Not the Shark, but the Water: How Neutrality and Vocational Awe Intertwine to Uphold White Supremacy

Over half of the population in the United States used a public library in the year 2015 to 2016 (Horrigan 2016) and libraries are described by authors, philosophers, and intellectuals with lofty words such as temples, sacred places, and sanctuaries. Similarly, professional library literature extends this belief that the very existence of libraries creates democracy, learning, and civilization, and it conflates librarians’ work with the actual buildings themselves (Latimer 2011; Sweeney 2005). This conflation of profession and place creates a narrative that what librarians do must be “good,” because libraries are “good,” and “sacred places.” This narrative results in vocational awe, a phenomenon traced and defined by Ettarh as “the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique” (2018). Both neutrality and vocational awe have been codified as values of librarianship, and rarely have these values been challenged in trade and professional literature, nor their ties to White Supremacy examined. Neutrality, defined as “the state of not supporting or helping either side in a conflict, disagreement, or war,” has long been considered a library value. For the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on what Charles Mills describes as the “present period of de facto White Supremacy, when whites’ dominance is, for the most part, no longer constitutionally and juridically enshrined but 1