Know Systemic Racism in California: What do you know about Oscar Grant?

Know Systemic Racism (KSR) is a project envisioned and led by the inaugural Racial Justice and Social Equity Librarian at Stanford Libraries, Felicia Smith, to make systemic racism evident. The project is a partnership between the library, research centers, community activists, investigative journalists, and non-profit organizations that advocate for civil rights. The role of the library is, essentially, a traditional one: the library provides curation, access, and preservation of records and data. This is a new approach to traditional practices because we intentionally seek to answer Julie Lythcott Haims’ call to “humanize the harm” lost in the abstraction of statistics, policy documents, and legislation.

This summer KSR has been working with students at Foothill/DeAnza Community Colleges through a fellowship program sponsored by CESTA (the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford) to gather, analyze, and present data. The projects range from a collaboration with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to collect information about the military equipment held by California law enforcement agencies, to a historical study of the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. The students will present the results of their work, combining research practices from the humanities and social sciences with digital library practices including document processing, entity extraction, the creation of linked data authority records, and visualization in the form of maps and graphs to support collection discovery.

The methods, tools, and outcomes of Know Systemic Racism are a model for academic libraries in other states to create similar resources for researchers and community members.

• Felicia Smith, Stanford University
• Catherine Coleman, Stanford University