfill, and negotiate their roles in the White and masculine field of sport management? Research method We used collaborative autoethnography in which the researchers themselves were the method and the participants for this study. The purpose of using this method was to use systematic introspection and retrospection to understand the researchers’ collective experiences. Results and Findings We provide four narratives of the researchers as the findings. Themes from the narratives included masculinized, Westernized sport as an oppressive institution, forever unsettled between insider and outsider, gendered and racialized/ethnicized immigrant women. Implications Theoretically, this study extends the use of intersectionality to an understanding of Asian women experiences in the racialized and gendered space of sport. Practical implications include that sport management programs must be designed with Asian and minoritized women in mind and provide relevant resources such as support networks, therapy groups, informal mentoring, and targeted Ph.D. recruiting.

Privileged Omissions: The Impact of Discriminatory Inaction

Scholars commonly study bias and discrimination from the perspective of those discriminated against and, to some extent, the institutional practices that foster discrimination. The research on institutional oppression often excludes a concurrent area of discriminatory omissions. Research on privileged omissions as a discretionary bias provides a more holistic view of discretionary decisionmaking. The concept of discriminatory omissions has limited research, but this paper adds to scholarship in this critical area by providing analysis and calls upon public service practices to disrupt the unintended consequences of privileged omissions.

“Actually Changing Our Way of Being”: Transformative Organizing and Implications for Critical Community-Engaged Scholarship

Because research alone cannot dismantle racial inequity, this article focuses on lessons for critical community-engaged scholarship (CCES) based on the Relationship-Centered Schools campaign of Californians for Justice (CFJ), an educational and racial justice youth organizing group. The campaign embraced transformative organizing—an approach to social change that encompasses reshaping oppressive institutions and healing trauma wounds wrought by injustice. I discuss findings and methodological implications for CCES, considering challenges in translating research to policy change for racial equity. This article situates the power and limitations of research within CFJ’s broad array of transformative organizing strategies to create more caring and equitable schools. Strategies include youth-led action research, voter engagement, lobbying, youth sharing power with adults, and healing practices of slowing down and relationship building to rehumanize youth of color. I then discuss implications for CCES. First, research supported CFJ youth leaders’ efforts to press institutions to value their full, emotionally complex humanity and legitimize their emotional knowledge. Yet because research is only one of many strategies for transformative change, fully participatory research is not always within organizing groups’ capacity. Thus, researchers can act more expansively by lending our time, energy, and labor to power building. Second, care and healing practices embodied by CFJ can inspire researchers to center relationship building and care as praxis and translate these lessons to transform the academy into a more equitable place. Ultimately, transformative organizing shows how CCES can extend beyond equitable research practices to include more liberatory ways of being, feeling, and acting towards justice.

