White project leaders-cum-saviors have redoubled their efforts to co-opt politically-driven, civically-engaged public history from POC, citing "the importance of our work in these dark times." In their columbusing of activist history, they don't recognize that public historians of color continually reconcile politics and social inequalities in our day-to-day lives, and that we're forced to critically engage that reality through our work. After all, the personal is political.
Consider the latest buzzword of the public history work – "shared authority." But public history has no sole interpreter – history itself is inherently subjective and a composite of stories about the past that get told and retold until they are rendered "fact." "Sharing" authority indicates that something or someone has always held the power to prioritize certain accounts over others, to erase and manipulate in their favor. That, in essence, is how institutions like the museum or the archive came to be. They were never neutral. They were never civically-minded. They were always state-sanctioned spaces meant to circumscribe self-narrative.
The illusion that the institution has the power to bestow or benevolently transfer authority is largely a myth born of historiographic paternalism. Perhaps dialogue-driven interpretation opens up questions of trust between institutions and communities, scholars and "laypeople." But public history engages the power differentials of knowledge transfer. Monologues are a top-down interpretive approach, while docent Q&A is a quasi-top-down approach in that it necessitates audience engagement but still prioritizes the word of an "expert." Meanwhile, audience feedback is a quasi-bottom-up approach in that it provides a forum for audience response/interpretation, but doesn't require follow-up from the institution.
Only true grassroots work can be bottom-up; it's ultimately impossible for institution-driven projects to truly be bottom-up. Dialogues could be a happy medium, depending on who's mediating/hosting/driving them, who's attending/in the space, whose work gets recognized, and whose ideas get incorporated into the set narrative. To that end, does bottom-up history demand dynamic, ever-changing narratives – pliant, permeable, and impermanent as opposed to static, overarching narratives crafted through exhibit labels and the like?
Still, this top/bottom spectrum would suggest an inherent imbalance. Doesn't everyone have agency? It's the structural factors, the predominance of certain methods and narratives, that stymie community-driven projects. In doing so, we must differentiate between the value of "consultation" and true project leadership – who has a hand in commentary versus content. For instance, community leaders of color may be brought in as "experts" to clean up a preexisting history, disregarding their own interpretation and testimony. Rather than asking poor POC to correct/supplement the work of white, middle-class institutions, such institutions can take a backseat by supporting independent, POC-led/driven projects – using their privilege to amplify and uplift rather than "give voice" to others' struggles.
100% of the SBD rewards from this #explore1918 post will support the Philadelphia History Initiative 