Steve Thomas: Tracie, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on today.
Tracie D. Hall: Thanks for having me. Steve.
Steve Thomas: I wanted to start out with asking how you got involved with libraries in the first place. What drew you to the field?
Tracie D. Hall: Well, I’ve been a lifelong library user and I have even heard some tales from my brother who used to walk me to the library that a Saturday and a library for me was an all-day affair when I was really young and I wanted to stay for all the story times. The story times were the point for me, and I even stayed for story times that weren’t in my age group and even heard that I probably scooted towards the front in those and maybe, may have acted out some of the stories turning towards the rest of the children, maybe who were younger than me. So I think I’ve been a lifelong library user and my family certainly encouraged that, my grandmother in particular encouraged that.
But I think in terms of the possibility of working in libraries, it wasn’t until I was directing a homeless shelter for young people that I started to see the connection between low levels of literacy and chronic homelessness or people being unhoused, chronically long-term situations there, and also to poverty. So seeing those connections between low levels of literacy and limited information access and what they meant long-term, I think as an antidote to some of that, reaching out to our local public library, which was Santa Monica Public Library. When I was working in the shelter and trying to connect our residents for the short times that they might be in the shelter to the public library, I really started to see public libraries as having this tremendous capacity to support some of those needs. And I think that lit the fire in me, and then shortly thereafter, I would go on to start work at Seattle Public Library as a young adult services coordinator, but at that particular time, I wasn’t a librarian, so that was the beginning of my journey.
Steve Thomas: And you went to Washington, is that right? For your library school?
Tracie D. Hall: Yeah. I went to the iSchool at the University of Washington while I was at Seattle actually. I hadn’t intended, even though I really had this tremendous respect broadening all the time, the more I worked at Seattle Public Library. I hadn’t necessarily thought of myself as a librarian. Certainly there wasn’t a lot of talk about, at that particular time, librarians being poets or painters or the type of activists that I think that I was, at least I wasn’t as exposed to that, and so I thought, “Oh, I’ll be doing other things. Maybe I’ll become a social worker. I’m gonna get my MSW, maybe I’ll go on and get a PhD.” But it was during the time I was at Seattle Public Library that ALA launched the Spectrum Scholarship Program. And I heard about it because Satia Orange, who was then Director of the Office of Literacy and Outreach Services, came to Seattle, I think to give a talk, and ended up turning it into a recruitment trip. We were connected. She told me about the Spectrum and I think that night I applied for Spectrum and library school or sometime in the next few days, and that really changed the course of my professional career for sure.
Steve Thomas: We’re gonna talk about some of ALA’s diversity work a little bit later, but that’s obviously some proof there that that kind of program can work to get people into the field, cause she went out and recruited…
Tracie D. Hall: Obviously Spectrum is critical because the American Library Association continues to be the largest driver of diversity in terms of having a workforce diversity program in the sector and then Emerging Leaders in general. I think there are a lot of early career programs that ALA has invested in where you see the return on impact. And I also have to give a shout out to our new PLA President Maria, who is also a product of Spectrum. So I think that we are seeing, and we’ll see over time, we’ll continue to see, the return on investment and even Lessa Pelayo-Lozada, who is our new ALA President overall is a product of the Emerging Leaders program. So I think in our professional lifetimes we’re seeing that those programs do matter.
Steve Thomas: Before you were the Executive Director, you had previously worked for ALA in the Office for Diversity. Can you talk about the work that you did there?
Tracie D. Hall: Yes. Actually, my first introduction to being an ALA staff member was directing the Office for Diversity, which is now merged with the Office of Literacy and Outreach Services, and now called the Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services. When I came to the Office for Diversity, one thing I have to say is that Spectrum was still an initiative. It wasn’t necessarily as woven into the fabric of the Association, and at the time I came. In the early 2000s we were entering in the University of Michigan decision about diversity and about whether or not diversity recruitment was legal or not. And so there was like really, I think a moment of really needing to re-up that commitment to say that we think that this is important for the field, and we were able to concretize that by not only people like Betty Turock, Carla Hayden, Camila Alire and others, so many who were really dedicated to Spectrum and to what it represented, supporting Spectrum with funding from advocating that we received further funding from our endowment, but also we were able to write two major IMLS grants to broaden Spectrum’s reach to increase the number of scholars.