Monogamy as a Force of Social Progress and Women’s Empowerment

Abstract Monogamy in Western countries has recently undergone criticisms, because it is perceived as an oppressive institution, adjacent to reactionary cultural values. In this article, I argue that monogamy is in fact a force of social progress and women’s empowerment. I point out that, given our natural tendencies, the most likely alternative to monogamy is polygyny. By its very nature, polygyny faces a numerical difficulty, to the extent that (given the equitable male to female ratio) when one man engages in romantic or sexual relationships with multiple female partners, inequality and social conflict ensues. I present historical and sociological data that sustains the argument that polygyny is associated with greater inequality, violence, poverty and women’s vulnerability. Nevertheless, while monogamy can be considered a force of social progress, I argue that the State is not morally entitled to prosecute non-monogamous lifestyles, but there may still be non-coercive ways to promote monogamy.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara This issue opens with Shana L. Redmond's presidential address delivered at the 2022 ASA annual meeting held November 3–6, 2022, in New Orleans, the first in-person conference in three years. The devastating deaths, violence, pain, mourning, policing, and confinement that filled the world during the intervening years only highlighted what Blacks have lived through for centuries. Redmond's powerful, beautiful, and heart-wrenching address, "The Dark Prelude," frees from capture the Black lives that were arrested, suspended, or terminated with a "routine" traffic stop by the police—Sundiata Acoli, Zayd Malik Shakur, and Assata Shakur on May 2, 1973; and Sandra Bland on July 10, 2015—by listening, accompanying, amplifying, and conversing with the sonic everyday of Black living. By turning our ears, eyes, hearts, and brains to the life before terror, Redmond urges us to imagine otherwise and be better. Kimberly Juanita Brown re-creates and joins the Black chorus Redmond called forth by pointing to the inquiry, immersion, politics, and prose of Black study and tracing Blackness that upends temporality. Erica R. Edwards responds to Redmond's invocation of "thick emotion" and "thick camaraderie" of Black study by beholding and listening to the Black anterior that lies in advance of and surrounds Black death and taking the reader through Redmond's act of indictment, not of the state of the field but of the world and our hearts. "Abolitionist Worldmaking" is a forum on Ruth Wilson Gilmore's muchanticipated collection of essays, Abolition Geography, published in 2022. In his introduction, convener Alyosha Goldstein situates Gilmore's decades-long contributions to the prison abolition movement in the history of abolitionism and elucidates the mode of critique that abolition requires. Alisa Bierria, Lisa Lowe, Sarah Haley, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis each reflect on the significance of the collection from a variety of perspectives, ranging from everyday movement building to the historical conditions of possibility for worldmaking as well as Gilmore's theoretical and methodological contributions. The first two essays examine settler cosmology, knowledge, and relationship to Indigenous lands and the environment. Nadia Chana's "On Eating, Critical Distance, and Qallunaat Cosmology" critically reads filmic texts that are purportedly about the Inuit and the hunting and eating of seals, showing that the tensions between eating and critical distance indeed illustrate Qallunaat (non-Inuit) cosmology. In "A Forest of Energy: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Sugar Maple Kinship in the Menominee Community," [End Page v] the study of the impact of settler colonialism on Menominee land and their understanding of "energy," Gregory Hitch and Marcus Grignon show that the Menominee consistently adapted and resisted colonization by utilizing their ancestral knowledge systems and interspecies ethical frameworks while also appropriating dominant science and technology for their goals. The next two essays bring contrasting approaches to the racial meanings of iconography. Sharron Conrad's "More Upset Than Most: Measuring and Understanding African American Responses to the Kennedy Assassination" uses a public opinion poll conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center that illuminated African Americans' deep veneration and mourning for the slain President John F. Kennedy. Through the analysis of the poll and Black families' practice of hanging his portrait alongside images of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr., Conrad challenges scholarly assessments of Kennedy's civil rights accomplishments. In "Muslim American Protest Iconography and Revisionism: On the Gendered-Racial and Secular Aesthetics of (Neo)Liberal Dissent," Najwa Mayer traces the production and mass circulation of a poster of a South Asian Muslim American woman clad in hijab in the style of the United States flag and argues that the aesthetics of racial and secular liberalism converge on gendered Muslim American iconographies while managing the terms of Muslim protest and inclusion. Finally, in "Un/Blocked: Writing, Race, and Gender in the American Academy," Naomi Greyser offers an innovative look at the American academy. Focusing on the felt impacts of institutional oppression on writing and learning, Greyser reframes writer's block less as a psychological syndrome than as a symptom of nationalist investment in academic writing as a means of managing knowledge, labor, and subject formation. In Book Reviews, Kristin...

Marriage equality & intersectionality

AbstractThe goal of this study is to understand the extent to which a diverse group of sexual and gender minorities understood the landmark Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality as personally impacting them. Prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) figures have argued that marriage is an oppressive institution and that legalizing same‐sex marriage would not benefit the most marginalized members of the community, particularly Black people. Until now, there have been few resources for comparing these claims of scholars and activists with those of members of the communities they claim to represent. Guided by Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, this study centered LGBTQ people of color's lived experiences. A purposive sample of 99 LGBTQ people in Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco were asked whether and how the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) personally impacted them. Most participants described an emotional impact. Relatively few criticized marriages as “heteronormative” or unfit for LGBTQ people. Black participants were less likely than participants of other races to criticize marriage as an institution. Moreover, Black and Latinx participants articulated a more expansive, equality‐focused understanding of the right to marry than the Court itself articulated. They described the marriage decision as carrying the potential to empower and elevate their identities in various contexts. For these people, the marriage equality movement was centrally about equality rather than marriage.

