The Rights to One’s Self and The Archive(s) By Abby Mortimer

 The Rights to One’s Self and The Archive(s)

By Abby Mortimer

Who “makes” a portrait? Is it the photographer, who after adjusting the lighting and selecting their lens, captures their subject? Is it the scientist who commissioned the photos in order to study his subject, his data, classifying each pixel according to a taxonomy of truth? Is it the subject himself, Renty, a Congolese man enslaved and photographed for study without his consent, lest he be beaten, tortured, murdered? Could it be his children, his children's children, the daughters-now-mothers sharing stories of Papa Renty - survivor, musician, writer - lest their past be forgotten, worse, overwritten? As Tamara Lanier, great-great-great-granddaughter of Renty asks: “Who has the rights to the violence of the past?”[1]

The courts made their statement in Lanier v. Harvard (2020), citing Continental Optic Co. v Reed, “the subject of a photograph does not own the negative or have any property rights therein” and the person who “made” or contracted them has the rights. The courts acknowledge the archival institution (Harvard), an extension of the 19th century racist Harvard pseudoscientist seeking evidence for White Supremacy, as having a right to property while simultaneously denying Renty the rights to his personhood. The law maintains archival rights to property while the archives safe-keeps their whiteness as evidence. However, Tamara’s story does not go unheard. Counternarrative, a powerful component of Critical Race Theory, conspiring with archival theory “radically critiques”[2] the centering of whiteness and the myth of objectivity in U.S. institutions in a way that re-centers BIPOC’s rights and knowledge in the archive(s).

U.S. law and government is created of and for racism. Bell says “In short, without slavery, there would be no constitution to celebrate. This is true not only because slavery provided the wealth that made independence possible, but also because it afforded an ideological basis to resolve conflict between propertied and unpropertied whites''.[3] This ideology gives property to whiteness in itself, with wealthy able bodied men at the pinnacle of deservingness. The codification of whiteness as a right to property justifies to colonial settlers the subjugation of BIPOC and the theft of Turtle Island. Archives, much like American law, are not neutral institutions;[4] many are deeply implicated in the construction of racism and maintenance of whiteness as normative. Under the guise of “Veritas”, Harvard staked their claim to the narrative of Black enslaved men and women when they took the daguerreotype photo record of Renty.

Critical Race Theory and Praxis in the archive, through highlighting experiential knowledge, allegory, counterstories, and the imagination, recognizes and amplifies the power of Tamara Lanier’s story. Her counterstory to Harvard’s claim to “proper care and study” of Renty posits him as the creator of his portrait. He was a man who loved his family as well as a man who did not consent to be studied.  Renty’s voice is brought to life by his descendants. Rachel Winston’s Critical Race Praxis theory of an informed approach to archives urges the profession  “not only embrace but also privilege counterstories”[5] of information professionals, communities collaborated with, and those represented in the collections. She also puts forth the tenants of Black Feminist ethics of care which make space for and honor the different kinds of knowledge and experiences, quoting Black woman archivist Chaitra Powell and colleagues, “our professional practice demonstrates caring for people as evidence of the capacity to care for materials”.[6] If Harvard were to honor the humanity of Renty and acknowledge the love and labor Tamara has poured into her family archives, they would recognize Tamara as the proper caregiver of the daguerreotypes and his image.

We can build new archives with Critical Race Theory and Praxis at the core of their values, but how do we dismantle the institutions that couldn't care less? Bell might suggest accepting this as reality and to instead focus on areas where improvement is hopeful. Harvard ignored Tamara in the ten years preceding her case in attempts to silence her. Ultimately dismissing her case, the Massachusetts Supreme Court urges Tamara to sue for emotional damages. The toll of Black Women’s emotional labor is costly and exhausting, as Winston and Crenshaw’s accounts detail. If Tamara wins that case, the top down “solution”, an interest convergence between Harvard and Tamara, does not address the foundational problems at play. Still, Assistant Professor of Law LaToya Baldwin Clark says that while the law falls short of justice, this is a step, a “means to an end” for greater visibility. It may be that the law falls short of justice, but archival theory does not have to. 

Tamara’s story being documented and shared begins to fill a gap where a silence in the archive dwells. Her story belongs in the Imaginative Dimensions of the Afterwor(l)d, with community who values her for her whole being and centers her story, which includes Renty. In this dimension, the locus of power no longer rests in the archives of traditional, white institutions. It is where “we refuse racial and social justice projects that…hoard power, employ only one way of doing things, force us to convince people, or even worse, convert people’s thinking, accept “perfection” or “objectivity,” or use a false sense of urgency to ignore the very real harm we could cause with our “solution”,[7] and open space for “collective liberatory practices”.  Archives that subscribe to a CRT framework that privilege counter stories, no matter their banality, struggle, creativity or joy, care for Tamara and Renty’s voices.  In this dimension Tamara and Renty might find rest and justice, with only their being as evidence to deserve it.

[1] Free Renty - Lanier v. Harvard (David Grubin Productions, 2022).

[2] Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic, The Derrick Bell Reader (New York University Press, 2005),  78

[3] Bell, 28

[4]  I, too, am not neutral. As a white woman, my whiteness keeps me afloat despite the other facets of my identity (disabled, queer, neurodivergent, for example). My fragility has kept me complicit in too many cases and my purview is limited by my white lens. I aim to hold myself and the information professions accountable for our implicit biases so that we may create systems of full accountability.

[5] Rachel E Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice,” Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory , 2021, pp. 283-298, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0020, 293.

[6] Chaitra Powell et al., “This [Black] Woman’s Work: Exploring Archival Projects That Embrace the Identity of the Memory Worker,” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 2 (2018): p. 5,  https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.25

[7] Sophia Y Leung and Jorge R Lopez-McKnight, “Conclusion: Afterwor(l)Ding toward Imaginative Dimensions,” Knowledge  Justice, 2021, pp. 317-334, https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0022, 326.