The Future
Public Forgiveness, Collective Memory, and the Life of Democracy
Introduction
This final section discusses the aftermath of the event with an eye to the future. It attempts to define the meaning and provide examples and non-examples of public forgiveness. It delves into the relationship between memory and forgiveness: what do we forget that it would serve us to remember? Finally, it takes a step back in order to observe the democracy of the United States and how it is implicated in acts of censorship. At the end, the reader will be given a chance to share their thoughts on NARA's actions and the repercussions they should face.
On January 22nd, 2020, the Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, shared an apology for the censorship on the official blog of the Archivist of the United States under the title "Accepting Responsibility, Working to Rebuild Your Trust." The same text had previously been released to the press and the staff of NARA. The apology reads:
We made a mistake.
As the National Archives of the United States, we are and have always been completely committed to preserving our archival holdings, without alteration.
In an elevator lobby promotional display for our current exhibit on the 19th Amendment, we obscured some words on protest signs in a photo of the 2017 Women’s March. This photo is not an archival record held by the National Archives, but one we licensed to use as a promotional graphic. Nonetheless, we were wrong to alter the image.
We have removed the current display and will replace it as soon as possible with one that uses the unaltered image.
We apologize, and will immediately start a thorough review of our exhibit policies and procedures so that this does not happen again.
Ferriero goes on to give context and provide a timeline of NARA's actions. The post reads as competent and thorough, although not necessarily specific on what actions will be taken, if any, to ensure that such missteps do not occur in the future, beyond the final sentence of the above apology. The fixes for the immediate situation, however, are made very clear and are relayed in great detail.
Public Forgiveness
Forgiveness is among the most challenging human activities. To what extent can forgiveness be extended to people and organizations in power? How can it ever be genuine?
Interpersonal Forgiveness
Forgiveness is hard enough on an individual level; we struggle with it our whole lives. This video, published by The School of Life, breaks it down into two steps. First, one must recognize the background, conditioning, and situations that led the other person to act in an offensive manner. Second, one must recognize that they themselves have the capacity to be cruel and hurtful, just like every other human being that has ever lived. In that discovery, one can discover empathy and the ability to forgive.
This concept of the two steps can be expanded to envelop situations in which a public figure or organization has had to apologize and now the public must forgive. First, the public must engage in a large-scale acknowledgement of the scenario from which the offensive behavior sprung. This is complex. To begin with, interpretations and understanding of the situation often vary from individual to individual. However, commonalities can be found. Then, the public must judge the situation as worthy or unworthy of empathy, which often involves individuals calling upon their own experiences as they would in step two of The School of Life's theory. Rarely does the public reach absolute consensus. Rather, a master narrative emerges about the worthiness of the scenario, which in turn determines whether or not forgiveness is granted. This process, I posit, can be described as public forgiveness.
Public Forgiveness of NARA
Below the blog post in which David Ferriero details the event, there are forty-eight comments. The vast majority of comments were forgiving; they expressed sadness and shock that the misstep had occurred, but ultimately express admiration for Ferriero's apology. One commenter writes:
"I was shocked by the alterations to that photograph but am delighted that you removed the offending text inaccurate version, replaced it with the original, and made a fulsome apology for what happened. That was the right thing to do, and I commend you all for it."
Some acknowledge the complexity of the situation:
"You were “damned if you did and damned if you didn’t” in this case. Had you posted the photo in full, there would have been condemnation from another sector, a demand for a cut in NARA funding, and probably also a Tweet-storm that, in a few short hours, would have spread to hundreds of thousands of readers...."
Others express their wishes for the mistake to be remembered, to serve as a reminder:
"I feel strongly that the archives should retain (rather than destroy) the altered display along with whatever other documentation (for example, letters of protest) that can help provide context for its removal. This is now (regretably) [sic.] a part of the history of the institution. To learn from that history, we need to retain a record of it, embarrassing though it may be."
Of course, there was not complete agreement that forgiveness was warranted. In addition to sharing what they consider to be NARA's patriarchal past, commenters share that this sort of behavior was not surprising from a governmental body that lacks unity. There were comments expressing both disappointment and wrath:
"Admitting to the error and restoring the original photo was the bare minimum accountability. This altered photo had been on display since May 2019, for EIGHT MONTHS. It was only because a reporter just happened to notice the alterations that you were CAUGHT. I’ve had enough of injustice. This wasn’t a minor mistake. The ultimate duty of an archivist is to preserve. Not alter. Not erase. If you don’t understand the core value of your job, you shouldn’t be there."
