Introduction

The theme of this book is timely, given the emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the USA. Although originating in America, the movement has struck a chord with Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities in other Anglophone countries such as the UK. While the BLM movement was initially a response to police brutality and racial violence against Black people, it has helped to generate a wider debate about the need to advance racial diversity and fight racial inequalities faced by BAME people. More pertinently, in the context of this book, the movement has placed the experience of BAME employees under greater scrutiny and initiated difficult but necessary conversations in organisations and workplaces about what employers are doing or should be doing to advance the rights of BAME workers.

This chapter's particular contribution is to focus on the academic library sector, which has been under-researched in relation to race equality. The authors argue that if successful decolonisation of libraries is to be achieved, then it is important to understand and reflect on the ‘lived’ experience of BAME staff currently working in academic and research libraries across the UK. The research reported in this chapter represents part of a wider project established to investigate aspects of developing the workforce and fostering diversity across the library sector (Ishaq and Hussain, 2019). It is hoped that the outcomes from the research will allow the leadership and management of academic libraries to take stock of where they are in relation to their race equality agenda and where they need to be to ensure that they demonstrate their commitment to the effective decolonising of libraries.

Summarising BAME employees’ work experience in UK organisations: evidence from the literature

Literature documenting the work experience of BAME staff in the academic and nonacademic library sectors is virtually non-existent. The closest is research conducted in the USA which centred on the issue of racial microaggression in academic libraries (Alabi, 2015) and on the existence of racism and a culture of Whiteness in US academic libraries (Brook, Ellenwood and Lazzaro, 2015). In the context of the UK, there is a small-scale qualitative study exploring the low representation of BAME staff in the library and information science (LIS) profession in London (Williams and Nicholas, 2009).