Dr. EJ Josie, the former founder of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association was alive then, and he was ailing as he was older then, an octogenarian, but he was so vibrantly alive in terms of his thinking. I remember reading a lot of his work while I was at the Office for Diversity, and in some of his writings, he was just really advocating for the diversity of the LIS professorate and how important that would be to long-term diversity in the field. And I actually asked someone for his number, and I think he might have been in an assisted living facility. I can’t remember exactly where he was, but I started calling him at night, and we would talk through his writings and I was able to use some of what he had written, but also where he was in his life, to write a grant to IMLS for PhD students, and I called, I actually went on vacation and I used that time to actually call ten library schools, the ones that I thought might have some of the most competitive PhD programs, and ask them if they would provide half of the support for a PhD student, and we could write the IMLS grant for the other half, and every single school, starting with Pitt, where Dr. Josie had taught said yes, every single one of them, and I was really excited.
So, we did a lot of things. We started a diversity newsletter at that time because it was very important to get the practitioners, especially BIPOC practitioners, to get their experiences in writing. We really saw the need to diversify the literature during that time. Also, we were able to do a lot of consulting to the field and just do a lot of firsts. There were so many. We also focused on rural and geographically isolated communities and diversifying the librarian workforce in those communities. So I’m really pleased, because I feel like that sort of ferocity, that relentless commitment to diversity and to racial equity and to all of the manifestations of diversity in terms of the human experience really let me know that when I came back to ALA or when I was asked to throw my hat in the ring, that I wouldn’t have to compromise, Steve, in those areas, because right now the thing that is most important to me in my life is justice and social justice. So I knew that the track record that I’d established at ALA meant that they, I was a known quantity when it comes to that commitment.
Steve Thomas: Can you tell listeners a little bit about what you do as the Executive Director for people who maybe don’t know what that job entails?
Tracie D. Hall: Yeah. Well, it is ultimately to set the operational strategy as well as the financial strategy for the entire Association. That’s inclusive of all 35 plus units that we have, eight divisions, offices, and a lot of service units that power the work that we do. And to do that, obviously in concert with the board, our members, stakeholders, et cetera.
Steve Thomas: You obviously joined ALA at a pretty challenging time, not only just from the financial issues that came out, but then also the pandemic. So at this moment, what do you see as the biggest challenges that ALA is facing?
Tracie D. Hall: I think the biggest challenge is really to embrace the tremendous opportunities that we face. I think the thing for the Association is that we are at a time when the notion of information as essential infrastructure is being articulated, the theory of that. I think that we are seeing in our lifetime this redefinition of infrastructure, inclusive of course of transportation, all these other things, but understanding that access to information, digital and otherwise is absolutely necessary to keep our communities vibrant and viable. And we’re also at a time ALA, as it gets ready to turn 150 years old, is existing at a time when three of our primary quality of life indicators -access to education, access to employment and access to public health- are all predicated on information access, digital and otherwise.
And we have to be, as Emerson would say, as real as the things we seek. Today, no matter what people think about, if they’re in the field or even proximate to it, if they wanna have a definitive answer or a definitive direction to move in, they come back to ALA. Other associations, library associations in the field that are smaller or more specialized, if they want to chart a particular course, they always come back and say, ‘We’re thinking this. What is ALA thinking?”
ALA is really the coral reef for the field. And I don’t take that lightly because I have seen the coral reef. I’ve been blessed to actually see it and see all of the larger, more complete ecosystem that it’s a part of, and to see the organisms that rely on it. And I’ve come to see ALA in the same way. As the Association goes, so goes the field. When we are strong and able to advocate really effectively, we see things like the ubiquitous internet. We see things like low internet rates, rates that have been low enough to allow us to do what we’re doing today and to make that accessible to most, but not all people. But we also see ALA at a point now where our Council, ALA’s Council, most recently declared access to internet a human right, which means that we have to lobby and push for a free internet.
When I think about ALA, I think we have to diversify our revenue. I do wanna say this, especially as our field talks about finances and especially because a lot of our colleagues in the field have budgets that are presented to them or given to them. For ALA 93-96% of our revenue at any particular time is generated revenue, it’s earned revenue. So what I applied ALA for is being able to reach almost 150 years old as a 501(c)(3) and to do the amazing thing of generating over 90% of its revenue in its entire lifespan. That’s unprecedented anywhere.
What I think ALA has done is to allow some of those revenue streams to get a little bit long in the tooth without diversifying them. So now under my leadership, we have an opportunity and with the amazing staff we have and the board who is my obviously necessary and needed and vital thought partner, we have an opportunity to pursue three other impact streams that generate both revenue as well as membership. And those are areas where we are already either the current leader or expected leader, but we haven’t necessarily articulated that, and that’s continuing education, data design and research, and also contributed revenue, which is allowing us to continue to provide grants to the field, whether it’s the dissemination of hotspots, setting up small business centers, workforce development programs, and most recently, some of the largest grants that we will ever have given between $30-$50,000 that are supporting libraries in trying to shore up their COVID related, as well as post pandemic, library services to help communities recover.
