When books about President Barack Obama arrived at the Bard High School, Early College library in Queens, New York, they were coded as 300 (Social Science) instead of 900 (History).
Librarian Jess deCourcy Hinds raised what she thought was an obvious question: Why isn’t the President of the United States listed as history?
Well, the answer was simple and yet confounding: He was black.
I’ll never forget where I was when I learned that the Dewey Decimal System was racist – and intentionally so.
The Dewey Decimal System categorizes books about Black people as Social Science books. The “system” in this case had no way to conceive of a black person being President.
However, if a Black person becomes President, books about him (or her) should probably be filed in the 900s (History) along with the other Presidents.
But the system didn’t know that. The way it was constructed, it could not conceive of a Black President, and thus could not file books about him where they belonged. This is the poster child of systemic racism.
In an episode of the WNYC Studios “On The Media”, Molly Schwartz dug into the systemically biased structure of not one but two different widely used classification systems.
The Dewey Decimal Classification System is a method that dates back to 1876 and is used by most libraries around the world. The second most popular system, the Library of Congress Classification System, was published in the early 1900s and based on the organization of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library. These systems help patrons find books on the shelves and facilitate resource-sharing between libraries. But they also encode bias into the structure of libraries.
Summary of episode ‘Bias in the Library’
But there was more even more racism built into the system. Black poets were placed in the 300s too, instead of in “poetry,” because they were black.
But if a poet was white they were classified simply as ‘poets.’
You see, when it comes to white artists and Presidents, the system was colorblind. Whites needed no special coding. However, the colorblindness of the system ended with whites.
Interestingly, a second prominently-used classification system was borrowed from an early American whose library was among the most highly-regarded libraries in the world. The library at Monticello created and maintained by Thomas Jefferson. It also used classification systems that did not anticipate people of color creating books, much less having books written about their accomplishments.
This classification failure persisted even if the prominent Black individuals were his own descendants, and went on to publish their own books, like this one by my former student Shannon Lanier.
You can learn more and listen to the article here at the On The Media site.
