{"id":533,"date":"2017-05-24T09:12:05","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T13:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/memory\/?p=533"},"modified":"2017-06-21T16:59:45","modified_gmt":"2017-06-21T20:59:45","slug":"the-american-dilemma-of-race-and-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/memory\/2017\/05\/24\/the-american-dilemma-of-race-and-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"The American Dilemma of Race and Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dom Harrington<\/strong><\/p>\n

My family has just concluded a four-hour conversation about race in America — from vehemently disagreeing about the value or lack thereof of #BlackLivesMatter to stumbling upon the infamous Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. vs. Malcolm X debate to finally ending with our different conclusions regarding whether or not the black community has achieved equality.<\/p>\n

This past week, I had the distinct privilege of\u00a0witnessing my older brother, Claude Lee Harrington II, graduate with honors from Washington University in St. Louis.\u00a0 I was joined by my parents, my aunt, and my two maternal grandmothers.\u00a0 My family has been in this country for generations, as far back as the 18th century.\u00a0 Therefore, both my maternal and paternal sides were slaves until 1865.\u00a0 Then, they were sharecroppers.\u00a0 Then my grandparents, on both sides, moved from Mississippi to Indiana as a part of the Great Migration.\u00a0 Therefore, it was an honor to attend this momentous occasion, hands interlocked, eyes swelling with tears as my brother\u2019s name was called to get his diploma.<\/p>\n

In our conversation, my father claimed that the very fact that my brother graduated from college and is going to law school is progress and shows that the Civil Rights Movement was a success. \u00a0In response, I asked the questions that prompted this post: What do real success and progress mean?\u00a0 Who determines the answers to these questions?\u00a0 These questions made me reflect not only on the collections I\u2019ve analyzed through this project but how the work that we are doing adds\u00a0to this enduring struggle for justice and progress.<\/p>\n

This past fall I worked on President Modlin\u2019s Papers. In the beginning, my team members and I had a hard time figuring out what exactly to do with the documents contained in the folder we were assigned. However, this course and project taught us that it\u2019s incumbent upon archivists to be able to read against the grain and challenge dominant narratives that rest within the documents that they are provided. In the end, we examined this collection with a critical lens to see if integration was \u201cinevitable\u201d at the University of Richmond or not.\u00a0 Even though my team focused on this university and its road to integration, our work informs the history of this country and its never-ending road to progress.\u00a0 This is exactly the reason why I am thrilled to be working with this project this summer.<\/p>\n

Like graduations, the Race and Racism project will mean different things to different people.\u00a0 To me, as a black female student, this project is both cementing my story, and those who have come before me, unheard and unknown. Dominant narratives like that of progress need to be challenged, especially now in the age of alternative facts.\u00a0 The thing about progress is, to know how far we have come, or how far we have progressed, we must know where we have been.\u00a0 To much dismay, I\u2019m not convinced that the majority of this country knows as much about where we have been, regarding our racial history than they should.\u00a0 With an acknowledgment of where we have been, we could have much more fruitful conversations about where we are today. It is 2017, and we still can\u2019t agree on whether or not the Civil War was about slavery or the states\u2019 rights. Therefore, it is 2017, and we have Americans protesting the removal of statues of Confederate war heroes. Perhaps if the country, as a whole, were more knowledgeable about the history of slavery and the ideologies in which it was grounded that persist today, we wouldn\u2019t have this issue.<\/p>\n

It is certainly progress that my brother, a black male, has graduated college. Is it true progress if he will have to be twice as good, in every aspect, for the rest of his life?\u00a0 Progress isn\u2019t linear or unidimensional. It\u2019s messy, and it\u2019s difficult, but so are race and racism. Therefore, we have work to do.\u00a0 We must ask the right questions, challenge the right institutions, and uncover the stories voices of those silenced and devalued, we can take down as many monuments as we want and talk until\u00a0we lose our voices, but until we truthfully and critically understand where we as a country have been with race and racism, actual progress is impossible. So,\u00a0 what better place to start with these questions than the site of memory that is the archive?<\/p>\n

Dominique “Dom” Harrington<\/strong> is\u00a0a rising junior majoring in American Studies and minoring in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. \u00a0She worked with the Race and Racism project for the Fall \u00a02016 seminar, Digital Memory and the Archive. This summer, she is\u00a0thrilled to continue working with this project remotely from her\u00a0hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana. <\/em><\/p>\n

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