Steve Thomas: Obviously members and dues is a big part of that. How can you make ALA more attractive to library workers in the field to make them want to join? What is it that you can tell them about ALA that you should be a part of this?
Tracie D. Hall: Yeah. Well, one of the things is that it used to be that if you wanted to build that network with the field or with your peers, you joined ALA, so that was membership and you came to conference, and then you read about their thinking. So those were our three primary revenue streams: membership, conferences, as well as publishing.
Today with the internet, folks can say, “I’m a librarian who’s really interested in food access.” And you can create a space on the internet for yourself and create a group on Facebook or Twitter. You can communicate all the time and you can find like minds, right? So I think that part, you are able to some degree to get a sense of immediate satisfaction.
But I think that what ALA has always done though is to actually move the field forward. So ALA and as I do a lot of research and think about my own experiences with ALA over the last nearly 30 years, what I think about is the fact that ALA is a place that also sets some of these ideas into policy, into practice, and really determines the future of not just the Association, but of the field. The Association can do that in a way that honestly, the internet can’t do, because we can actually codify practices. We can actually create policy. We can actually set protocols. And I think that is what people are interested in, in moving the field forward. That’s what ALA does, and to be honest, there is no replacement for that because we codify those ideas and those become standards for intellectual freedom. We codify those ideas and those become standards for library services to people who are incarcerated or detained. We codify those ideas and that becomes the Spectrum Scholarship. We codify those ideas and that becomes Emerging Leaders, and there is no substitute for that.
Steve Thomas: I feel like a lot of times people who disagree with something that ALA does. I mean, obviously nobody agrees with anything a hundred percent, but if you just disagree with it and you’re from the outside, then your voice isn’t being really heard. So if you’re a member and you’re there and you’re going to the conferences and you’re going to Council sessions, you have to be part of the conversation to change things the way you want to change them.
Tracie D. Hall: No, you’re right. I mean, it’s the same kind of idea about voting and democratic engagement, the way that you actually and actively engage is through your vote and through the electoral discourse around that and mobilization and those kinds of things. I know that one of our staff members, one of my colleagues who heads membership, when we spoke early in my tenure, she said something that stayed with me and was really music to my ears. She said that when she looked at membership in ALA, what she thought was really different about ALA and other associations that she had worked for is she said that ALA is an association, but ALA is also a movement, and I thought about that too because I think that librarianship in some ways was a kind of mobilization in its early inception in this country because at one point we had normalized libraries, even when we hadn’t normalized adult literacy. At the same time Carnegie and others were building public libraries in particular so prolifically, two out of five adults wasn’t fully literate, and we still have some literacy struggles, although we’ve normalized the institution of libraries, and I think those of us who believe in a democratic society don’t believe we can have a democratic society without libraries, academic, public school or otherwise.
But I think that you are exactly right. When I think about ALA, and when people say, well, ALA, you’re talking about 56,000 members, and the way that we shift and bend ALA to move with the times, to move with the will of the people, is by joining ALA. I wanna believe that conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion, conversations about diversifying our professorship in the LIS world, even conversations about the power differential between how libraries were deployed with these huge reference desks that seem almost like you were the royal eye and folks would stand before you and plead their information case. I tried to disrupt that. I would write about actually blowing up the reference desk. So I like to think about, I was writing 15 years ago about the Black body at the reference desk and connecting Black librarian users and their usage patterns to the history of compulsory illiteracy that was attended to African enslavement in this country. So I like to think that when we think about critical race theory and power in libraries, I like to think that I’ve contributed to that discourse and when we think about the Social Responsibility Round Table, when we think about the Rainbow Round Table, when we think about Coretta Scott King Awards, when we think about Pura Belpré, when we think about Dia, all of those things are people pushing and pulling the Association forward, and you can’t do that if you are just on the sidelines. You cannot do that. And also too, as James Baldwin says, you know, to be committed is to be vulnerable. I think that people who talk about what they, the “royal they”, are doing but aren’t active and aren’t mobilizing, that talk for me is just talk. I want people who are gonna put their energy on the line to pull this and other fields forward.
Steve Thomas: There’s obviously a lot of work being done in ALA, “Forward Together” is the name of the initiative of changing the structure of some of how ALA is done, of talking about doing something different with Council, something different with the Executive Board. Can you talk about the current state of that?
Tracie D. Hall: Yeah, isn’t that interesting because we have like all of these tides of change going on within ALA, and that feels about right. Anytime you’re gonna be a century and a half old, you should be doing that type of introspection, right? I think the last deep governance introspection was done probably about 30 or 40 years ago, so it feels right to be happening right now. But I think that in addition to Forward Together, we’re looking at our operating agreement, and we just completed our pivot strategy, which is our pandemic change management plan for the next five years of the Association.
