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Setting: Our monthly staff meeting. The majority of the time was going to be taken up by our new required Diversity and Inclusion training. This would be the second time I have seen it in action, and I was most definitely hoping that the second time around would be less terrible than the first time around.
It was not.
Our HR people lead the training, which could be good or terrible, depending on how much you trusted them to get things right. Based on experiences outside the current training, the opinions of the matter were going to be pretty low. We've already been having trouble with things like pronouns and harassment of individuals about their gender-nonconforming dress (from supervisors as well as peers - there's been at least one person who left the library system over direct harrassment.) The first time through, the HR people played excerpts of TED Talk videos: The Surprising Solution To Workplace Diversity, colloquially, the "Rent-A-Minority" talk because of the website associated with the project, Rent-A-Minority, and Implicit Bias - How it effects us and how we push through it, both of which were intended to point out that diversity and inclusion as a topic have a bad rap in organizations because it's been built up as this HR nightmare that only comes around when someone is accusing you of not doing enough and because there are a lot of people who bring their own baggage to the table when they look at and interact with other people in their organization. At least some of which they don't consciously recognize they're carrying with them.
These points would be good ones to make if we could then contextualize them in the ways that libraries and their staff do these things, too - the American Library Association Midwinter meeting just passed had a few talks and a panel about the library as an institution and the problems it creates by being a mostly white women's profession. And if we could weld that to the historical practices of the library (generally speaking, libraries have been on the side of the racists and the censors more than they have been fighting against it) and the debate about how the idea of neutrality as it applies to libraries is bullshit because selection decesions include and exclude, and that a library that intends to be equitable can't be "neutral", because equitability requires active work to make everyone both welcome and represented in library programming.
These opportunities were not taken, mostly because they only set themselves 90 minutes to finish the entirety of their training, and I knew this wouldn't be long enough, given that I had a workshop focusing solely on trans issues and the library that only skimmed the surface and it was scheduled for four hours. There's no way that this item was going to be anything more than the most surface-level of surface-level treatments on everything.
The real purpose of the program became apparent, given that many of the things that would be useful for a good discussion of these issues were relegated to appendices that would not be covered in the program. No, the actual purpose of the program was to inform us, poorly, that federal and state law prohibit discrimination against protected classes and there are guides (which we can read later) about how those things apply to things like trans issues and pronouns and the like. That there are library policies that prohibit these things as well, and that we are required, as staffers, to report them to HR if we are part of them or observe conversations or actions that are prohibited as well. There hasn't been any indications as to what constitutes such a conversation, nor any examples about what might be forbidden. Apparently, we'll know it when we see it.
This is a terrible idea. Because people will avoid situations that they could get in trouble for when there's no clear guidelines about where the line is. People who want to learn more will take the initiative, and even then, they might mess things up. People who don't want to learn will throw their hands up and declare it too complicated and do nothing, or say they're too afraid of screwing it up to do any learning of their own. If what we're supposed to be doing is learning and understanding and then applying that knowledge to create better customer service and staff cohesion, we've screwed it up terribly with this idea of "you have to report when someone's not being respectful to someone else, but we're not going to say what it is."
The final part of the program, in both incarnations, is a theoretical workshop on microaggressions, a term that doesn't actually get explained or defined during the workshop, and it shows that the HR folk don't actually understand it all that well themselves. In small groups, we each get a slip that has a situation on it, like
What the HR people are also ensuring we think about, though, is that it might have been one person of a similar racial group talking to another about wanting to make friends or contacts, or to be complimentary for someone they apparently know is new to the country about the strength of their English skills. In other words, it might not have been meant maliciously. Which is a thing you can highlight, but it should take a back seat to the idea that it was still a microaggression against a person, and that the response that came through, about how the staffer doesn't need to know, probably indicates how it was received. But no, we have to make sure that we're not assuming that things were terrible or that someone was being racist. Which entirely undercuts the idea that you're going for when you talk about microaggressions.
And that took up the rest of the time. Suffice to day, now that the survey has come through and asked my opinion about it, I have let them know about how little I found helpful out of it and what could be done to improve.
