ALBANY – The Albany Public Library is under fire from an out-of-state nonprofit after posting a job internship only for Black candidates.
The Touhey Equity Foundation Fellowship has been offered for the past two summers. It pays for two interns who must be “recent Black graduates of library school programs.”
But this year, the library received a cease and desist letter from the Equal Protection Project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation.
The foundation, a nonprofit based in Rhode Island, has filed complaints and threatened litigation in many cases, most recently objecting to “racially preferential” practices at colleges and universities.
Note the artwork hanging in the window of the public library. Disregarding the infantile corporate reductionist vector aesthetic, the Black woman on the right has natural hair, wears a bright orange top, and holds the world in her hands. The lighter, possibly Hispanic woman on the left is wearing a bright top and a stylish scarf, has a neat utilitarian haircut, and is holding the “recycle” symbol. Of course, the White person at center is a mess: unknown gender, depressing black clothing, a bizarre disordered haircut, and is holding the LGBT rainbow heart in xir hands.
You might argue I’m reading too much into the illustration, but one of these racially-coded characters is clearly not like the others.
Original: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/albany-library-criticized-only-black-librarians-17878081.php
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