Proceedings of the First National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color - 9

though often inarticulate, assump-tion that white people are justified in getting what they want through the use of power, but that Negro Americans must… make their appeal only through conscience. As a result, the power of white men and the conscience of black men have both been corrupted. The power of white men is corrupted because it meets little meaningful resistance from Negroes to temper it and keep white men from aping God. The conscience of black men is cor-rupted because having no power to implement the demands of conscience, the concern for justice is transmuted into a distorted form of love, which, in the absence of justice, becomes chaotic selfsurrender. Powerlessness breeds a race of beggars. We are faced now with a situation where conscience-less power meets powerless conscience, threatening the very foundation of our nation.” We on this panel today, are here not to talk so much about the past, but to share with you a picture of what we see are the challenges to librarianship in the present, in the face of the consequences of growing disparities in power in today’s world. As all present in this room are aware, racism is alive and well within the United States of American today – in spite of the fact that people of color occupy positions of power at almost every level of our society. Today a black woman is Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world. A Latino presides over that nation’s Department of Justice. Facts like these cause some people to believe that racism is a thing of the past. And, indeed, some aspects of our nation’s racist past have disappeared. However, in some very 9 important ways the changes are merely cosmetic ones. “We are faced now with a situation where conscienceless power meets powerless conscience, threatening the very foundation of our nation.” I repeat these words, of 40 years ago, because they are as true today as they were then, but in a slightly different way. Today we have conscienceless power that is destroying the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. That conscienceless power approves of torture. It invades countries and kills people who have never threatened our peaceful slumber. It refuses to address in any meaningful way the threat we in the U.S. pose to the wellbeing of our planet. The wealthy class increases its wealth every second of the day, while the middle class inches toward poverty and the poor continue to suffer. Today we have people of conscience who know that the abandonment of rights and laws will lead our nation into a nightmare of arbitrary searches and seizures, imprisonment without charge and legal representation, and the banishment of intellectual freedom from our academies and media and public forums. People of conscience, millions of them around the world, protested the U.S. invasion of Iraq early in 2003 – these people knew Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. People of conscience are gravely concerned about the realities of global warming, mass losses of biological diversity, and the great need for sustainable social systems. People of conscience know that the U.S. governing class today does the bidding of the corporate world, not of the people. People of conscience know these things, but not because our libraries are informing them. I suggest that our
Proceedings of the First National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color

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