So I think all of those things like feel right, and it feels that they should be happening in concert with each other, but in terms of governance, I think that the members of the Association want what we all want, what we want for our country, that we can govern effectively, and that we have a governance structure that is representative, that is resonant, that has reach, and can actually speak for the constituency that entrusted to speak for them. So right now that’s in the hands of the Council to determine what that’s gonna look like and that feels right too.
Steve Thomas: As I was doing some research for this interview, I came across one interview you did, I think it was with Sari Feldman, where she mentioned Big ALA and you had a poor reaction to the term Big ALA, and I think that shows even internally sometimes the Association needs to be a little more unified. Can you talk about what you don’t like about that term?
Tracie D. Hall: Well, I’m always interested… Steve, first of all, I wanna thank you for all of the questions. You’re making this interview really fun and exciting for me because these are the kinds of questions that I appreciate being asked, but first of all, it’s a false dichotomy. This notion of Big ALA… ALA is a canopy for all of these units that we, who are members of the Association, think are important to do timely work and to do the full work that the field requires, and that’s an ever evolving roster and proposition.
So when we talk about Big ALA, I just don’t know what that is and where that would be. Are we talking about general funds? Then all of the divisions operate using the general funds. That’s why they’re general funds. So that would be like us talking about, I just don’t understand it because ALA is a house and all parts are necessary. The kitchen is critically important and the bedrooms are too. And so I just don’t understand that and I think that because language means things. I’m a writer, so language means things. If someone says, “Well, when I say Big ALA, I mean everything that is not my division” then what about the other divisions? And letting that stand creates an unnecessary and an unnatural division. No one who joins ALA can say, “Oh, I would just love to just be a member of this division and not ALA.” Well, then you really would be cut off. You would be completely cut off.
What ALA means is that you actually have, at any given time, your membership, even in the division, pulls on the work of thirty plus other units in order to make that complete. And that’s why I say that and I take exception to Big ALA because it’s false and I don’t understand it, and I haven’t heard any definition that works for me or that talks about how important it is that we have a professional association that serves libraries of all types and information practitioners of all types. That is our strength and we must preserve that.
Steve Thomas: That’s great. One of the things that the field as a whole needs is diversification. Every time we keep doing surveys, it’s still overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly female. It’s the stereotype that we wanna try to get away from as much as we can, and a lot of that work needs to get done with local hiring at local libraries and everything. But what is it that ALA can do as a national organization to help take the profession as a whole and help make it more equitable, diverse, and inclusive?
Tracie D. Hall: When I talk about ALA, we have less than 250 staff at ALA, but we have 56,000 members. So let’s be clear. When I talk about ALA, I’m talking about the membership. The members have to recruit diverse members and obviously we have to support that. We already know that the commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion in the field is so profound at ALA that it exists in every single unit, every single unit. It’s in the fabric. So I think that what we have to do is that we have to get off of the talk part and get onto the walk part.
So I’m gonna just say this, whenever we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, I always say, look at your own friends. Look at the community that you live in. Look at your coworkers, and if you are in a hiring capacity, look at your hiring. If it doesn’t reflect the diversity, equity, and inclusion that you know the field needs, you gotta start with yourself because we need all kinds. We need to have a strong BIPOC workforce within LIS because that’s the thing that’s gonna make our libraries resonant and representative of the needs, but we also need to be thinking about how it impacts collection development and service disposition and decision making in general.
We also know too, Steve, and there’s a lot of studies that have come out on this. The reason why we are in this stuck pattern when we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the LIS field and otherwise is because all we do is talk about it. We are not hiring. Hiring makes the difference. It absolutely makes the difference. So if you are having your 15th EDISJ committee meeting at your library, but in the last three to four years, you haven’t hired people of color or just one person and you don’t have any managers who are of color, then it’s a problem. And definitely when we talk about fit and all that stuff, nobody can tell me, cuz we’re in the world of literature and ideas, that genius is not an equal opportunity employer because one of the things that we can say in terms of the evolution of human genius is that that is a place that we can’t apply a racist lens. Because even when we try to create a canon to keep out ideas and expressions, you always have the geniuses who jump that line. We have to make sure that we are recruiting the full talent pool in library services, but I wanna see a start with diversifying our membership. And that means that the way that we’re gonna need to do that is to hire differently in libraries, and we’re gonna have to prioritize walking over talking. Cause the talking stuff is a problematic and it’s been happening too long.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, because it’s nice when all these statements come out about George Floyd or Asian American violence, but when it’s just a statement and it’s not followed up with anything, then what does that even mean?