Not only is public forgiveness often difficult to judge without the luxury of time, the comments section is never ordinarily enough evidence. Extenuating circumstances make judgement particularly difficult to cast in the case of NARA's act of censorship. The apology was made public to the press on January 19th, 2020 and NARA closed its physical doors on March 13th, 2020 due to COVID-19. Even before the 13th, fear was growing, schools were moving to distance learning, and people were beginning to work from home. If that were not the case, it might be valuable to look at the numbers of people visiting the exhibit, interview docents about comments they received regarding the censorship, and observe the site where the photograph hangs on the wall to see if visitors examine the signs pictured, looking for blurs.
For further reflections, consider the following:
Cancel Culture
In the last five years, the millennial and gen-z Internet has been swept by cancel culture, an environment in which everyone is placed under a microscope and watched, with everyone else waiting to pounce on them before they can get pounced on themselves. Important information has come into the light due to cancel culture and conversation has opened up about forgiveness regarding a variety of deplorable actions including the use of racial slurs, homophobic and transphobic behavior, and blatant sexism. The antidote to the toxicity of cancel culture is asking oneself difficult questions about the capacity of people to change and the willingness of oneself to forgive.
Collective Memory
We remember things all the time: dates, meals, appointments. But how do we remember as a community? What do we remember as a community?
The Power of Monument
Monuments and memorials serve our communities in many ways: as gathering spaces, educational centers, and as sites for remembering. Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman wrote Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory specifically about the culture surrounding the monuments to the Civil Rights Movement, but the principles and themes of which are applicable to monuments erected to memorialized any struggle for justice. The ways we remember women's movements throughout history is dictated by the memorials we choose to represent them.
The Great (Wo)Man Narrative
Dwyer and Alderman discuss a "Great Man" approach to history, the act of "telling history from the perspective of leaders and and elite organizations" (Dwyer 28). There's a great temptation to elect the most digestible, or calm, or moderate, or moral participant in the movement. It is easy to push the radicals off to the sidelines. NARA is participating in a long line of censorship by obscuring language they perceive as offensive or too radical. However, as Dwyer and Alderman note, this "preoccupation with leadership is terribly out of step with... the reality of civil rights activism" (Dwyer 30). Just as it is valuable to memorialize the people and organizations who lead movements, it is desperately important to remember everyday people with day jobs and busy lives who made the sacrifices necessary to mobilize movements.
A Plurality of Movements
It is the role of memorial and cultural organizations like NARA to remember all aspects of a movement, not just one that serves the master or most convenient narrative. Dwyer and Alderman discuss the push against the "Great Man" telling, a narrative they categorize as decentralizing power and diversifying tactics (Dwyer 31-32). This theory emphasizes the potency of having a wide variety of grassroots groups working towards the same goal from different perspectives and angles. Memorials and museums can honor this tactic by interpreting artifacts from the entire spectrum of any movement. NARA should serve the opinions and memory of the coarse language sparked by anger as well as the inspiring and uplifting messages. Movements of any sort always contain multitudes and the memorial exhibits about them should be a testament to that.
Custodians of Memory
The role of institutions like NARA is to curate and develop the information that informs our collective memory of the past we inherit as citizens of the United States. By executing acts of censorship, they send the message that there are narratives and messages that are not deserving of preservation. The United States has a history of oppression and prejudice. NARA represents both the federal government and memorial and educational institutions. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that they set the standard for historical accuracy, freedom of expression, and a lack of unnecessary censorship. There is no need to cleanse our history, for how else are we to learn from it?
The full text of Dwyer and Alderman's book is available for free here.
The Temptation to Forget
It is human nature to want to forget what we feel shame about or what makes us uncomfortable. Jennifer Eichstedt and Stephen Small wrote Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums which examines the ways in which Southern plantation museums interpret, address, and confront slavery to varying degrees of success. The following discussion will pull from chapter four, in which Eichstedt and Small define and confront the symbolic annihilation of the enslaved people's experience through the language and literature museums use and publish.
Defining Symbolic Annihilation
Symbolic annihilation first developed as a term in the 1970s to describe the idea that "women are subject to symbolic annihilation in the media when they are either absent, trivialized, or condemned for taking non-sterotypical gender roles" (Eichstedt 106). The term has been used to describe the silencing and diminishing of many movements and groups of marginalized people. Eichstedt and Small identify symbolic annihilation in scenarios in which there is "erasure and marginalization" (Eichstedt 107), meaning that any mentions of the group in question (in their specific study, enslaved people in the American South) is either "negligible, formalistic, fleeting, or perfunctory" (Eichstedt 107) or not mentioned at all. They go on to list specific examples of symbolic annihilation for their study, including euphemisms about the reality of suffering, the use of the passive voice to describe accomplishments, and sweeping generalizations.
