Aisha Johnson, associate dean for academic affairs and outreach at the Georgia Institute of Technology Libraries, was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work on Sustainable Leadership as a Solution for Representation and Inclusion in LIS: A Bibliography and Toolkit. We recently spoke with Johnson for insights and updates on her work.

LJ: How did the Sustainable Leadership as a Solution for Representation and Inclusion in LIS project get started?

Aisha Johnson: As a Black youth, I grew up in a home where education, history, and culture were prime, and knowing your history and your culture an absolute must. I grew up in South Florida where I had Black teachers, a Black media specialist, a Black librarian. I went to a magnet school and had the privilege of representation growing up in Miami and Palm Beach. So going from there to Tallahassee, where I went to Florida State University, was culture shock, because while you had Florida A&M University a block away, I, for the first time, was often the only person who looked like me in a classroom.

Adjusting to that when I started working in libraries and decided I was going to get my master’s, my question was always, “Where are the Black librarians?” All of my research in my graduate studies was about African American librarianship and the lack of diversity in the profession. Of course, I carried that into my doctoral studies and looked into literacy and the development of access in the South for education. It’s been a 20-year question of mine, and I’ve come up with a variety of solutions. But every role I’m in, I try to diversify for representation, all people, all pronouns, all people of races, ethnicities, cultures, subcultures. How do we get more Black people, people of color in general, in this profession? Because Black librarianship is only seven percent. The profession is 82 percent white women. If the largest minority is seven percent, that means Native Americans and Indigenous people aren’t even hitting two percent. Our numbers in the profession are not representative of the population we’re serving.

What happens because of that lack of representation in libraries?

I think people underplay library anxiety. When we go to a library or seek answers, we’re acknowledging our own ignorance, meaning we don’t know something and want to learn. But the way we ask questions can be influenced by who we're asking, or if the librarian doesn’t look like the patron. There’s this idea—a reality of library anxiety—that people sometimes downplay or hide their ignorance when asking someone who’s different from them, perhaps because they’re worried about being judged or misunderstood. So, it’s not just about what we don’t know, but how social dynamics, like race, shape our comfort in seeking answers. It creates anxiety. I don’t think we’ve dived into that enough to understand that representation is so far beyond just a visual. It’s also experience, subcultures, intellectual levels.

I feel like society is finally looking to understand autistic and neurodivergent people. Our entire profession is filled with it, but what we’re not used to is how communities of color engage with autistic people and neurodivergent children. If we’re not representative of the populations we’re serving, how are we fully doing our jobs? It’s really about the need to have representation and inclusion to properly serve all the people we say we want to serve, and that’s everyone. Sustainable leadership is about emotional intelligence. It’s about people leadership, and it’s about strategic leadership. When we put people in place for seniority or say, “Oh, they’ve been here so long or in the profession so long,” that doesn’t mean they’re emotionally intelligent leaders.

I might be biased, but I think we have more impact than any profession in this world, because every single profession needs us. There is no profession that doesn’t need information literacy. I call us the warm blanket profession because you put us over anything, and we’ll make it better. But our warm blanket gets us in trouble because sometimes we’re too comfortable and don’t address our own problems.

Is it possible that lack of representation creates a subliminal response that says, “No one looks like me at the library, so people like me must not approach this career”?

Absolutely. One of the things I tell people, for people of color, specifically in America: Representation is psychological. We weren’t brought here to thrive when we were brought over enslaved. But I don’t care what it is you’re doing. You need to know there’s somebody out there doing it. Visualization for people of color is psychological. It’s a comfort. It’s an encouragement. I know what the people before me went through. I’m still going to go through some stuff, but they’ve curved it a little for me and my colleagues. I’m dealing with this craziness and this foolishness. My very existence is triggering, but I know the Black librarians who came before me dealt with even more craziness and death threats, actual violence on their lives and families. It doesn’t escape what my skin color means in America, but it’s also the thought of how I can impact the next generation of information professionals. How can I grow this number?

It’s so worth pursuing. And it’s not just people of color, it’s about everybody, particularly LGBTQIA, because libraries should be safe places. And sustainable leadership is really about developing a toolkit and resource of bibliography in order for us to shift that seven percent. Maybe 10 years from now, we can be at 10 percent. Maybe we can be at 15 percent. I feel like as much as we talk about the numbers, it really starts at the top. The changes I’ve made in organizations are because I was in a leadership position with the authority to do so. When you’re in these leadership positions, people not only look to you, but they listen to you, they trust you. Someone can be a good leader, but that doesn’t mean they’re equipped with all the tools. That’s what this toolkit is about, how we can do a top-down process of changing or evolving the profession, what we look like and how people see us. I want people to have the kind of privilege I had growing up in South Florida and having four out of five of my elementary teachers be Black, having a Black librarian in a predominantly Black magnet school who encouraged all the students. It’s all about making our profession better. Not just talking about it, but developing the tools so we can actually do better.