Teaching the Radical Catalog

During a recent information literacy session for a group of first-year students enrolled in an African-American women's history course at Sarah Lawrence College, I discussed the changing Library of Congress (LC) subject headings for this field: NEGRO WOMEN; BLACK WOMEN; AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN; etc. A student raised her hand and asked whether students specifically interested in the history of White women needed to search the catalog using the term WHITE. My colleague, a reference and instruction librarian with five years of experience, answered yes. While we might wish that LC acknowledged White as a racial category and marker for domination, it does not. LC is rooted in historical structures of White supremacy; as such, the catalog presumes White to be the normative term. The librarian got it wrong. We must get it right. Currently at stake is, first off, the problem of giving students wrong information. A class busily searching for works about WHITE WOMEN will come up empty, when a search for WOMEN would serve them quite well. A second stake, less obvious but more insidious, is the risk that by teaching a catalog uncritically, we hide and extend the universalizing, hegemonic tendencies of our classifications into our teaching. This chapter takes up the moment where critical classification theory intersects with critical pedagogy. Considering critical interruptions of classification as a social and political project, I argue that classification schemes are socially produced and embedded structures; they are products of human labor that carry traces of all the intentional and unintentional racism, sexism, and classism of the workers who create them. Political efforts to change terminology or localize classification schemes are inevitably limited by the nature of classification itself. We cannot do a classification scheme objectively; it is the nature of subject analysis to be subjective. Teaching, done critically and done well, offers a potential way out of this dilemma. This will require a challenge to our standards-based information literacy discourse, and a turn toward radical pedagogical theory.