Rendering Black Queer Operations: Technologies for Knowing, Being, and Living in Dirty Computer

Abstract In 2018, musical artist Janelle Monáe released Dirty Computer, a sci-fi film/visual album accompanying her musical album of the same name. Dirty Computer plays with elements of the visual album genre by embedding conventional music videos within a larger sci-fi narrative, the videos functioning as representations of Monáe's character's supposed “memories.” This essay analyzes representational strategies at play in Dirty Computer, drawing from Black feminist and queer theory, Black cultural studies, and media studies. I argue that together the narrative universe and structure of Dirty Computer strategically depict struggles over living as Black, queer, and/or woman; maintaining sovereignty over othered bodies and selves; and creating Black worlds within and despite an anti-Black world. Thematically, the film offers futuristic visions of queer/women's collectivity and Black queer intimacy. The film's content and structure render an example of Black Queer OS (Operating System); “Queer OS,” as Kara Keeling has described, “seeks to make queer into the logic of ‘an operating system of a larger order’ that unsettles the common senses that secure those presently hegemonic social relations that can be characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, and other violences.” Dirty Computer reveals surveillance technologies and oppressive institutions as unreliable narrators, incapable of fully or accurately depicting Black queer life. Instead, it is our own bodies and minds that enable technologies for truly knowing and relating as Black, queer, and/or woman. The film demonstrates strategies of subversive social, cultural, and political operation, presenting Black queer subjectivity as a technology of liberated being. Ultimately, Dirty Computer instructs us to operationalize Black queer life, joyfully together, on a larger order.

A history of unquestioning faith

Vocational awe is an emerging concept within LIS used to highlight how narratives andmetaphors involving professional self-reverence and sacredness serve to absolve librarianship ofaccountability for the complex and problematic legacies of institutional oppression andexploitation. This panel explores the vocational awe narrative and its implications for LISresearch in two ways. First, by sharing panelists’ experiences and struggles with vocational aweand second, by engaging the LIS research community in appropriate responses to vocationalawe, such as advocating for library workers and responsible allyship with marginalized groups.

Nakedness as Decolonial Praxis

This article examines naked protests as efforts to advocate for social justice, particularly against patriarchal oppression and state violence. It explores ways in which women use naked body protests as a form of resistance, thereby negating dominant narratives of its impropriety. Naked protests are examined for how they might be mobilised against patriarchy and institutional oppression. This is done through the use of three data sources, namely a radio podcast interview of two women student protestors who staged a naked body protest during the #FeesMustFall violence in 2016; a video recording of a protest staged by working class women against the destruction of their homes in Dobsonville, Soweto on 12 July 1990; and interviews conducted with 14 women who participated in naked body protests. The article employs critical discourse analysis to understand women’s role in advocating for social change and decoloniality. In addition, it delves into different affective registers experienced by women protesters during protests and interviews. Findings suggest that politics of protests are saturated with affective registers that range from anger to rage, fear, sadness, pain, joy and a sense of power. African women’s naked bodies in protest are a link to generational power that creates a rupture, which interrupts violence and coloniality. Moreover, the analysis suggests that naked protest is a powerful form of protest that transforms a woman’s body from social constructions of vulnerability and consumption to a site of militancy, defiance and one that speaks back from a position of solidarity and strength. These protests demonstrate a grounded African feminism, which enables African women to speak from their location and reality.

