This strikes me as a particularly romantic view of archivists, akin to Percy Shelley’s notion of "poets" as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It practically amounts to saying that history, which is the history of class struggle (Marx), is "created" by the "winners" and the "classes" do not preexist their narration in the historical archive. History’s actors are, in other words, "constructs," rather than economically determined. At the end of the next paragraph, however, Cook says archives "legitimize" the powerful, implying that power relations preexist their discursive legitimization. So, which is it? Are "classes" discursively or extra-discursively constituted? Is this not an important distinction to make given the role of the archivist in relation to power?

It is at this point that I encountered my own "intellectual disappointment" (p. 10) in Caswell’s reiteration of a familiar trope in (post)modern cultural studies in which abstract "concepts" are represented as signs of an out of touch elitism in relation to concrete "practices" articulated "from below," the recognition of which is made the limit text of "realistic" change. The distinction Caswell is making between "humanities scholarship" (a code for Theory) and "archival studies scholarship" (p.3) as a gendered division of labor "in the dominant English-speaking Western paradigm" (p. 4) itself suffers from "metaphoric 'inflation'" in only considering social inequality a cultural matter of "representation" and "recognition" that is "easily remedied" (p. 14) through what amounts to more "freedom of speech" — speak up (p. 13), "talk to each other" and "value each other’s opinions" (p. 14).

At its root the workplace is a site of "exploitation" (unpaid surplus-labor) and not simply "oppression" (inequality) in which all workers are alienated from their labor for the profit of another regardless of the cultural terms under which it is understood, justified, or questioned, such as race, gender, and sexuality constructs and dynamics. Who benefits from making the analytical frame for discussing the workplace primarily a cultural issue while marginalizing class-consciousness of the economic antagonism inscribed in the workplace under capitalism? All workers necessarily experience alienation because their labor is expropriated and used against them to keep them an exploited source of profit under a system that compels them to believe it is "democratic" and the limit of "freedom" because they have the "right" to be treated equally and the "freedom of speech". Pointing out the discrepancies and hypocrisies of the actual culture and its ideals is neither radical nor transformative, but necessary to maintain the underlying class structure by making it seem normal and just the way things are and therefore ought to be.

Assumes that “whites” do not have negative experience of police and that BIPOC experience of police is primarily due to “race.” This racial framing (1) obscures the function of policing in class society as a whole to maintain existing property relations, (2) contradicts the author’s argument that “library workers in general must incorporate insights from other disciplines into their practice and begin to meaningfully address the complicated roles of police and security guards in the public library,” and, (3) undermines their stated goal to contest the “harmful stereotypes about marginalized communities” that is typical of the “conservative and uncritical approach” that dominates discussion of the issue.

In their conclusion, the author suggests that the “root cause” of why libraries are not made “safe for all” is because of reliance on “exclusion mechanisms” that perpetuate negative stereotypes and treatment of “marginalized groups” as opposed to equitable use of “social services and social workers.” This does not, however, address the root cause of why “public spaces are becoming increasingly commercialized” which has to do with the conflict between profit and the social good of all. Social service provision is a way to manage the class conflict to make it less disruptive of the status quo, not abolish it. What about educating the public to become knowledgable about the forces of class society and how to overthrow them? Why is this not considered a “concrete action to address systemic issues” that “begins to address the inequality” here? This is something library workers can themselves do right now with their existing knowledges and resources…