Harold

On Page 48, Coates is describing what finding a library chock of full of information about African American life means to his consciousness. This is really essential to digest given the fact that I did not truly engage with African American history until my admittance to Southern University in 2015. Studying Black American History, and two African American Literature survey courses woke me up to just how much African American people like me had accomplished in the face of systemic racism. I needed to understand how as a system our "talent and gifts" once mighty----were exploited to create a story that covered up a deeper set of facts. There were elements of this that I was shielded from to a specific degree because I am black man with a physical disability. There was much about our past that I needed help discovering. It's important that people understand that without the library, African-American people only have the collected history of "explorers" and the British to anchor their ideas about how they should feel at home in the United States. The American classroom reflects a largely Euro-centric frame, that is much like a prison. And black people need to broken from the jail of other people's history... to understand their own role in making new American history. So African-American people need libraries to truly "discover" who they are. I needed the library at Southern University, The East Baton Rouge Parish Library system... to figure out how to discover myself in the context of an American mirror that often reflects that only one type of person deserves to tell stories and accomplish things. Libraries are information centers. It's important to understand further that African American perceptions of libraries are also intertwined with a possible under-representation of African-American information science workers. Sure, there are African-American library workers in America. But many American library workers I've seen are not black. This was another reason why I finally settled on my decision to dream big and work at becoming a disabled and African-American information professional. I'm hoping that my goal and journey ends up inspiring skeptical African-Americans toward information science, business, journalism, writing, and the humanities... fields that have defined me critically. These disciplines demand more African-American storytellers.