Absolutely!
Action is important.
Tracie D. Hall: Right. And we know that racialized capitalism has a tendency to co-opt these ideas and movements. After George Floyd was murdered, and I mean, I’m not even talking about murdered in a way that I can even just use murder. What happened there was so egregious just to our evolution as a species that, it was a spectacle that someone would lose their life in that way and… Wow. But what I wanna say there is that, after that, folks that you already know didn’t believe that Black lives matter because you could see it in their hiring practices, you can see it in who speaks for the organization, see where they invest, and all those other kinds of things everywhere you had Black Lives Matter. And to me, if there’s anything more repulsive than the thing that begat all of this is the fact that you knew that people were doing it because it became something that they felt they had to do to kind of save themselves or absolve themselves, and we don’t wanna do that.
In the library world, when we say Black Lives Matter, we have to mean it. In the library world, when we say that Juneteenth is an important holiday, we have to understand what we mean about Juneteenth and understand that the reason why we have a Juneteenth is because Black people were denied the right to read and that being found reading or even being a white person teaching a Black person to read was punishable, not just by fines, but also by physical punishment. It was considered to be one of the most severe offenses so that it actually came with corporal punishment. That’s how problematic it was.
Now, where do we see those same kinds of things happening? Where do we see compulsory literacy manifesting itself all over again? We see it happening ritualistically, almost in our prisons and in incarceration, and so I think that when we start saying those things in the field, we have to mean it, but it is hollow unless we’re changing our membership ranks and we’re changing the ranks of LIS leadership and how we hire.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I think even beyond that, you hire, but then you need to have an environment where somebody wants to stay. It’s like, yeah, you get into place and you’re like, “Oh, well I’m not supported here, so I’m just gonna leave!”
Tracie D. Hall: Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that we found when I first came to ALA, going back to my Office for Diversity work. The first thing I wanted to do was to create a census for the field to understand what was happening in librarianship and then to be able to understand, Steve, to your point, not just recruitment, but also retention.
We were hiring for a new head of the Office of Research and Statistics. I camped outside her office and said, “I really wanna do this.” I think she started one day and the next day I was literally sitting in a chair outside the office trying to catch her to say, “I think we need to do this work” and that work was released in 2006. It was the first official ALA longitudinal reflection on diversity in the ranks of the profession called Diversity Counts.
What we are hoping to do now to your point, is to not only remount diversity counts, but also to bookend it with a first national major retention study because what we found there is that before BIPOC librarians could reach their 10th year, their between eight and 10 years of employment, they were leaving the LIS field for a lot of reasons. One obviously is because we talk about diversity, but we don’t always create conditions that will allow diversity to flourish and become normalized in libraries and other places.
So you are exactly right. I think that we wanna get closer to understanding why. We also know that we need to have more people of color who are at the mid- and executive management level. That won’t solve alone, but what we know and what we have seen is that managers who are people of color tend to be the largest hirers of people of color. We also wanna make sure that we are creating spaces where people don’t feel like they’re the only one, and that their deeds are amplified on a scale that their white peers never experienced because they have a larger peer group.
So there’s a lot of things that we need to do, but I agree recruitment is critical because I’m also thinking about economic justice, and I also have done a lot of research to understand not just in librarianship, but in other fields too, that people of color, especially Black folks, tend to have the same degrees, but not to be hired or hired at the same rates or at the same compensation as their white peers. So I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I thought hiring was important, but attendant to that is retention. And in fact, I think the retention piece is the harder part because it exposes the institution and its weaknesses. If an institution is not able to retain talent, that speaks to what’s happening at that institution and flaws therein.
Steve Thomas: I think especially with school librarians and public librarians working with younger people in their lives and doing programs and getting materials that show this social justice lens and having kids grow up with this kind of thing. Cause I know I’m 40 mumble, mumble years old, and I grew up in Tennessee and I had never heard of Juneteenth until after I was out of college.
Tracie D. Hall: Yeah. Cause Juneteenth is Texas, right? Juneteenth is like Louisiana, Texas. So again, when we talk about Juneteenth, that isn’t a universal, even for Black folks. That’s not a universal holiday. But what it represents now has come to be so important because it still exists, that kind of economic isolation, those kinds of reinforced educational gaps. This idea because Juneteenth is also too about hand-me-downs and clothing and not having the agency, people who are asked to make new clothes for folks to sew and make other people look great, but then have to wear the hand-me-downs that were original. You know, all of that. That’s why I think it’s become national as opposed to regional. So you were in Tennessee, you didn’t hear about Juneteenth and then what?
