The ethics of writing history in the traumatic afterlife of lynching

ABSTRACT

‘The Ethics of Writing History in the Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching’ raises questions about the ethical obligations of historians who write about historical traumas like lynching, in particular when the subjects of their histories cannot give consent for their violent and deeply personal stories to be published in books and articles. This essay argues that, though historians are charged with unearthing the ‘truth’ of the past without whitewashing or tempering violence, bigotry, and the like, we also have an obligation to preserve the dignity and privacy of the victims and survivors of historical trauma. Some stories (or certain parts of stories), like those of Black women who were raped as part of a lynching ritual, may be legitimately unspeakable, especially given the real potential to veer into the gratuitous and threaten to re-objectify victims and retraumatize survivors. Expanding upon an essay by Teju Cole, ‘Death in the Browser Tab,’ that critiques the ease with which anyone can access videos of police shootings, this essay proposes strategies for forging ethical relationships with these historical subjects and navigating these difficult writing choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• lynching
• consent
• trauma
• photographs
• Walter Scott
• narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Author’s interview with Audrey Grant in Adel, Georgia, 20 May 2013.

2. Ibid.

3. My particular research concerns memory studies and trauma studies but speaks to histories of violence more broadly. Also, for this essay, I am setting aside questions about whether historians should air ‘dirty laundry’ that, depending on one’s perspective, can be needlessly salacious and embarrassing gossip or a necessary revelation of stories scrubbed from the mainstream. Claims about ‘dirty laundry’ often intend to protect the powerful, and as the word ‘dirty’ insinuates, degrade more vulnerable people and more marginal behaviors.

4. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s foundational work explores silences in the production of history. As profoundly important as his work has been in shaping the discipline of history, especially on scholarship that recovers stories by developing an ear for these silences, he doesn’t talk about silences born out of pain and protection or a reluctance to make personal traumas public (Trouillot 1995, 26).

5. According to Audrey Grant, her grandmother, who was five or six years old when her parents were lynched, was not fully aware of what had happened to her parents for years after they died. Her aunt who raised her, Viola Godfrey, sheltered her from the truth that her mother and father were lynched. Author’s interview with Audrey Grant; Author’s interview with Robert Hall in Valdosta, Georgia, 28 January 2012.

6. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin [1963] 1993, 8) wrote, ‘Please try to remember that what they [white people] believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.’ Baldwin’s shift away from the internalization of shame among targets of racism and to its perpetrators has broader implications for the way we should talk about the targets of any kind of harm, whether lynching, rape, or both. In many ways, his insight is at the center of #MeToo, which aims to remove the shame surrounding sexual assault and rape, in large part, by encouraging survivors to share their narratives in public.

7. When the creator of a collection is deceased, archivists often negotiate these agreements with donors who are the children or spouses of the creator, even if the agreement’s terms go against the wishes of the deceased creator of the collection. This practice privileges the wishes of the donor over the creator or others who may appear in the collection. Therefore, even when an item that is particularly sensitive or personal has made it into an archive, a historian should consider whether including its contents in published research is necessary and whether its inclusion is intrusive. Relatedly, time restrictions placed on collections operate under the assumption that trauma and privacy concerns fade over time, but trauma unfolds in non-linear ways and can remain potent across generations and time. Some historians, including Marisa Fuentes, have noted that working in archives of violence takes a toll on them, hundreds of years after their historical subjects lived and died.

8. Recently, archivists have contended with the ‘right to be forgotten,’ which emerged out of case law in the European Union involving individuals who want to control online content about themselves, often of a personal and damaging nature, such as revenge porn.

9. In ‘What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?’ Frederick Douglass dismissed as obvious and insulting questions about Black humanity, asking rhetorically, ‘Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already.’ (1998, 256). Historians should do the same.

10. By saying that I want to avoid turning readers into voyeurs of spectacle violence, I am not suggesting that historians remove uncomfortable truths about traumatic histories. In fact, that discomfort can be productive. For example, in some of Kara Walker’s installations about the violence of enslavement, she projects scenes of violence in silhouette on the wall, and viewers become part of these scenes when they pass in front of the projectors. The discomfort of becoming a viewer-participant is part of Walker’s artistic vision, a way to think about these scenes of enslavement as less remote from ourselves than we may want to believe (Shaw 2004, 40).

11. Susan Sontag (2003, 102) explained that the quantity of violent images we are exposed to does not account for becoming ‘inured to what they are shown’ but rather, ‘It is passivity that dulls feeling.’

12. The exhibit was later moved to the New-York Historical Society, which could accommodate more viewers and was intended for historical rather than art exhibitions, and it subsequently travelled to venues around the United States but with additional historically grounded curatorial work of Joseph Jordan. Those photographs also appeared in Without Sanctuary, a book with an art press published also in 2000 (Lee 2007, 1; Allen 2000).

13. I no longer use lynching images in my classes on memory and racial violence, and, though my book reprints a few images of lynched effigies, I intentionally do not include lynching photographs. Instead, most of the artwork I analyze depicts Black mourning, a process steeped in love and loss, not hatred.

14. Given my sensitivity to the consumption and display of violent images as a scholar of lynching memory, I have made a decision to actively avoid watching videos of police shootings, but since television news often plays these videos on loop with no regard for the numbness to Black pain that this repetition produces, I have encountered these videos just by glancing at a television screen in an airport or hospital waiting room.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mari N. Crabtree

Mari N. Crabtree is an associate professor of African American Studies at the College of Charleston and, for the 2019–2020 academic year, was a visiting research scholar at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies. She specializes in African American history and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book, ‘My Soul is a Witness’: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, 1940–1970, is under contract at Yale University Press for the New Directions in Narrative History Series, which is co-edited by Aaron Sachs and John Demos. She has also published an essay in Raritan: A Quarterly Review, ‘The Art and Politics of Subterfuge in African American Culture,’ and has a forthcoming chapter in Reconstruction at 150: Reassessing the Revolutionary ‘New Birth of Freedom’ that reimagines the temporal and geographical boundaries of lynching. Her next book project expands upon the subject of her Raritan essay, and it is tentatively titled Shuffling Like Uncle Tom, Thinking Like Nat Turner: Humor, Deception, and Irony in the African American Cultural Tradition.