Johann Gottlieb Stoll and Forster’s Challenge to Kant

Abstract When in 1786 Georg Forster criticized Immanuel Kant’s racial theory, he famously challenged him to oppose slavery. Although Kant declined to take up this challenge, the discussion between Forster and Kant was the impetus for Johann Gottlieb Stoll to present his views on the matter. In his defense of monogenesis Stoll did what Kant had failed to do, namely, explicitly criticize oppressive institutions like the slave trade and slavery with a demand to respect the dignity and humanity of every human being, independent of their physiological traits. Although his work has been ignored ever since its publication, he offered an even greater challenge to Kant than Forster. He defended the idea that so-called race mixing not only proved the unity of the human species but was also not contrary to nature. Not only did he distance himself from Kant but also from Forster. He challenged his readers to consider the ability of non-Whites to be an example for Whites.

CHRISTIANITY AS THE CRADLE OF MODERN SCIENCE AND ITS INFLUENCES ON SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

The condemnation of Galileo Galilei, a milestone in the history of science, is interpreted as if the Catholic Church were an oppressive institution and against scientific investigation. However, much of what we are taught is nothing more than myth or legend, such as persecution and condemnation at the bonfire. In fact, far from persecuting him, the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church welcomed Galileo as a son and, moreover, it was the cradle of science and the university system, for being the institution that was most interested in cultivating knowledge, it was also the one that invested most in astronomy. Previously called natural philosophy, modern science was influenced by the priests of the Catholic Church, mainly by the Jesuits who were pioneers in astronomy. Priests like Nicolaus Copernicus, who started the theory of heliocentrism, Roger Boscovich, a Jesuit priest who gave the first coherent description of the atom giving rise to the first modern atomic theories, Gregor Mendel, who was the monk who performed experiments with peas, Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest who created the Big Bang theory. These and many others made great discoveries that made science take great leaps. Not discarding other civilizations and religions, pantheists, who brought a lot of wisdom, such as the Incas, Mayans, Babylonians, Egyptians, etc., but the Christian Church was the only one that reached to take science to another level, for it was based on the belief of a single God who had created all things with physical order and laws. Therefore, the objective of this work is to contest the idea that the Church is opposed to Science, exposing the difference between the two and aiming at scientific investigations carried out by priests. Concluding that this Christian institution did not persecute science, but made great leaps, did not burn scientists on the bonfire because of their ideas, did not delay science in the medieval and the conflict or divergence is the result of criticism made for the Church by Enlightenment thinkers and the story badly told full of fantasies.

Bye Bye Binary: Reimagining Gender in An Unkindness of Ghosts

Bye Bye Binary: Reimagining Gender in An Unkindness of Ghosts Kamri Jordan (bio) There is no rulebook for navigating oppressive systems, but oppression cannot eradicate discovery and creation. Marginalized groups rely on a multitude of practices to assert their subjectivity against institutions that say otherwise. One such method that has lasted for centuries is the act of storytelling, which for African Americans over the years has taken many forms ranging from work songs, spirituals, and slave narratives to dramas, poetry, and novels. The last of these forms is exemplified by the contemporary counter-story created in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017). Aboard a spaceship in a post-climate catastrophe future, Solomon presents a society where institutional oppression and slavery remain upheld. With an Afrofuturist structure, Solomon pushes for a new vision of Black people’s subjectivity, and agency develops within and against systems that seek to deny them such. Aboard the HSS Matilda, residents are separated into the Upper and Lower Decks. Divided by Solomon’s imagined caste system, upperdeckers live a life of comfort, while the lowerdeckers ensure the ship’s day-to-day running. However, all are put in peril as a problem with the Matilda’s energy source causes a series of blackouts. Amidst the quest to solve the mystery of these blackouts, characters such as the protagonist Aster seek to find their identities. Following the notes left behind by her deceased mother, who was a former technician on the ship, Aster connects the mystery of the ship to that of her own identity. Thus, as the Matilda faces the instability and challenges brought on by the blackouts, Aster also takes the time to evaluate her own positionality. Through Aster’s exploration, An Unkindness of Ghosts becomes a counter-story of gender and sexuality. Under the oppressive caste system and the turmoil caused by blackouts, the lower deck communities become spaces for sexual and gendered violence. However, under this oppression, characters such as Aster fight to understand and claim their gender and sexual identities rather than those forced on them by the oppressive systems of Matilda. I argue that the novel offers a space to rethink Blackness, gender subjectivity, and sexual agency. While the characters operate within their own futuristic chattel slavery society, they also engage with conversations on gender and sexuality that dominate our present-day discourse. Thus, An Unkindness of Ghosts does not create an idyllic future of freedom and gender and sexual liberation. Instead, Solomon shows that Afrofuturism is a space in which it is possible to reconsider and imagine Black people’s relationship with gender and sexuality in the past and present so that the future creates new avenues of subjectivity and agency. [End Page 23] An Unkindness of Ghosts opens three hundred years after the destruction of the Great Lifehouse, the novel’s presentation of Earth, with Aster aboard the Matilda and preparing to amputate the foot of a lowerdeck child, Flick. Flick and Aster are united through their shared social status; both are lowerdeckers and belong to the Tarlander classification. The Tarlanders are the residents of P, Q, R, S, and T decks, and as Aster describes them, “as close to a nation as anything on Matilda” (Solomon 11). The Tarlanders provide the manual labor to sustain life onboard the Matilda. Each day thousands of lowerdeckers go to work on the Field Decks. Rotating around the ship’s artificial sun, known as Baby Sun or Baby, the Field Decks are described by Aster as being “of varying size, each of them a different field, forest, or orchard” (73). Also, an estimated eight thousand workers reported working the fields during Aster’s shift, with two of the Tarland decks represented (70). Though the Tarlanders exist physically and socially at the bottom of Matilda’s structure, they are crucial to its operation. They provide manual labor and material resources that keeps the Matilda afloat. Seventy years after the Matilda began its voyage, there had been a decline in the Tarlander population (19). Dependent upon the labor of the Tarlanders, this decline was of grave concern to the authorities of the Matilda, referred to as the Guards and the Sovereign...

