I’m an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan studying Cultural Anthropology and Museum Studies. I joined the Documenting Criminalization and Confinement project after taking one of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLabs with Nora Krinitsky, the director of the Carceral State Project. Part of what I appreciated about the HistoryLab was the archival work that put us in touch with original documents, something tangible to connect us with the people we were learning about. I grew up in the Midwest, and researching the history of social justice issues and activism in Detroit has been important to me because I think it’s crucial to know where you’re starting from when you set out to make change in the present.
I think that the audiences for the DCC project should continue to be scholars as well as the general public, although I think we are leaning towards public audiences in particular. I believe the digital database we are creating to contain all resources from all of our research teams is going to be most useful for other researchers and scholars, but I think it will also be interesting to the general public. We’re building websites for specific component projects and developing comprehensible data visualizations because we want our research to be easily presented to those not already familiar with the concepts discussed. I think the audience for my research specifically will tend to be researchers and amateur historians: our websites about the 1943 Detroit race riot and the labor strikes of WWII-era Detroit will appeal most to those interested in the history of Detroit, especially race relations and manufacturing during wartime.
The audiences we anticipate having are critical to our work because it will affect how we interpret information, what we include, and how we synthesize our research into presentations. I think that the historian-inclined audience I anticipate is important because, without a clear understanding of how current power structures came into being, we can’t effectively dismantle them. To use the police as an example, there is no amount of racial sensitivity training today that can erase the fact that America’s police forces grew out of groups appointed as early as the 1700s to capture and return enslaved people who had escaped. We cannot ignore the fact that throughout the 20th century, the police maintained strict color and class lines, enforcing Jim Crow law and waging the War on Drugs that focused primarily on punishing young men of color for minor offenses. We need to understand the centuries and decades of systemic abuse that has built current power structures in order to understand why we can’t simply “repair” the issues which are most apparent today. As demonstrated in our research, when searching for the root causes of race riots, public officials choose to look for inciting incidents close to the time of the actual riot. This leads to band-aids on situations that are actually the results of long-term issues. Through our research, it’s understood that the root causes of racial tensions are long periods of discrimination in housing, employment, and public spaces for recreation, worship, etc. The way to solve race riots is not to lock up whoever threw the first rock through a storefront window, but to end discrimination in its legal, institutional forms.
I believe that tying our content to platforms that the university uses to promote research occurring on campus is important because the university wields a lot of influence in many areas. I think that creating independent websites is also a good idea because we can promote these resources beyond simply our university affiliations. Any platforms that effectively use visuals are the best, I believe, for disseminating our research because we have so many rich visuals to draw from, especially from the component projects like Documenting Prison Education and Arts, which digitizes the creative works of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.
The political and ethical issues involved with the platforms I mentioned are mainly that we need to avoid sensationalism or exploitation of certain images (something I’m sure has been discussed extensively and more articulately within the Critical Carceral Visualities project). When using images, if we are using them as a way of drawing attention and interesting people in reading further, the issue becomes what qualities the images are chosen for, and avoiding disturbing or dehumanizing visuals. In terms of my research specifically, ethical issues we need to be aware of is emphasizing how issues from the WWII era have resonance today. Not only does the discrimination of this era create a legacy that reaches the current day, but we can also use history as a reference point moving forward. I think we also need to emphasize the humanity of historical figures. It is easy to remember people who were victims of police brutality as merely victims, or a list of death certificates, and we need to remember to give the full picture. Their narratives don’t begin and end with incidents of police brutality. We also definitely need to make it clear that the records of police brutality from this era are far easier to gain access to than the records of the current day. In fact, reporting the statistics on police shootings of civilians and police brutality became less and less common between the 1940s and today. These records are far harder to access now. It’s important to give everyone the true picture of the lack of transparency and accountability there is in the carceral state. I think people have faith that more information is available than there really is.
Collaboration comes in as we find public spaces to disseminate our research. What do communities want from our research? What aspects interest them and what do they want to be informed on? We should work with community activists and leaders, as well as the administration of public meeting spaces such as libraries, to make our work visible and easily accessible.