NARA's Act of Symbolic Annihilation
While Eichstedt and Small do not list censorship explicitly, it takes no great stretch of the imagination to understand that it belongs on the list. NARA's act of censorship not only annihilated the words of individuals who were expressing their anger at being objectified and mistreated by President Trump, it also removed the President's name, protecting him from being the intended audience of that sign. The censorship guarded President Trump from criticism of his actions and rhetoric, allowing the public to forget his transgressions. Furthermore, the censoring of references to female anatomy vilifies women's bodies, bodies which are statistically more often mutilated and maimed. It negates the efforts of women to reclaim terms that refer to their body that have historically been used to describe weakness and cowardice. NARA could not have more literally participated in the erasure of individual expression.
Determined to Not Forget
It is more comfortable to forget than to remember. The memories that we carry as a collective are often shameful and difficult to reckon with. The urge to write out the uncomfortable, to let it gather dust, is often overwhelming. However, it is vital to our survival as a cooperative and democratic nation to remember and learn from our past. Acts of symbolic annihilation that refuse to acknowledge the existence of the pain in our collective past cannot be tolerated-- they are poison to our republic.
Eichstedt and Small's book is available for purchase here.
For further reflections, consider the following:
The Life of Democracy
Democracy is a founding principle of the United States of America. How do censorship and democracy intersect? What is democracy's relationship to truth?
Knowledge and Democracy
Democracy is fueled by imagination and by our collective memory. We recall the ideals upon which the democracy of the United States was built-- ideals that were informed by the imaginations of the founders of this nation. Democracies are fragile. They require the cooperation of everyone (or at least the overwhelming majority of people) in the nation to participate peacefully and patiently, for they cannot resort to violence against their people without becoming dictatorial. In order to maintain this peace, "democracies set limits on the exercise of epistemic power just as they do other forms of political power" (Miller 200). The knowledge produced in a democratic nation must fit into the societal and political norms of the nation. That being said, a wide breadth knowledge and the voracious consumption of it is vital to the survival of democracies. The system of government relies upon wise and informed political participants. Therefore, democracies must make regular decisions about what to censor and not to censor in order to maintain a delicate balance and survive.
The Plurality of Knowledge
On January 19th, 2020, the Executive Director of the American Historical Association (AHA), James Grossman, sent a letter to David Ferriero. Grossman expressed anger that an artifact was censored, especially by NARA, which should be setting an example for all other institutions to follow. The letter went on to acknowledge the integrity of NARA as a trusted educational and historical institution. Grossman concluded by assuring Ferriero that "the AHA stands ready to be helpful as NARA reconsiders its exhibition policies and procedures to make sure that its exhibitions maintain... standards of accuracy and integrity" (Grossman 7). Scholarship is at its best when it values the plurality of knowledge, emphasizing that learning and understanding it a cooperative and democratic effort. On the other side of the same coin, an informed and knowledgeable democracy is at its best when its citizens are sharing knowledge with each other, acknowledging that no one person can ever have all the answers. The plurality of knowledge encourages the truth to rise to the top, it encourages inaccuracies to be corrected, and transgressions to be revealed. Without a democratic base of scholars, the truth is obscured and the censorship of citizens becomes the order of the day.
The Death of Truth
Written in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's election, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder examines the ways in which a democracy can be threatened and experience a descent into fascism by providing twenty concrete pieces of advice in historical context. Number ten is to believe in the truth. Snyder cites a "renunciation of reality" (Snyder 66) and a succumbing to untruth that arrives at democracy's doorstep in four steps.
"The open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts" (Snyder 66).
The adoption of cultish chants and repetitions (Snyder 66-67).
The willingness to openly embrace contradiction and turn to magical thinking (Snyder 67-68).
The (mis)placement of faith in a deified leader (Snyder 68-69).
Not all of these steps are evident in the matter of NARA's censorship, but some of them are. There was no effort to denote the censorship, to explain to the visitor that the the image they were looking at had been altered. This is clearly a presentation of a lie as a fact-- step one. The apology written by David Ferriero and copied above is copied everywhere. The language in Ferriero's response to James Grossman's letter directly echoes the language of his January 22nd blog post-- step two. Arguably and somewhat antagonistically, the thorough reevaluation of their practices and policies promised by NARA is magical and contradictory thinking due to the bureaucracy that dictates the United States government-- step three.
This is an extreme evaluation of the censoring. It is not necessary to believe that the democratic principles of the nation are at risk to be able to see that NARA's act of censorship was an effort to obscure the truth, present an altered reality, and soften the political beliefs of women in order to make them more presentable.
For further reflections, consider the following:
"When Censorship Becomes Necessary"
A TEDx Talk from New Zealand's Chief Censor David Shanks about the line between hate speech and free speech. When taken in context with the NARA censorship, it becomes very clear how unnecessary NARA's actions were.