→ spirit of the people

 “The Spirit of the People is Greater Than the Man’s Technology”: On Memory Work and Community Self-Defense
danielle luz belanger

“One cannot memorialize that which is present and that which is yet to come, a reality that reinforces the requirement that memory work in these contexts becomes bullets for liberation.”

- Doria D. Johnson, Jarrett M. Drake, Michelle Caswell in “From Cape Town to Chicago to Colombo and Back Again: Towards a Liberation Theology for Memory Work”

Instances of community self-defense--or strategic practices aimed at resisting forms of aggression, repression, and oppression by any means necessary--are prolific throughout modern history, yet remain largely understated in the dominant record. This project seeks to rectify the lack of visibility surrounding the plurality and legacy of community self-defense by highlighting historic examples from groups such as the NAACP Monroe Chapter and the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, among others. These groups embraced the fundamental understanding that safety is a precondition of community empowerment.  

The examples that follow speak to the relatively commonplace practice of self-defense among subjugated and vulnerable communities, exploring the various strategies exercised by and for those communities in the struggle for self-preservation and self-determination. Such framing aims to subvert negative stigmatizations of left militancy by situating self-defense as one of several components comprising the larger social fabric of collective life in progressive spheres. This context is necessary for understanding how self-defense in many cases emerges as a critical condition upon which the liberation of oppressed people depends; it is in contrast to prevailing assumptions that such practices are extremist, unwarranted, or fueled more by a general antagonism than a concrete need for protection.

An equally important context informing the question of why we know so little about this expansive history stems from recognition of the ways in which community self-defense, by demonstrating the effectiveness of organized resistance, threatens to undermine the status quo. Examining how the production and circulation of knowledge relates to existing power structures helps elucidate the challenges engendered in efforts to uplift histories such as this one, which face the dual forces of exclusion and subjugation.

In 1970, Howard Zinn delivered a seminal speech at the Society of American Archivists in which he unsettled the concept of neutrality. Up until that point, neutrality was largely accepted as a standard tenet of work in libraries and archives, alleged to underpin the moral dimension of the information professions.[1] Zinn pointed out that neutrality is in fact much more contentious than previously believed, serving to reproduce the unequal power relations of society and dictate the legitimation of certain ideas over others.[2] Far from being the ethical stronghold of the field, Zinn explained that neutrality is an insidious manifestation of ideals that both derive from and reinforce a specific set of values, thus establishing those ideals and values as normative.   

The myth of neutrality is evidenced everywhere by its patent synonymity with the white, patriarchal, heteronormative perspective, and the dearth of preserved perspectives that fall beyond those bounds. For archivists, historians, librarians, and others who actively participate in memory work, asserting a neutral stance should be tacitly understood as the masking of underlying political motivations and experiences that inevitably inform one’s decision-making process.[3]  Acknowledging this reality reveals how complicity and passivity work in tandem to implicate supposedly “neutral” views in a system that is predicated upon an uneven (and in many cases, harmful) distribution of power. [4]

Just as neutrality acts as an instrument of racial capitalism by obscuring reality and truth, intellectual freedom similarly operates to obfuscate systemic injustice under the false premise of universality. Governed by the conditions of racial capitalism, the construction of libraries and archives as a “marketplace of ideas” leaves these institutions encoded by an “economic order of things.”[5] This can be observed in the ways in which the field of Library & Information Sciences acknowledges a need for antiracist reform, but responds superficially to that need by adopting a neoliberal multicultural praxis, as opposed to one that is based upon reparations that recognize the humanity and dignity of all people.[6] Illuminating histories of community self-defense--which are primarily histories of indigenous, black, and brown resistance--requires active recognition of the dignity that belongs to all people who molded past struggles for self-determination and self-preservation.

We have established that instances of community self-defense remain obfuscated in the historical record and explored the power dynamics responsible for the scarcity of available resources on the subject. But what are the implications of this observation? How can certain ideas and lived experiences be legitimized without relying on the authority of the traditional arbiters of knowledge? How did we arrive at a situation where the right to self-defense still needs defending?

