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This case study was developed using publicly available published sources like the company’s website, articles, blogs, videos, filings, etc. Multiple sources were used to put together the chronology, quotes and details. This case is not disguised. All the key figures in the case study are identified by their real names.

Black Girls Code (BGC) was founded by Kimberly Bryant (Bryant, she) as a nonprofit organization in 2011. BGC conducted workshops and programs to teach young girls of color technology, science, engineering and math and train them in Web design, developing apps and robotics. It aimed to address the lack of diversity in science and technology. The organization has received support from tech giants like Google, Facebook and IBM. In one decade, the organization trained more than 30,000 girls and aimed to teach one million girls by 2040.

In 2021, the BGC board ousted Bryant, citing allegations of workplace impropriety. She was put on paid administrative leave by the board. This ousting was done in the aftermath of complaints by several employees who raised concerns about Bryant’s conduct. The former and current employees said that high turnover in the organization was due to Bryant’s leadership, which was rooted in fear, and that she would publicly insult managers. The board formed a special committee to evaluate the concerns and sent Bryant on administrative leave.

Cristina Jones, who succeeded Bryant as CEO, brought about several changes in the organization and expanded the scope of science, technology, engineering and math to include arts. She expanded the courses to include design, gaming and others. She was looking forward to launching one million black girls in tech by 2040. But before she could go on, she needed to ensure that the ouster of the founder did not hinder the activities at BGC in any manner and also needed to address the concerns of employees, students and funders.

This case can be used to learn about nonprofits, the role of nonprofits in building an equitable society and nonprofit entrepreneurs. The objective is to understand how passionate entrepreneurs can create organizations that can make a high impact with limited resources but with ambition and vision for radical change.

This case also helps in learning the challenges encountered due to the rapid growth of startups and the role of the leader in handling such growth.

This case can be integrated into any of the existing courses or taken as a special case study to illustrate the gender and racial disparities that exist even in highly developed countries like the USA.

The policing of Black male bodies is not uncommon to America. Less known is Black male bodies policed in public libraries. Having worked at the Nashville Public Library’s Hadley Park branch, I saw behaviors and stereotypes played out on both sides of the public service desk. Hyper masculine behavior, homophobia, mental illness, and staff safety were issues that had to be faced by me and my staff. The quandary was my being a Black man who understood the ramifications of a police call or verbal exchange. Putting a Black man in a “problem” branch in a Black neighborhood was not by accident. Administrative choices were based upon racist and sexist tropes that Black men are familiar with dysfunctional environments of drugs and prostitution and don’t need a sense of safety like any other human beings.

In Virginia, former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder accused the state’s library agency of racism for “its slow pace in processing and publicly presenting records from his tenure as the nation’s first elected Black governor” (Associated Press, 2020). The State Librarian responded that this was just a lapse in protocols and framed it as a budget issue and staff turnover. However, “Library of Virginia has been processing papers from his gubernatorial successors before finishing work on his” (Associated Press, 2020). Recently, the Alabama State Department of Archives and History acknowledged their participation in systemic racism, epistemicide, and their history of privileging White voices over those of Alabama African-Americans.

Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a way of knowing (Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, & Bertolini, 2020). Conceptualization and analytic application of epistemicide has an established tradition in a number of social science fields, but information scientists have only recently acknowledged epistemicide (Oliphant, 2021; Patin et al., 2020; Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, Bertolini, & Grimm, 2021). Building from our recent identification of the existence of epistemicide within the IS field (Patin et al., 2020), this work challenges the information field to become an epistemologically just space working to correct the systemic silencing of certain ways of knowing.

This chapter examines the four types of epistemic injustices—testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular—occurring within libraries and archives and argues for a path forward to address these injustices within our programs, services, and curricula. It looks to digital humanities and to reevaluations of professional standards and LIS education to stop epistemicide and its harms. This chapter demonstrates how to affirm the power and experience of Black lives and highlight their experiences through the careful acquisition, collection, documentation, and publishing of relevant historical materials. Addressing epistemicide is critical for information professionals because we task ourselves with handling knowledge from every field. There has to be a reckoning before the paradigm can truly shift; if there is no acknowledgment of injustice, there is no room for justice.

This chapter historicizes the social construction of racism in Brazilian society and its relation to the development of the library and information science (LIS) field. It is a theoretical-reflective research built on the scientific literature of the field of LIS and related areas that aims at reflecting on social justice in Brazilian libraries and creating strategies to confront institutional racism. The authors develop five main points to understand Brazilian racism: the myth of racial democracy, structural and institutionalized racism, the whitening ideology, whiteness, and the epistemicide of black knowledge. The authors then discuss racism and the promotion of white supremacy in library teaching and professional action in libraries. Black US American and Black Brazilian Librarianship movements show that the activism and political action of black librarians advance the development of informational counter-narratives. Finally, the authors recommend three strategies for social, racial, and informational justice in the LIS field: including ethnic-racial studies in basic university courses curricula; building diverse, inclusive collections that account for ethnic-racial themes and authors; and considering “Pretuguese” keywords while indexing, in order to counter exclusion and promote epistemic repair. The authors conclude by advocating for these strategies to steer LIS professional and educational spheres toward contributing to forward an anti-racist society.

The chapter presents womanist musings about the author’s journey and growth as a Black woman scholar-advocate committed to socially just and antiracist scholarship. Using autoethnography, the author has synthesized her personal experience as a mother of a child diagnosed with cancer, with her professional endeavors as the founder Golden Moms (a peer support organization where majority of the mothers and their children are White) and with my work as doctoral student, to challenge White privilege in the academy.

In the spring of 2021, the author embarked on a soulful exercise of teaching without bounds. The author’s vision was to create a communal classroom environment exploring Black feminist and critical race dimensions of the information stratophere. The course deceptively titled Information Justice & Community Engagement, surveyed contemporary texts that confront and critique the mechanizations of information studies that sustain White hegemonic norms. Each session was an exercise in reflection and creative expression. The author encourged students to name instruments of oppression, crtique information systems, and devise ways to dismantle racism though informed praxis. To accomplish this, the author prioritized intimacy, trust, and community building in the classroom space. The shared desire for the collective learning experience became love and liberation. Through this experience, the author learned that the teacher, as illuminated by bell hooks (1994) is more than instructor, but is truly engrossed in the work of freedom. This proposition, inspired by Paulo Friere’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, offers clarity in the sacred, spiritual, and soulful exercise of learning with a reciprocal benefit to teacher and student. Using personal narrative and learning products this chapter will present the journey to developing an anti-racist consciouness in teaching and learning in a library and information studies (LIS/IS) course.

The purpose of this study is to explain how library and information science (LIS) with a focus on libraries, librarians and LIS associations, developed into becoming a racist institution that supports white supremacy. The central argument is that a philanthropic organization, the Carnegie Foundation, which led the eugenics movement, captured LIS and with the assistance of the American Library Association (ALA), created a library ecosystem that was structurally racist in order to maintain the power of the elites. This study is an exegetical analysis that is explored through the lens of a Christian spirituality conceptual framework. Some tentative solutions to remedy this problem are suggested.