There is a small bright spot - just recently, the library introduced name badge options that allow someone to put their pronouns on their name badge. However, they've only offered this option on a name badge that provides the full name of the staff person. So there's still some work to do about reminding them that we do not want people to have to choose between being able to express their pronouns and not being stalked by people who have their full name. That will come soon enough.
And then, after that particular bit of no-yay, during the week that followed, I had to be the person in charge with someone. Now, my library is situated in a community that is composed primarily of subdivisions, condominiums, and the occasional apartment complex or mobile home park, but those latter two have essentially been pushed to the fringes of the community. There's also the school systems and the like, but the general gist of this community is that there are a lot of parents that both work or relatives raising children, and there's nowhere for our teenagers to go that isn't school or work when the weather is poor enough that the parks aren't really open and usable.
So they come to the library. And because they are teenagers, that means they're in the phase of life where they are testing boundaries and exploring the possibilities of freedom of language that they don't get in school. What that ends up sounding and looking like to the other people in the library (and more than a few of the staff) is that the teenagers are behaving badly, talking too loudly and swearing far too much. We try to regularly remind them about noise levels and conversational topics, and provide consequences when things get out of hand on either of those situations. We're still finding the balance between the people that believe a library should be silent enough to pinpoint where the pin was dropped and the reality that children and teenagers and adults are going to generate noise in the library. (It doesn't help that the staff are essentially all being asked to compromise on their personal beliefs about the matter toward a shared understanding of where the line is.)
One of the patrons decided we weren't taking care of the teenagers sufficiently swiftly and decisively to his liking, and so he went in to the teen area to try and enforce his own idea on them. While one of my staff people is over there talking to the teens about the issues of noise and language. Thankfully, it was only talking rather than anything physical. This is the part where I have to be the person in charge - there's been enough attempts from the staff to get the noise level to stay down at this point, so first matter of business is getting the teens to take a break outside the library so that we can re-establish a baseline.
Once that's done, though, I ask the staff person who observed the patron trying to handle the teens themselves to point them out to me, so that I can talk to them about the issue. Because inserting yourself into a situation where there are staff on duty who are taking care of it is inappropriate behavior. If you are frustrated with the matter, you can talk to the staff, but putting yourself in the situation without the right kind of training is asking for the situation to get worse, not better. (Not to mention where you lack the authority to actually make change happen, so I won't be surprised at all if you become the target of mockery and derision, too.)
I introduced myself and asked if this was the right person to talk to, and proceeded to explain that the person's behavior was inappropriate and the staff was handling the matter. The person responded by denying that we were being effective at our job, and routinely turned his back to me to point at my other staff member about not doing her job and invade her personal space while doing so. To the point that after a couple times of doing it, I physically stepped into the gap to emphasise the point of who this person should be talking to, since I'm the one talking to them about their problems. (And, y'know, I'm the person in charge.)
After an exchange where the other gentleman berates us for not doing our jobs and handling the teen problems, and threatened to call the police on the teens the next time he feels they're not being handled well enough by the staff, I'm ready to tell them to leave for the day, but I'm mostly at the level of "if you continue to behave inappropriately and you continue to insult and intimidate my staff, you're going to leave for the day."
He gets the hint, and though, while not formally dismissed, he's on his way out and we start the paperwork for documentation purposes, but then he apparently shouts a profanity very loudly as he heads out into the atrium, where some of the teenagers are cooling their jets. And proceeds to start haranguing them again. At which point I formally dismiss him from the building. Of course, he doesn't believe that I have the authority to do so, and says I'll have to call the police to get him to leave.
I'm done arguing with this person, so that's what I end up doing. He leaves before the police arrive, so whatever. Documentation, notification, et cetera.
This reconfirms my belief that I would make a terrible manager, and that I have exactly no interest in ever doing so for this library system. And also, they're not paying me enough to handle these issues, because I just did a manager's work (the actual manager was in off-site meetings all day) for a librarian's pay scale. This idea of being person-in-charge has always been a backdoor method of making the librarians managers without actually having to pay them for it.
So that's been my week (or two). If I had wanted to be a manager, I would have taken more management courses in my information school. Instead, I keep getting Peter Principled on a regular basis.
It was not.