Steve Thomas: Well, I was gonna say, the nice thing is my kids, I’m in Georgia now, they are learning that in school. So I mean, my son’s in fourth grade and they’re doing reports on Juneteenth and all this kind of stuff, so I think stuff’s gotten so much better. And that’s just in the school system. But then I think libraries as a whole can also contribute to that and seeing library work through a social justice lens is a really important way for us to serve our communities.
Tracie D. Hall: Yeah, for sure, especially since access is one of the main tenants of the work that we do, as is equity. There is no other way around. It’s not necessarily anything you can sit out, because if you’re really a librarian, you’re trying to serve everyone who walks in. You have to understand some of the information barriers that they may be facing, and also who’s been institutionally underserved so that you’re not imagining that just because your doors are open, everybody who needs your services are gonna come to you.
So you’re exactly right and I’m happy too. I’m happy that we are passing down our commitments to social justice because we are certainly passing down our racism. So if we’re gonna be passing down our racism, we need to be passing down our commitment to social justice, because let’s be real, too, this idea that we are all gonna become one kind of like multicultural, happy family and that racism was somehow gonna die, certainly hasn’t been true.
Steve Thomas: And I don’t think fooling yourself into thinking, “Oh, we’re living in a utopia now. We have a black president now. Racism is over!” It’s like, what? I mean, that’s a great big step, but as we saw over the last few years, that’s obviously not the case. Things like that have just ramped up and things like the George Floyd killing, like you said, is not something new. It’s something that’s being recorded and shown to everybody. That’s a good thing, I guess, about our modern times is that we have this social network now and we can get this stuff out and so people can actually see what’s happening because unfortunately, a lot of people won’t believe things until they actually have it shoved in their face and say, “Look, this is happening. Cuz people have been saying this for years that this is happening.”
Tracie D. Hall: Oh yeah. You know, you’re right. Sunlight is the strongest disinfectant. Being able to bear witness more widely and to understand what this says about us is so important. And ALA wants to be on the right side of history. We wanna be part of that art towards justice. We want our legacy, and I’ve said this before, but I mean it very seriously. We want our legacy as an Association and as a membership, and as a movement, to be justice. And I don’t say that because that’s what we should aspire to, but at our best, that’s what we have aspired to, whether it is making decisions in the thirties to not hold conferences in states that abided by, or cities that abided by Jim Crow laws. And having our membership, having black members of the Association hold us to that to stand and to write letters and to think about also to our recognition today of AAPI violence and violent language as well. That is critical because that that’s all of us. We wanna be on the right side of history. We wanna be on the right side of history when we look at the fact that increasingly information access and even the right to read is deteriorating in incarceration and detention for millions and millions of people in a country where mass incarceration has become normalized.
We wanna be fighting for school librarianship when we go to Philadelphia, where we were founded in 2020 last year, just before the pandemic. And understand that only nine, eight or nine schools in all of Philadelphia have staffed school libraries, and then we wanna talk about the achievement gap. And we think about how racialized and classed that is, or to look at the proliferation of COVID-19 in rural communities, in prisons and in jails and in dense, urban communities where we still have weak information infrastructures. In some parts of Chicago, such as a community I live in, less than 50% of people have access to the internet in their homes, or even computers in their homes.
So when we think about that, that’s our work, right? We wanna be on the right side of history. And if we ignore that, if our library schools are ignoring that, then our students aren’t gonna be prepared to serve. If in libraries we’re making decisions that ignore that, then I think we risk our relevance and ultimately our funding too. If as an Association we are not recognizing that and not centering all of that level of access as our work, then we really aren’t serving the field or the public.
So our work now is really about centering information, access, digital equity, those are some of the civil rights issues of our time, and also having frank discussions like this one where we talk about operationally in terms of how it is budgeted and how it manages its budget and how we recruit, retain, and support members their own activism. All of those are prescient conversations for ALA to be having, and for ALA to not only be having, but frankly, Steve, to be leading.
Steve Thomas: You’ve mentioned incarceration a couple of times, and I know you’ve written about that recently in a couple of columns for American Libraries Magazine. Can you talk about how you feel that libraries can help mitigate inequities with people incarcerated in the first place and then coming out of incarceration?
Tracie D. Hall: Yeah, first of all, and thank you for that. I think if we look at, and we don’t even have all the time needed to talk about it, but when we think about what are the leading indicators in terms of what are the various prison pipelines, school and otherwise, we see that all of those are issues that libraries are traditionally in line to disrupt. And I feel that libraries then become places that have to be part of, I don’t even wanna say the rehabilitation, but supporting the reentering of people who have been detained. Then of course, access to information, re-skilling in terms of employment, supporting people and being able to understand the network and community infrastructure where they can go for support, including things like housing as well. And then once they’ve reentered being there and being that connector, I think that libraries play an essential role to hopefully disrupting these various prison pipelines to supporting people who are incarcerated and supporting them post-incarceration.
