#19: English isn't the national language →

From Emma:

This tip is more or less what got me writing this blog. I’ve been interested in the topic since library school, where one of my favorite instructors sent all of us out to do an ‘accessibility audit’ of our own neighborhood libraries. That audit was eye-opening in a horrifying way and it had been on my mind as a topic that deserved more attention on and off since then. However, what made me start making the list of tips was starting a new job where the non-English materials sat below a big sign that said “Foreign Languages.” I happened to walk past that collection on the path between my desk and the reference desk, and I probably walked by about 100 times before the absurdity of it finally struck me.

Very nervously, I broached to my boss that “foreign languages” probably wasn’t a great term since many of the people who used those books had lived in the area a long time, maybe since birth, and definitely were American. She thought about it for a moment and then admitted that she had just never thought about the name and that yes, she agreed it should be changed.

That particular collection was composed of several tiny sub-collections, each in a different language, so we couldn’t just re-label the section “Spanish/español” or “Russian/Ру́сский язы́к “ or whatever. We couldn’t think of a good all-encompassing name to put on a new sign (“Non-English” being awkward and “materials in other languages” being long and maybe not very clear), so what we ended up doing was just taking the sign down. The regular users of those collections already knew where they were (they’d been in the same part of the building for more than a decade), and because the collections were so small relative to the rest of the library, the reality was that people didn’t come across them via browsing anyway, even with the old sign—users who wanted them ended up asking for help at the desk and being walked over to the shelf.

My boss at the time was a progressive, thoughtful person of color who worked on the #WeNeedDiverseBooks initiative. Her colleagues were excellent librarians who I admired for their committment to making everyone welcome in the library. The fact that they walked by this sign literally thousands of times and its inappropriateness never occurred to them is a testament to how hard this stuff is. I wasn’t a better, more aware person than my colleagues were, I happened to be the one to spot it, and I wondered what all of us were walking right past that no one had been lucky enough to see yet. Especially because of the pretty severe problems that librarianship has historically had with diversity, very few people are likely to spontaneously notice things like this because they don’t affected white, middle-class, abled, native English-speaking people directly. The few librarians who don’t come from a privileged background shouldn’t have to bear the burden of fixing this stuff—it’s everyone’s responsibility. As public servants, it’s our job to notice because it affects the public even though it might not affect us.

I went online and starting looking for some kind of checklist, something like the accessibility audit I’d had to do in library school, but that covered way more than the physical barriers the accessibility audit had focused on identifying. I wasn’t looking for anything that would seem revelatory on the face of it, just for a tool that would help me spot stuff like our “Foreign Languages” sign before walking past it 100 times. I obviously didn’t have a lot of luck with that. There are some checklists out there, and I encourage you to do your own searching (I still do), but there wasn’t anything approaching the comprehensive list I was imagining. That’s more or less why this site exists now.

I’m sure I still walk by metaphorical “Foreign Language” signs all the time. If you’ve seen any that I haven’t, I’d be grateful if you’d point them out.