Amber Billey writes (January 2018):
The problem: LCC is peppered with a demographic topical cutter .N3-.N5 for Negro, which is not great…to say the least.
Our first task is to figure out what the better replacement is: .B5 for Black or .A4 for African descent? We need to reach out to the BCALA and the African American SACO Funnel for thoughts and feedback.
This will be a difficult proposal. LC has a policy of not changing LC classes, and they argue it will be too laborious to change all the classmarks. I argue that this change is worth the labor for the humanity and dignity of our users who see themselves represented in our collections and catalogs through our classification schemes.
Violet writes (February 2021):
See Netanel Ganin’s blog post on “Every Occurrence of N4 in the Library of Congress Classification Scheme” for more info.
Pitts Theology Library at Emory University replaced N4 with A35 for African American or B5 for Black, depending on the geographical focus of the book. They also replaced O7 (“Oriental”) with A82, for Asian or Asian American. See the story about their changes: https://candler.emory.edu/news/releases/2021/01/pitts-staff-works-to-counteract-racism-in-library-catalog.html.
I have worked on a local mapping at George Mason University: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eZLHdSSN1wJk6synjvv8LvHDnNENlRAQkHST7DCrX3c/edit?usp=sharing. We decided to go with .B5 (or similar) for all instances.