So I feel that libraries play this really important part, but certainly I think my interest in incarceration is so acute because I come from a community where so many people have been incarcerated and where members of my family have been incarcerated and where my own existence as a Black person and as a Black woman means that I’ve just been lucky to not be incarcerated, or maybe I have just through education or employment status, been able to sometimes elude that, but it feels so present for me, Steve.
I was actually in a car accident not very long ago in a ride service. I don’t have a car, but in a ride service, we were rear-ended and pushed into a car in front of us. It was alarming, but when I heard those sirens, I became really afraid. Of course police are gonna come, but I remember when I was asked for my ID, and I remember being looked over by the police officer who was white and the person who was driving was a person of color too and a man. And I remember thinking rather than saying, “Hey, are you okay?” the first thing is, “Give me your id. I need to run it.” So that’s why I think about incarceration because it is so present for my community. In those moments, being the Executive Director of the American Library Association could mean nothing. It don’t mean anything. It means like, “Let me run this and see if you really should be in prison,” as opposed to in this car or in jail.
If you walk in the store, people don’t care about that. They’re still gonna follow you all around the store, and they’re still gonna look at you if you try to get money out of the bank, cuz maybe you are having some home repairs done during this time of pandemic and that kind of thing, money that you put in the bank. And I remember one time when I directed the Office for Diversity, I’ll never forget. One of our recipients of the Spectrum Scholarship, you know, $5,000, it is. He was a young Latino student and he called me from the bank and luckily, I was in my office at ALA, this was so many years ago, this might have been like 2005 or something, and he said, “Ms. Hall, I have the letter that you wrote, which was the, like, congratulations and all of that. I brought it to the bank, but they still don’t believe that I would have this check from the American Library Association. I have them here. Can you tell them that this is legitimate?” Steve, that’s real. He’s gone on to become a great librarian, but it’s just ridiculous that call, that’s why I write about the things that I write about because that is the experience that I have had using and being a librarian and working in an Association. Nothing makes you immune from that treatment, nothing. And so what I’m trying to do, I hope in my tenure is I love librarianship as a practice. I’m a geek for libraries, but I also want to speak about the underside of our societies and how libraries can disrupt some of that, and we cannot act as if that world does not exist because it does. So that’s why I write about it because it is necessary, and so many of our communities live with that trauma and that stress.
Steve Thomas: I feel like we could probably talk about this for a lot longer cuz all these subjects have much deeper things here, but as we’re coming toward the end of our time, I wanted to wrap up with something a little positive and uplifting and I wanted to hear who are some people in the library field who have been inspirational to you or influential to you in your career?
Tracie D. Hall: Wow. And that’s supposed to wrap us up. It’s so many. Oh wow. It’s so many. They say to list is to limit, you know, it’s so hard to say that because there’s been so many.
Satia Orange, she recruited me into librarianship.
Ray Serebrin, who’s now retired. He was at Seattle Public Library and then went on in the area to lead one of the smaller libraries in Washington State. I came in as a director of a homeless shelter, and he saw something in me and he hired me.
Howard McGinn hired me first as a librarian because I then had my library degree for New Haven Free Public Library. And he told me something that was really critical. He said, “You know, you love libraries so if you love libraries, I think you have the capacity to lead libraries.” I didn’t see that, Steve, but he said, “Leave libraries for a while. Try other things. Learn to lead in other fields so that when you are thinking about libraries, you’re thinking about them in the context of how you lead any organization well.” And that really changed my trajectory in life because as you know, I’ve spent as much time working outside of libraries as I have in them.
Anwar Ahmad was a great mentor to me. He hired me for Hartford Public Library. He introduced this notion of community librarianship as opposed to branch librarianship. He was all about outreach, all about service to the community. He said that to run a branch was like to run a small business, that we had to think of our customers in the same way. He helped me to really think about customer service.
I would say people like Carla Hayden, who has remained an influence and a supporter and a model of what executive leadership looks like, even from her Enoch Pratt days.
I would say Elizabeth Martinez, who was the first BIPOC woman to head the Association. I think she was a maverick in her ideas.
Betty Turock in terms of her fighting for the internet, and then also her support of Spectrum.
Kathleen de la Peña, John D’Agata, researchers who had a profound effect on my work.
Frida Chapman, who I consider to be the Octavia Butler of the field in terms of having this really vision for what information access and what information constellations look like.
