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94 assimilation and ‘Americanization’ of immigrants needing to learn the mores of white society (Hall, 2012; Honma, 2005). Given the historical context, white normativity continues to be a hallmark of modern librarianship” (para. 4).

Although the way knowledge is organized is often perceived as neutral, classification systems are heavily biased. Sociologist Chris Bourg (2018) added, “Our classification systems are also not neutral. We use subject headings that center the straight, white, male, European experience; and are often racist and de humanizing” (para.36). Recent literature, for example, has established and documented that Melville Dewey, often called the “father of modern librarianship” and creator of the Dewey Decimal Classification System, had a history of antisemitism, racism, and misogyny (Blakemore, 2018; Flood, 2019; Ford, 2018; GoodingCall, 2019; Lindell, 2019; Oster, 2019). The earliest iterations of his classification system had his bigotry woven into it, and the system is still used to organize information throughout the English-speaking world. Similarly, the Library of Congress Classification system, which was mainly adopted by large academic libraries, did not include any Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) when it was created. In the 1930s and 1940s, librarians and information activists like Alfred Kaiming Chiu and Dorothy Porter began to change these systems to make the works of BIPOC content creators more visible in the systems designed to erase them (Liu, 2000; 裘开明_百度百科 (Qiú kāimíng_ bǎidù bǎikē), n.d.; Nunes, 2018).

Black Scholars Building Encyclopedic Knowledge

Before Dorothy Porter, a librarian, bibliographer, and curator at Howard University who started identifying white supremacy in the Dewey Decimal system in the 1930s and 1940s, Black information activists helped pave the way for her important work. In the early 1900s, sociologist, journalist, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois took a different route to changing the system. Instead of trying to change the popular encyclopedia of the day, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Du Bois sought to publish nothing less than the equivalent of a black Encyclopaedia Britannica, believing that such a broad assemblage of biography, interpretive