Our HR people lead the training, which could be good or terrible, depending on how much you trusted them to get things right. Based on experiences outside the current training, the opinions of the matter were going to be pretty low. We've already been having trouble with things like pronouns and harassment of individuals about their gender-nonconforming dress (from supervisors as well as peers - there's been at least one person who left the library system over direct harrassment.) The first time through, the HR people played excerpts of TED Talk videos: The Surprising Solution To Workplace Diversity, colloquially, the "Rent-A-Minority" talk because of the website associated with the project, Rent-A-Minority, and Implicit Bias - How it effects us and how we push through it, both of which were intended to point out that diversity and inclusion as a topic have a bad rap in organizations because it's been built up as this HR nightmare that only comes around when someone is accusing you of not doing enough and because there are a lot of people who bring their own baggage to the table when they look at and interact with other people in their organization. At least some of which they don't consciously recognize they're carrying with them.
These points would be good ones to make if we could then contextualize them in the ways that libraries and their staff do these things, too - the American Library Association Midwinter meeting just passed had a few talks and a panel about the library as an institution and the problems it creates by being a mostly white women's profession. And if we could weld that to the historical practices of the library (generally speaking, libraries have been on the side of the racists and the censors more than they have been fighting against it) and the debate about how the idea of neutrality as it applies to libraries is bullshit because selection decesions include and exclude, and that a library that intends to be equitable can't be "neutral", because equitability requires active work to make everyone both welcome and represented in library programming.
These opportunities were not taken, mostly because they only set themselves 90 minutes to finish the entirety of their training, and I knew this wouldn't be long enough, given that I had a workshop focusing solely on trans issues and the library that only skimmed the surface and it was scheduled for four hours. There's no way that this item was going to be anything more than the most surface-level of surface-level treatments on everything.
The real purpose of the program became apparent, given that many of the things that would be useful for a good discussion of these issues were relegated to appendices that would not be covered in the program. No, the actual purpose of the program was to inform us, poorly, that federal and state law prohibit discrimination against protected classes and there are guides (which we can read later) about how those things apply to things like trans issues and pronouns and the like. That there are library policies that prohibit these things as well, and that we are required, as staffers, to report them to HR if we are part of them or observe conversations or actions that are prohibited as well. There hasn't been any indications as to what constitutes such a conversation, nor any examples about what might be forbidden. Apparently, we'll know it when we see it.
This is a terrible idea. Because people will avoid situations that they could get in trouble for when there's no clear guidelines about where the line is. People who want to learn more will take the initiative, and even then, they might mess things up. People who don't want to learn will throw their hands up and declare it too complicated and do nothing, or say they're too afraid of screwing it up to do any learning of their own. If what we're supposed to be doing is learning and understanding and then applying that knowledge to create better customer service and staff cohesion, we've screwed it up terribly with this idea of "you have to report when someone's not being respectful to someone else, but we're not going to say what it is."
The final part of the program, in both incarnations, is a theoretical workshop on microaggressions, a term that doesn't actually get explained or defined during the workshop, and it shows that the HR folk don't actually understand it all that well themselves. In small groups, we each get a slip that has a situation on it, like
A staffer at the help desk says "Your English is very good. Where are you from?" The person replies, "You don't need to know that to check out my materials."Which, yes, that's a microaggression, but what we're supposed to do is analyze all the assumptions present in the scenario and figure out what we can do as staffers to not cause issues. Most groups figure out that asking a person where they're from carries a bad assumption about their citizenship status and a further stereotype about good English" as a marker of being a "good foreigner". The kind of thing you're leaning on when you call a black man "articulate", which shows you're expecting all black men to use the cantiest form of AAVE and are surprised when they don't.
What the HR people are also ensuring we think about, though, is that it might have been one person of a similar racial group talking to another about wanting to make friends or contacts, or to be complimentary for someone they apparently know is new to the country about the strength of their English skills. In other words, it might not have been meant maliciously. Which is a thing you can highlight, but it should take a back seat to the idea that it was still a microaggression against a person, and that the response that came through, about how the staffer doesn't need to know, probably indicates how it was received. But no, we have to make sure that we're not assuming that things were terrible or that someone was being racist. Which entirely undercuts the idea that you're going for when you talk about microaggressions.
And that took up the rest of the time. Suffice to day, now that the survey has come through and asked my opinion about it, I have let them know about how little I found helpful out of it and what could be done to improve.