Commentary – Advancing Nursing in Canada: Toward the Elimination of Anti-Black Racism

This commentary challenges historic and contemporary issues within nursing and provides direction toward a more inclusive future for nursing. This is a call-to-action for nurses, nursing students and nurse allies to advance effort toward the elimination of anti-Black racism in nursing in Canada. To achieve this, it is imperative to move beyond the performative and adopt practices that enable critical reflection and action. Addressing the manner in which exclusion is reinforced and perpetuated requires interrogation of four distinct yet interconnected processes of racial exclusion and discrimination. Notwithstanding, the future of nursing requires a critical examination of the role of nursing in and relationship with oppressive institutions, including prisons. Abolition, regarded as a radical stance, argues that beyond disproportional incarceration rates, prisons exist within a system of punishment that inflicts long-lasting irreparable mental and physical trauma upon individuals, families and communities. The effects of incarceration on mental, physical and spiritual health is a healthcare crisis that is in direct opposition to the core tenets of nursing and health.

Whiteness from the top down: systemic change as antiracist action in LIS

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is two-fold. The first is to inform the readers of the racist origins of libraries in America. Readers will learn about historic instances of systemic racism in libraries and those that persist today. The second purpose is to give readers examples of antiracist actions they can take on an individual level, in concert with library administration, and on the institutional level.Design/methodology/approachThis paper gives an overview of systemic racism in librarianship. Part I outlines the history of libraries and their institutional oppression origins in America. Part II reviews some of the current racial issues in Libraries and Information Science (LIS). Part III gives the author's viewpoint on how to incorporate antiracist action within libraries and how to decenter whiteness at the national level.FindingsThe authors found that libraries were established on institutional oppression and systemic racism, which continue to this day to center whiteness and disadvantage BIPOC. Having said that, now is the time to make changes, decenter whiteness and remove systemic barriers through antiracist actions. These actions will help increase the number of BIPOC working in libraries and improve the retention and promotion of those BIPOC too. If the American Library Association (ALA) heeds this call to action, Critical Race Theory (CRT) will become part of the Master's of Library and Information Science (MLIS), BIPOC will be better funded and supported, and the credentialing stigma will be removed.Originality/valueThis article highlights concrete action that should be taken beyond individual bias awareness and into systemic changes. It advocates for more critical awareness and daily antiracist action within the LIS field.