Kimberly Edwards - Learning Retrospective

As librarians in Public libraries, we interact with a wide range of people, from the homeless to lawyers to students to retirees. Most days you never know who you will come in contact with, so being able to address our biases (conscious and unconscious) helps us to serve the public. With everything that has been going on in the world today it’s was a pretty timely workshop. When you think about biases much of the focus is on the most obvious …gender, race, disability, age and economics, but there are some biases that don’t fit those categories. Biases you don’t realize that you have until you attend a workshop about biases and then you realize that maybe you pull your purse a little closer to your body when a teenager is walking near you. I go to comic conventions and I went to one in Chicago and I’m standing in front of a comic artist with my stack of comics for him to sign and he asks me “Are these for your boyfriend?” As if I wouldn’t attend a comic convention unless I was with a boyfriend/husband/whatever. It ticked me off, but I’m sure I’ve done something similar and didn’t even realize I was doing it.

Biases can be organic, where we just develop them because of your personal experiences or they can be part of system thinking, where various institutions such as Government, Banking, Education, Criminal Justice and Religion have systematically instituted biases, through a series of laws, policies and practices.

As much as many of us would like to think that we have no biases, we all have them. We then need to accept that we have them and try to find ways to diminish them.