#A4BLiP

[mhpmiller]

Conference presentation post-mortem the second

Conference presentation post-mortem the second

A sun-dappled path at Portland’s Japanese Garden.I believe I consistently and correctly used the microphone throughout.1 I have not checked the recording to confirm; I am unfond of my voice, and I was there so I don’t really need to listen to the panel again. Though if you weren’t there, Teressa Raiford is most definitely worth listening to, both from a content and presentation perspective. I had…

[inapat13]

Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia : Archivists’ Allyship to the Black Lives Matter Movement

Benedict Evans/Redux 

Since the 1980s, official and unified history has been more and more challenged by conflicting memories. The Internet has offered new opportunities and new tools to communities trying to tell their own side of the story. Community-based participatory archives are one of these new tools. To Yvonne Ng, they are “especially valuable in communities that institutional archives have traditionally overlooked or misrepresented, and in communities where archives belonging to the state or other institutions have historically enabled discrimination and abuse”[1]. They are a reaction against traditional archives, which reproduce their institution’s categories, bias and omissions while collecting documents.

The Black Lives Matter movement was at the origin of several independent archives. A web archive was created on archive-it.org, and contains news articles, blogs, social media, and other websites related to Ferguson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, protests and demonstrations around the country, and “seeks to document the movement as it grows and evolves”[2]. Another example is A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, created in 2015 by Cleveland residents and professional archivists, and which defines itself as “a safe and secure space to share any testimony, documents, or accounts that narrate or reflect on encounters or effects of police violence” in the life of Cleveland citizens[3]. It contains Use of Force Policies and Incident Reports (which are public records), protest posters of people killed by the police, testimonials, press coverage, militant groups archives, etc.

One of the creators of A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland is Jarrett Drake, a former digital archivist of Princeton University. In 2016, he was also the initiator of Archives For Black Lives in Philadelphia (or A4BLiP), a volunteer-run organisation of archivists, librarians and other professionals in the area “responding to the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement”, with the aim to “end archives’ erasure of Black lives”[4]. It is not an archive in itself, but an association theorising anti-oppressive archival description and procedures, and promoting community archives by advising organisations serving Black communities on archival management questions, such as organisation, reboxing, inventories, metadata, digital preservation, grantwriting…

In their statement of principles, they acknowledge their privilege, as archivists, “of choosing what goes into the historical record”, and thus “their responsibility to safeguard accurate representations of contemporaneous events”. They pay attention to the location of archive, that is to say the fact that "archivist" is an overwhelmingly White profession, that archives are situated within institutions which have historically “reinforced systemic oppression”, and “have historically been inaccessible or unwelcoming to marginalized groups”, and that “archival theory is rooted in concepts like provenance that promote […] privileged document-creators (those who have the means to create and preserve records) over subjects”. They also remind us that archival collecting mostly ignores narratives of marginalised communities. Furthermore, they maintain their commitment to political values, such as the promotion of just policies around records of police violence, or the advocating of intersectional justice, that is to say the recognition of “intersecting social identities and the related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination”[5]. Finally, they assert their position of “allies” with individuals facing oppression. Allyship can be defined as “an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person of privilege seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group of people”[6].

In a speech at the 2016 American Library Association Conference in Orlando, Jarrett Drake reaffirmed that these principles were essential for archives and libraries to document the Black Lives Matter movement responsively, and gave examples of alternative ways in which institutions could practice allyship with the movement: “partner with organizations and communities to identify the short-term and medium-term preservation, access, and security needs for records they create, […] use your existing collections to host dialogues, programs, and exhibits around the many issues the movement is illuminating, […] offer [the] institution’s information and building resources to movement communities, organizers, and organizations”[7].

Esther Montanès

[1] Yvonne Ng, “Community-Based Approaches to Archives From the Black Lives Matter Movement”, Witness blog, URL: https://blog.witness.org/2015/09/community-based-approaches-to-archives-from-the-black-lives-matter-movement/, viewed on 23rd March, 2020.

[2] Black Lives Matter web archives, archive-it.org, URL : https://archive-it.org/collections/4783, viewed on 23rd March, 2020.

[3] A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, https://www.archivingpoliceviolence.org/, viewed on 23rd March, 2020.

[4] Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia, https://archivesforblacklives.wordpress.com/, viewed on the 23rd of March, 2020.

[5] A4BLiP’s statement of principles, URL: https://github.com/rappel110/A4BLiP, viewed on the 23rd of March, 2020.

[6] «Allyship», The Anti-Oppression Network, URL: https://theantioppressionnetwork.com/allyship/, viewed on the 23rd of March, 2020.

[7] Jarrett M. Drake, «Expanding #ArchivesForBlackLives to Traditional Archival Repositories”, On Archivy, 2016, URL: https://medium.com/on-archivy/expanding-archivesforblacklives-to-traditional-archival-repositories-b88641e2daf6, viewed on 23rd of March, 2020.

[jenpalm]

Statement from the Concerned Archivists Alliance about archives role in social justice.