The examples raised in this project illuminate the possibilities of autonomous and community-directed world building. They are largely sourced from The Freedom Archives, a community archive which mirrors this very sensibility. Specializing in 20th century progressive histories, The Freedom Archives always avails opportunities to participate in dialogue with its patrons, not only because patrons often have insights that help build a deeper understanding of materials in the collection, but also to ensure that the histories conveyed in the archive’s holdings are accurately represented and understood. With robust educational initiatives and an effective internship program, the archive frequently engages the collection by repurposing historical materials for pedagogic application. In this way, The Freedom Archives participates in the memory work of creating a place for indigenous, black, brown, queer perspectives and experiences to be remembered, preserved, and activated.[7] The Freedom Archives stands as a potent example of a project that undermines the hegemonic regulation of information and hones the liberatory potential of forging a new and genuinely community-driven paradigm for archival engagement. [8]

As a staff member, it follows that my own experiences with preserving the past are heavily influenced by The Freedom Archives and the meanings generated from the relevance of its collections to the communities with which I actively participate. My explorations in memory work are also shaped by the understanding that ideas of “belonging and believing” provide a valuable conceptual framework from which the project of “humanizing the dehumanized,” can be authentically pursued.[9] Acknowledging our obligation to preserve and remember the histories most resonant with our own experiences is believing that we have always belonged someplace, and fought for that belonging. And we continue to belong and fight to belong here, now, as we will in the future that has yet to come.

It is worth stating that this project does not attempt to offer a complete account of the entire history of community self-defense; it reflects the understanding that such an endeavor is not only an impossibility, but a Borgesian caricature of what knowledge under capitalism stands for: the desire to create a digestible, controlled taxonomy, to possess through knowing. To dispossess through unknowing.

The goal instead is to provide some examples that can help expand what currently exists as an abbreviated history. Significant contributions to a people’s history of self-defense have already been made by historians, activists, archivists, and scholars such as Howard Zinn, Michelle Caswell, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Akinyele Umoja, Nathaniel Moore, Claude Marks, and countless others. Many of their ideas are drawn upon in the following pages.

With the objective of encouraging engagement with past examples and providing resources that might assist in the process of building programs of communalized support today, I raise the topics of community self-defense and collective memory to underscore their parallel relevance to the present moment. An unprecedented level of precarity ushered by the coronavirus pandemic has been met by a growing culture of care and reciprocity, giving rise to the (re)emergent conviction that communities can, in fact, keep each other safe in the face of a failing system.

In the spirit of fighting for our safety and belonging through the creative means available to us, I close with a scene that aspires to recognize and participate in the liberatory capacity of memory work:

in an industrial city across the san francisco bay / there were oil refineries and polluted soil and people who lived there / one day they got together and held guns to the sky while a black man spoke about spirit / it’s greater he insisted greater than the man’s technology[10] / and he pointed to a helicopter that flew overhead close to the ground where the people stood / its rotary wings lapped up dust and dirt and you could see every particular flit thru the wind-churned air, turning light to gauze / the people roared / they said / no more!!! / and the helicopter shrunk back into the sky / so the people took back what was theirs / not a single bullet fired / not a single person fell / the ground beneath their feet / the sky above their heads / the stillness of the afternoon air / they took back what was theirs, said / it could be ours, too

Notes

[1] Although Zinn’s ideas have been largely accepted among information professionals, the subject of neutrality is still debated today. For a recent argument in defense of neutrality, see: Boles, Frank J. “To Everything There Is a Season.” The American Archivist 82, no. 2 (September 1, 2019): 598–617. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc-82-02-21.

[2] Zinn, Howard. “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest,” Boston University journal., v.19-21 1971-1973.

[3] Caswell, Michelle. “Dusting for Fingerprints.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. preprint (2020).

[4] Jensen, Robert. “The Myth of the Neutral Professional,” Progressive Librarian No. 24, 2006.

[5] Seale, M., & Mirza, R. Speech and Silence: Race, Neoliberalism, and Intellectual Freedom. Journal of Radical Librarianship, 5, (2019): 41–60.

[6] This is a generalization. While not all aspects of the field fall into the trappings articulated here, it remains the dominant trend. In a world dominated by a specific set of views, believing that all perspectives can be provided an equal platform vis-a-vis intellectual freedom is (under many circumstances, at least) the equivalent of denying pre-existing formations of privilege and disenfranchisement; it is an ambitious aspiration that in recent cases, has tended to deny, rather than advocate for, Black people’s humanity. See: Seale, M., & Mirza, R. Speech and Silence: Race, Neoliberalism, and Intellectual Freedom. Journal of Radical Librarianship, 5, (2019): 41–60.

[7]  Such narratives have long eluded traditional archives, which were initially built upon the exclusion and erasure of subjugated perspectives.

[8] Johnson, D., Drake, J., Caswell, M. (2016). “From Cape Town to Chicago to Colombo and Back Again: Towards a Liberation Theology for Memory Work”. Reflections from the 2016 Mandela Dialogues. Accessed November 6, 2020. https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/reflections-from-the-2016-mandela-dialogues. Also see: Caswell, Michelle, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand. “Critical Archival Studies: An Introduction.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (2017). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.50.

[9] Hughes-Watkins, Lae’l. “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices.” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5, no. 1 (2018). https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6.

[10] Derived from Terry Cannon, The Story of the Black Panther Party: All Power to the People (San Francisco: People’s Press, 1970).