When you work at the library like I do, you are bound to be attacked by a book every now and then. They leap off shelves armed with hard, sharp corners. But I’m a trooper. I can take the physical pain. Unfortunately, the books in the library are often (literally) stuck with something a lot more painful and harmful than a little knock on the head.

Open a book and open up some racism. This is not lynching, it is not hate speech in the sense that we normally think of it, but the racism is there – and perhaps more dangerous for its subtlety.

The books in Baker and Berry libraries have different bookplates usually glued onto the inside covers. There is the Lone Pine bookplate, there are text-only labels that recognize the contributors who make the purchase of books possible. Then you have the bookplate of the squatting "Indian" smoking a pipe while the "civilized" white man perches on a trees stump and educates him.

This bookplate harkens back to and reflects the sentiment of the first days of the College when "civilizing Indians" was the school’s mission. Of course, First Nations peoples never needed "civilization" – they had been perfectly well off in the civilization department long before Europeans had come to this continent. Nonetheless, many books in Dartmouth’s collection, both new and old, continue to bear this insulting emblem. It is still placed on new books as they come in.

And there are other dangers to encounter in the library. If you venture over to Berry Level 3 and look at some book spines, you’ll see the "Orient" section comprised of books primarily written in Chinese. Each call number has "ORIENT" on the first line. For those shaking their heads as to how this is racism, they need only look to the history of the "Orient" and its relationship with the Imperialist western powers.

The "Occident" and the "Orient" were and still are posited as polar opposites where the "Oriental" is typed as sneaky, stupid, and dirty – among other things. The book labels hold only about an inch of type – too small to be harmful, right? – but that inch of type is repeated over and over again. And that is a very real, very widely disseminated expression of racism.

Some folks will surely pass this off as political correctness going hypersensitive again. Maybe they would say, "It might be racist, but we have bigger, more pressing and important things to worry about than bookplates and call-numbers. We have research papers and term projects to do, and if you want to leave the library we have real crimes to address."

This line of thinking has a real and strong pull. It was partly my initial reaction. The word that first popped into my head as I thought about this was benign. We are dealing with low-key "benign" racism. But a little deeper reflection led me to ask how could racism ever be benign? Humanity will always be injured by racism and bigotry. When we go to the big picture, little banal things like call numbers and bookplates go by the wayside, but the little things add up. They are the bricks that form a larger, stronger foundation for racism. If people grow up in an environment that accepts and perpetuates racism as the status quo, racism will always be the status quo.

We get upset about "incidents" as they are often termed, but how shocked should we be by events like these? A lot of attention will be given to Allen Iverson being heckled by fans who call him "monkey" and "nigger" – and to his homophobic retorts. A lot of attention will be given to frat brothers harassing a woman with racist and misogynistic shouts. We can decry these moments of hate until we can decry no more, and it might be a while until something considered similarly outrageous happens again.

But these incidents will never be under control, because people are not made in outrageous isolated moments even if that is all we remember. People are made in the Everyday. And everyday in Baker and Berry Library thousands and thousands of books have little stickers that give racism the thumbs-up.

I do not see us peeling off these stickers anytime soon. It would certainly be a major pain in the rear: there are a lot of stickers! But we can stop putting them on new, incoming books. We can at least begin to re-label book spines. We must be willing to fight more innocuous, everyday racism with as much energy as we fight racist incidents.