Relegated to the Margins: Faculty of Color, the Scholarly Record, and the Necessity of Antiracist Library Disruptions

Abstract

demic publishing, and scholarly communication more broadly, have been shaped by professions that are overwhelmingly white— academia, publishing, and librarianship. These professions have developed a scholarly communication system comprised of policies, practices, and beliefs that marginalize contributions by and about communities of color. Scholarly communication is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use” (ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee 2003). A core tenet of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is that racism is ordinary and pervasive in societal structures— scholarly communication is no exception. It is marked by a series of gatekeepers that judge the admissibility of research into the scholarly record, sending messages to People of Color that they do not belong in academia and their research is not valuable. The inequities in publishing are representative of racial power dynamics in greater society, reflecting and reinscribing White Supremacy over the construction of knowledge. Academic publishing, the publication of the products of scholarly research, is the primary means through which knowledge is validated and entered into the scholarly record. In order to get published, research products typically undergo editorial and peer review, through which decisions are made as to whether these products are valid and significant enough for publication. Critique of liberalism is a tenet of 8