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The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between African–American undergraduate students, racial microaggressions (RMAs) and college retention rates.

Data were obtained from a survey given out to African–American undergraduate students, recruited from a large, midwestern, predominantly white public university (n = 53).

The results indicate that students did experience a wide range of microaggressions. Furthermore, the data revealed a statistically significant relationship between the participants’ perceptions that others viewed them as if they were foreigners and did not belong to the place and the participants’ thoughts about dropping out during the ongoing semester [r(51) = 0.338, p = 0.05]. The results suggest that African–Americans frequently experience RMAs while on campus but these experiences are not significantly tied to their intentions to complete the ongoing semester or return for the subsequent semester.

This study shows that African–American students felt disconnected from the campus that they attend. This information may allow for faculty and staff members to assist in making students feel more welcomed and included in the classroom and on campus.

This is one of the few studies to provide evidence of the relationships between African–American undergraduate students, RMAs and college retention rates. In addition, most studies looking at the relationship between RMAs and retention are qualitative in nature. The use of a quantitative approach helps us eliminating possible observer bias and increasing sample size.

Policymakers have long suggested diversifying US police forces, which typically have white male majorities among officers. This article explores to what extent police diversity has changed over time in large agencies, as well as whether different diversity benchmarks may matter for agencies.

The authors draw data from the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey for 358 agencies that had at least 100 full-time sworn officers in 1997 and 2016 and that reported officer demographic data to the LEMAS in both years. For a selection of 12 communities – three randomly chosen in each of the four US Census regions – the authors compare officer diversity to Census data on population diversity for different benchmarks.

There has been some increase in diversity but policing largely remains a white male profession. The authors find only limited variation in diversity by type of benchmark – e.g. total population, working population or recruiting-age population – a community considers. This suggests communities may wish to choose a benchmark they can best measure and seek to increase diversity by it, and research on workforce representation may not be sensitive to benchmark choice. The authors also suggest communities and their police organizations consider other ways to assess diversity, including those that illustrate a broader range of attributes and representation throughout the organization, and that they research and test alternative forms of measurement to gauge whether these findings hold for different modeling approaches.

Our analysis is limited to the largest police agencies and to overall staffing level diversity metrics pertaining to sex, race and Hispanic origin. Still, we find many police agencies have room for greater diversity, which could draw more qualified workers and lead to better policing.

While there has been much attention to police diversity in recent decades, there have been few efforts to compare alternative measurement approaches. This research provides guidance to some initial measures, as well as further considerations communities may wish to make.

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.