One of the things 2018 became known for, as Ashley Farmer points out in “Archiving While Black,” was the cultural realization that white people in the United States use the police to keep Black people out of presumed-white spaces. What 2020 made more of us realize, especially in cities like Louisville, is that those white spaces are everywhere: not only downtown streets but suburban ones, city parks, the trunks of Black people’s cars. These white spaces can even be the bedrooms that Black people inhabit in their sleep.
Since United States archives have also often been one of these white spaces, it is not enough to simply preserve the materials, movements, and histories of marginalized groups; it is also vital to pay attention to who is doing that preservation work. Who, then, are the chroniclers of Black lives in the pandemic? Who is doing the work of remembering the Black essential workers in the battle against COVID-19? Who is memorializing the history of the people who are fighting for racial justice, and who is doing so in more depth and detail than the small snapshot that I offer here? How are they capturing the stories of people whose lives have been so disrupted by the pandemic and white supremacy that it prevents them from building their own comprehensive history?
Some doing this work are archival studies scholars. People like Ricardo L. Punzalan and Michelle Caswell have outlined the archive’s challenges and proposed including more material from marginalized groups. Among other things, Punzalan and Caswell have suggested finding new ways to evaluate those materials, giving the subjects themselves a say in how the history is documented, and creating broad-based community archives that form a web of materials and information rather than a centralized housing of them. In addition, Caswell and others like her have done considerable work to identify white privilege in the archives and to identify steps for dismantling those privileges. Others, like Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, discuss the necessity of building what they call a “reparative archive” that helps to highlight the lives and experiences of marginalized populations.