Author’s note: The author of this blog post is an international student studying at UCLA with experience of living in the United States less than six months. Given the situation that I am not familiar with the American contexts sufficiently, this blog post can be just seen as very preliminary work.
Racial equality is, in fact, not a realistic goal. Few may agree with me that our racial equality goals may never be realized.[1] - Derrick Bell
One day in October 2019, I received an e-mail from the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) list, which is intended for communications relating to AERI and to research and education relating to archives and archival studies more broadly. In this e-mail, an African American male who is a member of the AERI community described his experience of being subjected to racism when he worked as an archival professor in a university. After reading that, I felt shocked and appalled, because I didn’t expect such a bad thing can happen to an AERI member. But what is sadder is that even now, racial discrimination and gender discrimination may happen in every corner of the world, which we have to face and acknowledge.
In The Derrick Bell Reader, Derrick Bell, an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist writes, “Racial equality is, in fact, not a realistic goal. Few may agree with me that our racial equality goals may never be realized.”[2]Although eliminating racial discrimination and gender discrimination can’t be easy, contrary to Bell, I argue that through the joint efforts of people from all walks of life, we have seen tremendous progress in racial justice and gender justice. Though it is not satisfying enough in some ways, this progress may give us reasons to believe that racial justice and gender justice will eventually be achieved.
People of color have been treated unfairly historically and contemporarily and it is not easy to eliminate racial discrimination. Derrick Bell describes the story of spirituals in his book, which made a deep impression on me. In the early years of the enslavement of Africans, “the slaves used their songs as a means of communication: giving warning, conveying information about escapes planned and carried out, and simply for uplifting the spirit and fortifying the soul.”[3] However, some white scholars concluded that “the basically primitive song-chants were not capable of complex development and were certainly too simplistic to convey sophisticated musical ideas”[4] and “those songs were not art.”[5] In my eyes as an archivist, the spirituals are a link within communities of enslaved people, an important way for them to build identity and collective memory, and a valuable spiritual treasure for all humankind, which enables the enslaved people to have a special and effective channel to care for each other and exchange feelings.
It is also worth noting that the intersection of race and gender makes some people’s voices more likely to be ignored. For example, compared with white women and Black men, Black women may be subject to the dual oppressions of sexism and racism. Kimberle Crenshaw, a leading scholar of critical race theory who developed the theory of intersectionality describes three Title VII cases: DeGraffenreid v General Motors, Moore v Hughes Helicopters and Payne v Travenol, in which the problems of intersectionality of race and sex are completely obscured. More specifically, she argues, “the paradigm of sex discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of white women; the model of race discrimination tends to be based on the experiences of the most privileged Blacks.”[6] We need to realize that Black women can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by white women and Black men.
Although the road to racial justice and gender justice can’t be flat, and it is full of broken stones and thorns, we still can notice that many people are making their contributions in their fields. Taking the field of Information Studies as an example, many scholars have made outstanding efforts to promote racial justice and gender justice. In Anthony Dunbar’s work, he tries to introduce critical race theory to archival discourse. He proposes, “research must be a shared vision between critical theorist and archivist of creating and recreating identities that are expressive of the lived experiences of marginalized populations.”[7] More specifically, he offers, “Critical race theory can assist in establishing a voice and identity for underrepresented and marginalized populations that can be expressed through an agency of self empowerment based on issues of significance to them,”[8] which encourages underrepresented groups to actively speak out, to record their unique memory and to build their common identities. In addition, through insightful discussion, combination and analysis of two distinct strands - archival theories of value and feminist standpoint epistemologies, Michelle Caswell proposes “a new archival appraisal theory, methodology, and political strategy”[9] named feminist standpoint appraisal. She argues, “for archivists from dominant groups, feminist standpoint appraisal offers an opportunity to align archival practice with oppressed communities by both acknowledging and dismantling oppressor standpoints and attempting to center oppressed standpoints.”[10] Last but not least, Safiya Noble’s book - Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and Fobazi Ettarch’s research about Intersectional Librarianship have also made great contributions to promote racial justice and gender justice. The academic achievements related to race and gender issues in the field of Information Studies have aroused people’s attention, refection and discussion on racial justice and gender justice. And this kind of attention, refection and discussion makes more and more people aware of some social issues that they have previously ignored, and this awareness can be transformed into actions, and may even encourage people to make their own contributions to racial justice and gender justice in their work and life to a certain extent.
Similarly, outside the field of Information Studies, many people in other fields also have made their own contributions to gender justice and racial justice. With the joint efforts of people from all walks of life, tremendous progress has been made, for example, we have Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the United States, we have Toni Morrison, a successful American novelist, essayist and professor, we can see that more and more people of color and more and more women play a pivotal role in study, work, and various areas in society. Although these are symbols, these examples may give us reasons to believe that the dream of justice will eventually come true.
I will end this piece where I started it. In response to the problems of discrimination, as a member of the Future of AERI Working Group, we are working on creating a Legal Defense fund to support archivists experiencing job discrimination. I firmly believe that a joyous daybreak will surely come.
[1] Derrick Bell, The Derrick Bell Reader (New York: New York Press, 2005).
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” u. Chi. Legal f., (1989):139.
[7] Anthony Dunbar, “Introducing critical race theory to archival discourse: getting the conversation started.” Archival Science6, no.1(2006): 109-129.
[8] Ibid
[9] Michelle Caswell, “Dusting for Fingerprints: Introducing Feminist Standpoint Appraisal.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, special issue on feminist ethics (2019). https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/113/67
[10] Ibid
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