To honor Black History Month, I have been reading books and articles about noteworthy historical figures who are often overlooked in our history classrooms in the United States. As a TSK practitioner, questioning the boundaries of the familiar is a constant practice (or perhaps I should call it a lifestyle!), and Black History Month and other days/months celebrating historically marginalized communities serve as important reminders that we can change our focal setting and look at the world differently. If we habitually “toss out” perspectives that don’t fit with our preexisting views, life loses its vibrancy, like rewatching the same program over and over again. Locked into a static position, it becomes difficult to learn anything new. 

One story I was particularly struck by this month – and which seemed particularly relevant for our work here at Center for Creative Inquiry – was about Dorothy Porter, a groundbreaking librarian at Howard University who was instrumental in building up the Moorland–Spingarn Research Center. The MSRC is “one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive repositories for the documentation of the history and culture of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and other parts of the world.”

When Ms. Porter began her work, she encountered a classification system that only included two classification numbers for all African American literature and culture. The two available categories in the Dewey system at the time were “slavery” and “colonization,” and every Black poem, book or story could only be labeled as one or the other. Seeing the limitations this system imposed on knowledge, she rejected the Dewey system and devised a new classification system that highlighted genre and author.

In Love of Knowledge, Tarthang Tulku writes, “In every time and every culture, there have been individuals who have broken away from the accepted forms and predetermined limits of conventional knowledge to explore new ways of thinking and being. Disregarding the definitions that partition knowledge into standard fields of inquiry, they have probed the boundaries of the known, reaching out toward a broader vision. They have discovered the deep sense of meaning and profound satisfaction that come with a wholehearted commitment to inquiry.” At CCI, we celebrate Dorothy Porter for being one such visionary who broke away from pre-established labels and limitations. In so doing, she opened up new paths for thinking and learning about diverse experiences. May we draw inspiration from her example to ask questions beyond the familiar, probe the edges of the known, and nurture a creative and active intelligence in our lives.

Read more about Dorothy Porter: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/remembering-howard-university-librarian-who-decolonized-way-books-were-catalogued-180970890/