Archives and Empathy
(Just a heads up: this gets into some dark territory.)
I know that I haven't written anything on this blog in over year. I also know that what I'm going to talk about here -- namely, the Stanford Rape Case -- might not seem related to archives at first. But I hope you bear with me here.
A couple days ago, I started to reading the woman's victim statement, and found I couldn't stop reading, even as it got more and more painful. Reading it all the way through felt like a necessary act of bearing witness, and apparently numerous others felt the same way. I couldn't get this awful crime out of my head (and learning of the rapist's light sentence and his oblivious father and friends made it worse), but there was something about it that particularly ate away at me, apart from the obvious horror of his actions and subsequent denial of any guilt on his part.
Finally I realized what was haunting me about this case: someone very close to me was attacked in a similar way many years ago. She too was sexually assaulted after passing out at a party. But she never pressed charges or publicly accused her attacker. I firmly believe that he hasn't lost a moment of sleep since, or even spent a single moment of thought considering his actions that night. I wouldn't be surprised if he's completely forgotten about it; if he was reminded, I can only imagine the numerous denials and excuses he would make for his behavior. Like almost all rapists he'll never suffer any consequences at all for the violence he committed. Consequences are for victims and those that love them.
Committing an act of violence against another person is like a man dropping a rock into a still pond; the ripples spread out, strong at first, weaker over time, but taking a long while to fully disappear. And now there's a constant rhythm of stones dropping into water, and the ripples criss-cross each other, and overlap, and the surface is never still, almost boiling, and that's the world we're born to and the one we've made.
But beyond the fear and rage they inspire in us, there's something ... uninteresting about those men with their stones, something banal and repetitive about men who are truly hateful. Whatever social, religious, and/or political wrapping they choose, the rancid contents are the same as they've ever been: greed, jealousy, rage, and the old-as-humanity-itself pure tribal fear of the outsider and the stranger. That tribalism is why Brock Turner's family and friends, who I'm sure are otherwise decent human beings, will defend him. It's a failure of empathy. Their circle of compassion is only as wide as their tribe, at least in this case, and why they think he should not only not be punished but not suffer any consequences at all. Consequences are for victims and those that love them.
What really matters -- in the big, big picture -- isn't hateful individuals, but hateful institutions, which project that tribal fear and loathing through space and time. Individual racists, for all the violence they may commit, don't matter; racist institutions cause mass suffering and can tear whole societies apart. Brock Turner as an individual doesn't really matter, he's just one more hateful man in a literally endless succession of them. But Turner's defenders, apologists, and enablers are different, because their tribalism is tangled up with the institutions of family and the legal system. Just like individuals and their tribes, institutions have their own ways of justifying the limits of their empathy. Usually, they claim that they had to act in a particular way because of some responsibility to an even greater force: corporations are beholden to their stockholders and investors; political parties are to their donors and primary voters; universities to their trustees and alumni; governments are to "national security" and "jobs". And institutions will retroactively justify their actions, as well as their continued existence, using the discourse of history. Tradition, Heritage, Honor, Memory, Etc.
The reason I created this blog, as I suggested in my first post, is to uncover ways archives can complicate and subvert those very "historical" narratives to which institutions so dearly cling. But the most lively conversation/argument taking place in the archives field over the past ten years (outside of What To Do About Interns/Volunteers/Paraprofessionals) has been around ethics and archives. What does it mean to be an ethical archivist when one is split three ways between professional standards, personal beliefs, and duties to one's job and colleagues? And when many of the records we administer were themselves created and/or acquired unethically? More recent discussions have focused on how archivists can best use their work to forward the realization of social justice in their communities, locally and nationally.
Is that what archivists are for? What are archivists for? Obviously the answer is "many, many things," but if one of those things is "increasing social justice," then the follow-up question is "how would archivists do that?" I submit that one answer is already embedded in the material we work with every day. Many of the records that arrange, describe and preserve tell the stories of individual human beings; apart from personal papers, even organizational records -- which make up the bulk of the records in US archives -- have individual histories embedded in them if you know where to look. We can recover those histories if we try. Attempting an authentic recovery of those histories -- comprehending those individuals on their own terms, not ours or some institution's -- means using our imagination, our will, our knowledge, and also our empathy. And I believe that process, that movement of the mind through space and time, can itself increase not just the knowledge but also the empathy of those who undertake it.
This might sound naive to you, or just wrong. But you've probably seen something like this yourself. Have you seen someone become fascinated by one of your records? There's a kind of invisible connection made between a person and a document, a book, an artwork, an object from the past that he or she suddenly feels connected to. I've felt it myself and seen it happen to others. Sometimes folks will approach historical artifacts with a particular arrogance, ready to either fit things into preconceived notions of what "really happened" or ignore them altogether; those folks, usually older, are lost causes. But then that true connection happens it's real, and it can be meaningful to the person making it.
And maybe that's a first step down a path of broader horizons and new understandings for that person. I want to facilitate that experience if I can, I want them to feel it for themselves rather than explain it to them secondhand. I want that person to look at the names of women sold as slaves in this country and think, "who were those women? What where their lives like? Why was this happening to them? How could supposedly good people treat other human beings this way?" So often the reaction to any discussion of slavery is denial and evasion; "it wasn't really that bad..." "they could have just run away..." "poor whites had it just as bad..." "the Irish were the real slaves..." "it doesn't have any bearing on our lives now..." and so on. But if I can get someone to push through that disgusting layer of ignorance, cynicism, and stupidity, to want to reach out mentally and emotionally, to want to ask the hard questions that follow, to have more empathy, I've done something worth doing.
Like most people I like to believe that my work does something, however small, to improve things; I think this might be one way archives and archivists do that. I don't believe that I make "the world" a better place -- the world is now and always has been a terrible place, full of violence and suffering, and it will always be that way, no matter what I or anyone else does. But within that large world of the present, we have microcosms that have captured the past, small worlds that can be fully entered and understood only with an open mind and an open heart. We beckon others to come in, to open their minds and hearts as well. It's something. Isn't it?
