Flash exhibit: Black Lives Matter

Post by Violet Fox and Alex Kyrios

Since the most recent death of an African-American man in police custody, protesters have gathered around the world to speak out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. George Floyd is just the most recent name to be added to the list of Black lives destroyed by police brutality and racial discrimination. Here in the U.S., many librarians have been working to compile resource lists to shed light on the history and context behind the protests. We expect many works will be published about these protests, adding to existing literature about mass incarceration and racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, and the about the history of Black struggles for justice and peace. The books listed below are fundamental for understanding today’s protests; let’s explore where libraries are classing these works.

The new Jim Crow : mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander describes how systemic racial discrimination lives on even after the civil rights movement reforms of the 1960s. The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and young African-American men have been imprisoned at a rate far higher than their percentage in the population. This book has been classed by LC at 364.973 Criminal justice—criminology—United States, but you can see from the OCLC Classify tool that about 25% of WorldCat records for this book have an alternate class number: 305.8960973, a built number representing the sociological aspects of African Americans.

Law enforcement in the age of Black Lives Matter : policing black and brown bodies, edited by Sandra E. Weissinger and Dwayne A. Mack, is a fascinating look into the policing of minority communities. Chapters include “The Psychological Impact of Policing on African American Students” and “Police Use of Force: Practices, Policies, and the Law,” as well as chapters reflecting on immigrants’ experiences with border police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Libraries have classed this book at 364.3496073 African Americans—criminal offenders. Despite the questionable “criminal offenders” wording being used in WebDewey to describe people being policed, this classification does appropriately focus on the people who are being policed, not the police themselves.

Invisible no more : police violence against black women and women of color by Andrea J. Ritchie documents years of police violence towards Black women and girls and women of color. Ritchie describes how racial profiling and aggressive enforcement of minor offenses lead to repeated interactions with law enforcement and can ultimately end up with abuse by the police causing the deaths of marginalized women. Libraries have classed this work at 363.232 Patrol and surveillance, which is where many works about racial profiling have been classed. “Police brutality” is also indexed there. Do we need more specific numbers in this area?

When they call you a terrorist : a Black Lives Matter memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele is the story of Khan-Cullors, one of the cofounders of the Black Lives Matter movement. From a difficult and impoverished childhood, Khan-Cullors emerges with the awareness that only through building community and speaking truth to power can the Black and queer community she loves survive. Take a look at the classification chart for this book from Classify:

Some libraries have classed this work in 323.092 Civil rights leaders, while others have placed it with 305.8960973, and another third have classed it outside of the DDC, with biographies. (Some libraries prefer to collocate biographies rather than adding T1—092 to different numbers.) While most books in WorldCat have a relatively clear consensus about where they should be classed, this chart demonstrates dissension.

To help librarians classify similar works in the future, we’ve made a few updates to WebDewey this week. We’ve added new built numbers: one for the 2014 protests in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown, 323.1196073077865090512, and one for the 2020 protests in Minneapolis, 323.1196073077657909052. As we’ve seen in this post, there are several areas you should consider when classifying such works, so while these two new numbers are appropriate for works on the protests themselves, works focusing on the role of police should probably use a different base number. Unfortunately, the experiences of Michael Brown and George Floyd are not unique. WebDewey shows the components of these numbers, so you can use different Table 2 notation and Table 1 time periods for similar protests, e.g., Baltimore protests after the death of Freddie Gray 323.119607307526090512.

We’ve also mapped the LCSH “Black lives matter movement” to 323.1196073 African Americans—civil rights. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback, on this topic or any Dewey topic, at dewey@oclc.org. If you haven’t already, please see the post from OCLC Next on this topic.

Comments

[Roberta Chapman]

How do I subscribe to this blog's feed? I did click on the link on this page but took me to a page of HTML coding.

[Violet Fox]

Hi Roberta, you would need an RSS reader to subscribe to the blog. This can be done via an RSS reader app (for example, Feedly), or through your Internet browser. You can find information about choosing a reader app at this link: https://lifehacker.com/the-best-rss-readers-and-news-aggregation-apps-1839030732 or enabling the RSS reader ability within your Internet browser via this link: https://www.technorms.com/44712/follow-rss-feeds-in-chrome-safari-firefox.