Vartan Gregorian, who just passed away, who was president of Carnegie, I think as someone who has shown that to be a librarian and to be a library leader, is to have tremendous capacity as a civic leader, but also in philanthropy.
And I could just go on and on. Martín Gómez, style wise.
Veronda Pitchford, who is one of my peers, but I think is a connector in a very, very profound way.
Patty Wong, somebody I’ve always admired. I could just go on and on and on.
Steve Thomas: That’s the good thing about this field. There’s so many great people who are doing great work that it’s sometimes hard to figure out everybody who’s great. This is the 200th episode of this podcast, so I’ve had like at least 200 people that I think is inspirational and doing great work, and I couldn’t name all 200 right now?
Tracie D. Hall: 200, right? Yes. Thank you.
Steve Thomas: Yes. Your episode 200 and then episode 100 was Keith Michael Fields, the previous Executive Director.
Tracie D. Hall: Oh wow. Thank you so much for even having me, and thank you for giving this opportunity to talk about and reflect. It hasn’t been fully a year and a half in this position, but I feel so tremendously blessed to be at ALA at this time for all of the reasons that we talked about. And I just wanna thank you for all that you’re doing for the field because documentation is so key to practice and it’s something that we don’t often do. I think you’re giving us an easy way to reflect and talk about what is actually happening, and I think the archival capacity of this work will actually probably have a life of its own. So I just wanna commend you.
Steve Thomas: Thank you. And I also feel like that as a white man, I haven’t experienced a lot of that stuff that you were talking about before, but I can use this platform to raise other people’s voices and get it out there so that other people can hear.
Tracie D. Hall: Steve, let’s talk about that for just a quick, quick minute. One of the things that I think is so important about this particular time is that, it gives us all a 360, right? Mine may be focusing on some of these things. I just wrote about the school to prison pipeline in a column called “A Hurting Thing”, about my own feeling of helplessness when I saw a young man that I thought had so much capacity and I felt that I didn’t know how to reach him. I think about that and I rolled it over in my mind again and again, and I wrote about it and I’m happy to see that is resonating with folks.
I’ve positioned school librarianship as one of the possible opportunities for disruption. And I’m hearing from a lot of school librarians about it. But the thing is, is that I, in growing up, have had an opportunity to understand how a white person who is now living with her grandfather in the mountains and he’s gruff and she is needing love and familiar support, how she navigates that. And that book becomes so dear to me. Heidi, right? Or I get a chance to participate in a lot of existential crises that in the bildungsroman novels that I was reading growing up of teenagers where they might be white young men or groups of young people, and I get a chance to understand what that feels and have that resonate for me.
Or if you ask me what are the best books I’ve ever read, or best movies that I’ve ever seen, or best music I’ve ever listened to, I’m gonna give you a constellation that looks like everyone and everything. I still think about Kurt Cobain because I spent a lot of time in Seattle when Nirvana and Hole and Moxie and all those groups were having their heyday, so I would not normally listen to them. I might run into them on the street or literally in an apartment building, so that music resonates and that makes me fully human. Without that, I would be less.
So I wanna just say to our white colleagues when they’re listening to all of this, everybody feels pain. Everybody feels lost. Everybody feels vulnerability. Everybody has felt what it means to not be listened to, not be seen, persecution, people can experience poverty. That can be an equal opportunity employer, those kinds of things. Maybe not at the same degrees, those kinds of things, but what I wanna say is welcome to the human experience. Welcome. Get into it, right? Because it’s gonna make it richer. There’s some ways that Nirvana expressed imposter syndrome that when I wanna get into that and like, “Okay, this is what I’m feeling”, I can go right back to Nirvana. If they weren’t a part of my music world, I wouldn’t have as an acute response to that feeling as what Kurt Cobain is constantly introducing us to, over and over. “This feels good, but do I have a right to feel good like this? Am I worthy of this particular feeling? Is it really me or is this false?” or those kinds of things.
I just wanna say that to folks because when I hear that, I wanna just say, welcome. Welcome to the Human Experience. Let it be as full and right for everyone. Enjoy it and begin to understand that we can learn so much, and we become fully human by encountering as many different types of human experiences as we can. And in fact, maybe that’s how we should be ending today. Let the librarianship work that we do be about the relentless quest to understand the ways in which all humans generate information, how we collect, how we archive, how we disseminate, and how we codify that that should be what we’re up to, and I hope in the next 150 years of the Association, we will have a primary place in that practice.
Steve Thomas: And I appreciate that you’re gonna be part of that as the Executive Director of the Association, so thank you for that and continuing to do that, and thank you again for coming on the show today to talk about all this.
Tracie D. Hall: Thank you, Steve.
Circulating Ideas 