Hannah Alpert-Abrams and Andi Gustavson, “Chapter One:The Ethics of Teaching Undergraduates Using Digital Archives.” In Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, eds. Transforming the Authority of the Archive. Lever Press, August 2023.
A colleague of ours who works in special collections recently described conducting a one-hour presentation for undergraduate students. The class was focused on the history of colonialism in the Caribbean, and so he had selected a number of documents that were relevant to the topic: historical maps of the region, diagrams and texts related to the sugar trade, and documents about slavery and emancipation. Among the objects he chose was a political cartoon that relied on a racist caricature to represent an enslaved woman. The moment he came to that image in his presentation, he realized he had made a mistake. Rather than providing a window on a history of violence and enslavement, he realized he had reinforced stereotypes and committed violence against the Black students in the class. He felt terrible, he said, but he also didn’t know what he could have done differently. Eliding the histories of violence studied by the class and evidenced in the collection did not feel ethical either. Wouldn’t excluding these documents be even worse?