This is starting in 50 minutes! We'll be tweeting any additional information and answering questions there isn't time to get to during the presentation here in this thread. https://twitter.com/LibrarianMelody/status/1354136558639714305

Kicking off our (Not) Another Anti-Racist Reading Group panel!

Not all of our panelists are on Twitter, so some replies may take some time as we communicate with them and relay that information afterward.

To learn more about the Keyauwee and Saura, please visit:
https://www.ncpedia.org/keyauwee-indians
https://www.ncpedia.org/saura-indians 

Chatham House Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule

Progressive Stack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack

You can find our presentation and a selection of some of the materials we used here: http://bit.ly/NAARRG 

Shouting out @OBPlibrarian here! Olivia is a current MLIS student at the UNCG SILS program and a student rep on the library's diversity committee. Olivia's participation was incredibly valuable, both for her perspective as a student and as an outsider to the library's structure.

We did our best to balance the work Olivia would be doing as an unpaid student rep to the diversity committee with her desire for opportunities to do this work to supplement her MLIS education, and we took steps to ensure she was clearly cited as a participant in the committees--

-- and working groups, as well as inviting her to a grant application we submitted (and received). We would have loved to have had her on this presentation, but the scheduling unfortunately didn't work out this time. If you have any questions for Olivia about her role--

--in this process, you can direct them to her here, or we are happy to relay them to her.

ok, there were a lot of questions that didn't get addressed in the presentation -- we're going to take a break and then try to address the ones we captured here in thread!

We're going to come back to this tomorrow, and the link to the recording should be up by then as well. In the meanwhile, if you have any questions or comment, feel free to direct them here!

Answering some of the Qs we got yesterday -- we got a LOT, & I think I was able to screencap most of them but might have missed some. If so, apologies! We might not get to all of them today. I’ll be summarizing some q’s since we often got multiples or similar asks.

Since we’re trying to make sure most of these get *an* answer, we aren’t all answering every question individually. If you’d like to hear from someone specifically, feel free to reply with the request. We may also come back to some of them as we have more time & energy to do so.

Pls keep in mind that this takes up a lot of time, we have our regular job duties, and that we might miss some notifications. We will try to follow up on questions here but reserve the right to disengage if it becomes too much or too time consuming.

For questions where multiple of us wanted to answer, I”ll post the question and then we will branch the thread off for replies. I’ll be posting on Suzanne’s behalf since she isn’t on Twitter. And here we go!

First, the recording is now available from ASERL: http://www.aserl.org/archive/ 

Q1: Someone asked about @sofiayleung’s #claps2020 presentation, which can be found here:

Q2: We had some questions about library and participation stats, some of which we addressed in the webinar.

Q3: We got several questions about who was invited to participate (patrons, library workers only, etc) and how we promoted it or encouraged participation. We'll come back to some other questions we got about soliciting participation later downthread.

Q4: Were there only BIPOC spaces or discussion time?

Q5: Were there any external UNCG consultants or collaborators?

(we're doing these in batches -- more Q & A coming later as we have time)

Q6: How do you all define anti-racism?

We had a fair number of questions about moderation, which are going to be the next batch.

Q7: There was a question about the role @OBPlibrarian had. I addressed this a bit in the webinar as well as upthread, but we wanted to have a place where this discussion could continue, as well as a way for Olivia to reply herself, as she wasn't able to be on the panel.

Q8: Do you have advice on successful approaches to calling people in? For example talking to them about the considerable about of time they are speaking.

Q9: How did you prepare reading group participants for the fact there may be conflict in discussions and help them get comfortable with being challenged?

Q10: Do you have any strategies for allowing emotions to be expressed in the face of racism/homophobia/misogyny? Showing anger is so verboten at my institution but it’s unfair to expect a calm response from someone saying/doing something offensive

Q11: Do you have ideas for how this might work in a smaller organization with a long history of power imbalances that maybe doesn’t have some of the room for anonymity that you used in this group?

Q12: At our institution, anonymous spaces have become where we get toxic feedback. How can you construct those spaces so people feel safe speaking truth to power rather than a place to be “safely” anti-diversity?

Q13: We had a few questions about mentoring circles.

And that's it for today (there were a LOT of questions) -- going to add more in the next day or two.

Regarding mentoring circles more broadly: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07294360902725017
As I mentioned in the webinar, we had a colleague, Dr. Claire Heckel, who had had prior experience with formal mentoring circles and who proposed them as a 1/2

possible method of combatting some of the siloing we had identified as a source of so many misunderstandings and issues. She was kind enough to explain them to us and helm the effort to get the mentoring circles going at our institution. 2/2