Not every piece of information fits into a single post, so this is a follow up of sorts with a focus on archival research. The way we describe groups and what we call things today is generally very different from 75 or even 50 years ago. Hopefully we are making collective progress in being more inclusive and less discriminatory in our language, but not always.
This again is where context comes into play, knowing what something was called 100 years ago will help when searching for information. There has been a recent effort to do “reparative descriptions”1 in archival collections but a newspaper from 1905 will still have words used at that time.
A few years ago I had a researcher looking for “social services” in the early 1900s in Portland. She was having no luck and asked for help. I let her know that what we know as “social services” today (Medicaid, welfare programs, social security, etc) were not generally called “social services.” They were more specific like the Milk Fund and Toys for Tots as well as the Ladies Auxiliary of the Kenton Unemployed League. These groups were in many ways doing the work of Social Service providers, but not officially government run programs. When we did searches for one of these topics, she found much more material for her paper. I think it would be an interesting comparison to look at social services today and what it looked like 100 years ago. How much is the same and how much is different? There are still people hungry, without housing and struggling with addiction. But I digress.
For my newsletter on the Women of the Post,2 I wanted to include links to whatever relevant materials might be available online, specifically at the National Archives. The first time I did a search I found a film titled “The Negro Solider” and I made the error of not grabbing the link or citation. I started to watch online and wanted to finish it before I posted about it. When I went back a few days later, I could not locate the film in the database. It can be utterly frustrating to redo a search. The record seemed to disappear and it did not help that I could not remember the actual title either. “Black Solider” and “African American Solider” did not pull up the record.
I failed a few dozen more times, then I finally tried “negro soldier” and the film was the first result. I did not know what to expect, but it was a surprising film, especially for 1944. Definitely a recruitment film for WWII enlistment as it was created by the War Department, but the slant was not what I presumed. Produced by Frank Capra and included footage of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It is well worth watching and all you need to do is click this link.
This War Department enlistment film aims to recruit African Americans in its World War II engagement. The documentary has as its framework a Black minister's explanation to his congregation of the reasons they should join the armed forces to fight the Nazis. The viewer sees historical re-enactments of African Americans as valued participants in U.S. armed conflicts dating from the American Revolution. Scenes also detail Black accomplishments in the country's history, with footage of Blacks as they served as judges and school teachers, conducted orchestras, played football, and served the U.S. Army in World War II. Footage is included of Jesse Owens and other Blacks as they competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. "The Negro Soldier" was produced by Frank Capra and directed by Stuart Heisler, with music by Dimitri Tiomkin.
Below the description highlighted above, in the general notes portion of the record description the National Archives says “This archival description was reviewed and not revised as part of the NARA reparative description initiative on July 3, 2023. The term “negro” used in the Title and Scope and Content fields were determined to be bibliographic titles. Original archival records have not been altered.”
In Women of the Post, Joshunda Sanders also addresses the issue of language and eras. She includes the following sentence about language in her Author’s Note:
“A note about language here: the nomenclature for referring to African Americans in the 1930s and 40s was Negro/Negroes, which is why I opted to use that term in the text, though it is outdated now, so for the purposes of this note, I’ll use Black.”
Language must change and evolve, just like our understanding of the world. Archival descriptions are a living record, therefore we can always add more context and update language to make things more findable.
I am sure (or I hope) the idea of “reparative description” was in the minds of archivists before 2021, but that is when it became a “thing.” The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) created a timeline of sorts about reparative descriptions and digitization. It started January 20, 2021 with the executive order 13985 - Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. As they worked on the principles of how they would go about reparative descriptions, NARA started by inserting “Harmful Language Alerts.” By July 20, 2022, NARA published the Reparative Description Appendix to the Lifecycle Data Requirements Guide with new guidelines for reviewing and updating harmful terms in archival descriptions.3
There is so much more to dive into, but I bring this up to start the conversation, provide perspective on historical records and get you thinking about how to use context to help with searching for information from the past.
Remediation of practices or data that exclude, silence, harm, or mischaracterize marginalized people in the data created or used by archivists to identify or characterize archival resources
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Reparative Description Performed Term: “Due to its complex history, negro cannot be uniformly replaced with another term in NARA’s archival descriptions or authority records. Each instance must be reviewed for context. Black is the preferred term when referring to an individual’s race. The term should be capitalized and used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example: “Benjamin Robinson was a Black soldier in the U.S. Army.” Note that Blacks and the Blacks are both considered offensive and should not be used. Black people is the preferred plural form of Black.”