Positionality Statement

This project was developed by white and white-passing, non-black mixed race individuals. We recognize that this whiteness affords us privileges to be able to explore the themes within our archive that do not personally enact generational harm and trauma, and that we are able to discuss these topics largely protected from outside pushback or questioning. We acknowledge that as white Americans, we continue to benefit from the past and current exploitation of black Americans, and US colonialism and imperialism as a whole. In this archive, we do not deeply explore or engage with the specific horrors of enslavement because 1) as archivists and not researchers, our goal is to present the information in a way that is most valuable to those doing research work (and for this specific project, making this information accessible to those with and without significant experience in archives), and more importantly, 2) we wanted to follow indigenous scholar Eve Tuck's "desire-based" instead of "damage-centered" frameworks. In her 2009 work Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities, Tuck writes, "desire-based research frameworks are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives [...] desire-based frameworks defy the lure to serve as “advertisements for power” by documenting not only the painful elements of social realities but also the wisdom and hope. [...] This is to say that even when communities are broken and conquered, they are so much more than that—so much more that this incomplete story is an act of aggression," (Tuck, 2009).

 

Additionally, our goal here was not to uplift the white women who performed abolitionist work, as white women have historically and contemporarily engender significant harm to BIPOC communities. Rather, our desire was to highlight the specific relationships and relationship building within the abolitionist movement that served as acts of resistance, as well as how these relationships manifested spatiotemporally.  

 

In Tuck and Yang's Decolonization is not a Metaphor, they explore various "settler moves to innocence," and this is something we consciously want to avoid. They state, "settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware," (Tuck and Yang, 2012). They also explore the work of Mawhinney, who "theorizes the self-positioning of white people as simultaneously the oppressed and never an oppressor, and as having an absence of experience of oppressive power relations," (Tuck and Yang, 2012). We want to affirm that our work is only possible due to the vital contributions of BIPOC scholars, and that our privileges and "absence of experience of oppressive power relations" will absolutely cause us to miss things, have missteps, and inevitably cause harm. The goal of this positionality statement is not to be lauded, but rather to give credit to these scholars who inform our work and to recognize the ineluctable absences in our archive.

 

In addition to Tuck and Yang, we were informed by the works of Sutherland, Hartman, Punzalan, Drake, Jules, among others. This positionality statement drew inspiration from Ziegler.