There is a small bright spot - just recently, the library introduced name badge options that allow someone to put their pronouns on their name badge. However, they've only offered this option on a name badge that provides the full name of the staff person. So there's still some work to do about reminding them that we do not want people to have to choose between being able to express their pronouns and not being stalked by people who have their full name. That will come soon enough.
And then, after that particular bit of no-yay, during the week that followed, I had to be the person in charge with someone. Now, my library is situated in a community that is composed primarily of subdivisions, condominiums, and the occasional apartment complex or mobile home park, but those latter two have essentially been pushed to the fringes of the community. There's also the school systems and the like, but the general gist of this community is that there are a lot of parents that both work or relatives raising children, and there's nowhere for our teenagers to go that isn't school or work when the weather is poor enough that the parks aren't really open and usable.
So they come to the library. And because they are teenagers, that means they're in the phase of life where they are testing boundaries and exploring the possibilities of freedom of language that they don't get in school. What that ends up sounding and looking like to the other people in the library (and more than a few of the staff) is that the teenagers are behaving badly, talking too loudly and swearing far too much. We try to regularly remind them about noise levels and conversational topics, and provide consequences when things get out of hand on either of those situations. We're still finding the balance between the people that believe a library should be silent enough to pinpoint where the pin was dropped and the reality that children and teenagers and adults are going to generate noise in the library. (It doesn't help that the staff are essentially all being asked to compromise on their personal beliefs about the matter toward a shared understanding of where the line is.)
One of the patrons decided we weren't taking care of the teenagers sufficiently swiftly and decisively to his liking, and so he went in to the teen area to try and enforce his own idea on them. While one of my staff people is over there talking to the teens about the issues of noise and language. Thankfully, it was only talking rather than anything physical. This is the part where I have to be the person in charge - there's been enough attempts from the staff to get the noise level to stay down at this point, so first matter of business is getting the teens to take a break outside the library so that we can re-establish a baseline.
Once that's done, though, I ask the staff person who observed the patron trying to handle the teens themselves to point them out to me, so that I can talk to them about the issue. Because inserting yourself into a situation where there are staff on duty who are taking care of it is inappropriate behavior. If you are frustrated with the matter, you can talk to the staff, but putting yourself in the situation without the right kind of training is asking for the situation to get worse, not better. (Not to mention where you lack the authority to actually make change happen, so I won't be surprised at all if you become the target of mockery and derision, too.)
I introduced myself and asked if this was the right person to talk to, and proceeded to explain that the person's behavior was inappropriate and the staff was handling the matter. The person responded by denying that we were being effective at our job, and routinely turned his back to me to point at my other staff member about not doing her job and invade her personal space while doing so. To the point that after a couple times of doing it, I physically stepped into the gap to emphasise the point of who this person should be talking to, since I'm the one talking to them about their problems. (And, y'know, I'm the person in charge.)
After an exchange where the other gentleman berates us for not doing our jobs and handling the teen problems, and threatened to call the police on the teens the next time he feels they're not being handled well enough by the staff, I'm ready to tell them to leave for the day, but I'm mostly at the level of "if you continue to behave inappropriately and you continue to insult and intimidate my staff, you're going to leave for the day."
He gets the hint, and though, while not formally dismissed, he's on his way out and we start the paperwork for documentation purposes, but then he apparently shouts a profanity very loudly as he heads out into the atrium, where some of the teenagers are cooling their jets. And proceeds to start haranguing them again. At which point I formally dismiss him from the building. Of course, he doesn't believe that I have the authority to do so, and says I'll have to call the police to get him to leave.
I'm done arguing with this person, so that's what I end up doing. He leaves before the police arrive, so whatever. Documentation, notification, et cetera.
This reconfirms my belief that I would make a terrible manager, and that I have exactly no interest in ever doing so for this library system. And also, they're not paying me enough to handle these issues, because I just did a manager's work (the actual manager was in off-site meetings all day) for a librarian's pay scale. This idea of being person-in-charge has always been a backdoor method of making the librarians managers without actually having to pay them for it.
So that's been my week (or two). If I had wanted to be a manager, I would have taken more management courses in my information school. Instead, I keep getting Peter Principled on a regular basis.
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