My shoes. Walk in them.
A valued local colleague asked me the other day whether I would be going to next year’s code4lib conference.
Well, honestly? No. Not this year and I daresay not any other. At best, considering the history, that could only be an exercise in overanxious, easily-triggered people (myself hardly least) harshing each other’s mellows. At worst, I’d be forcefully reminded why I exited that group to begin with. Hope not, but you know? behaviors change slowly, and attitudes more slowly still.
As evidenced by a recent uproar on the web4lib mailing list, started by a Swiftian yahoo with a masculine name whose ethnicity I do not know (but I’ll eat my brand-new noise-cancelling headphones if he isn’t as white as I am). The code4lib conference offers two diversity scholarships, one for women and one for people of color. Mr. Swiftian Yahoo doesn’t think that should be. It’s patronizing, don’t you know, and librarianship is female-dominated anyway, innit?
Numbers don’t necessarily equal power, Mr. Yahoo, and in systems librarianship women don’t even have the numbers. Bet you didn’t know that. I bet, in fact, that you still don’t believe it. You don’t have to. It doesn’t mess with your job. It doesn’t cut you off from valuable support systems. You are never the freak in the room. You don’t have to worry that you aren’t credible in the eyes of potential employers, that you’re cut off from one of the more lucrative parts of the profession. You don’t have to go to conferences and watch a parade of people onstage who look nothing like you. You don’t have it assumed that people like you aren’t on that stage because they didn’t put in the effort to get there. You don’t have it assumed that you’re onstage because after all, we gotta have tokens, even if they’re inferior. You don’t have to worry that the vendors on the exhibit floor (or the developers of the open-source software you depend on) aren’t taking you seriously. People like you are not the constant butt of sophomoric locker-room humor and jawdroppingly, grotesquely offensive statements tossed off like they don’t mean a thing. People like you don’t have to watch their profession, their own profession reduce them to their sexualized body shapes. People like you don’t have to cluster at conferences to avoid—well, people like you!
These are my shoes, Mr. Yahoo. My sensible low-heeled librarian Munros. I have big feet; they might well fit you. Howsabout you walk a little in ’em before you open your big fat thoughtlessly privileged mouth? Before you have the gall to assault a few guys who are at least aware of the problem and singing the right notes on the subject?
And if you can’t be arsed to walk in my shoes, or at least listen to me about my experiences walking in ’em, you need to shut the everliving hell up.
And then maybe discussions about women might include women, instead of Swiftian yahoos who think they know all about us and can tell us what we ought to find patronizing. Wow, imagine that. Inclusion. Voice!
The web4lib discussion didn’t include women for quite a space, until Darci Hanning and Karen G. Schneider stepped in at last. It’d be funny if it weren’t so damn angry-making—and yes, I’m pretty mad right now, if you hadn’t guessed. I’m grateful to the men who spoke up for code4lib, don’t mistake me; that’s necessary, helpful, and valuable. Not to mention that it takes guts. But I can’t help being irked at the same old pattern of being talked about, at, and around instead of talked with.
This is bad of me, but I can’t help feeling just a wee tiny bit of schadenfreude, because some of the same people who jumped all over one male code4libber because he had the temerity to challenge a sexist marketing tactic are now finding themselves jumped on in essentially the same way. I think they’re learning the hard way how wretchedly difficult it really is to change behaviors and attitudes.
That’s healthy. Personally, I don’t think the code4lib scholarships are actually about the women and people of color; I tend to agree that in and of themselves, they’re a sop and they don’t accomplish much. As symbols, though, they’re important; they create mindfulness. They’re fundamentally about not letting the privileged folk who don’t have to think about the problem (because it doesn’t directly impact them) turn into Swiftian yahoos because they’ve blithely forgotten the problem exists. It’s about holding their noses to the grindstone until the problem is solved.
And when the problem is solved—when systems librarianship looks like the rest of the profession, when I have the same tech-support networks everybody else does, when I don’t have to put up with sexist crap or people who defend it, when a woman is treated as courteously as a man and taken as seriously as a man in all professional and professionally-liminal contexts—I’ll be the first to say that the gender-diversity scholarship is patronizing and ought to be done away with.
The problem? Is so very, very, very not solved. As Mr. Swiftian Yahoo has amply demonstrated. Kudos to code4lib for being mindful, and defending that mindfulness.
Edited to add: Missed Darci Hanning’s post to the list and shouldn’t have. Fixed omission, and I apologize for it.