“What connection should one feel to acts committed or omitted before one was born?” It is a question lacking a clear-cut answer, but one that informed the most recent Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities given last October by Dr. Andrew Delbanco who chose to take on the divisive topic of reparations.
In my last column, I discussed some of the ways in which legacy media outlets were acknowledging gaps in their past coverage, oversights that perpetuated misrepresentation or omission of minority populations in the communities they serve. At that time, I stated, “We, as media historians are uniquely positioned to sound a clarion call to ensure that past oversights and misrepresentations do not continue to manifest in the journalism of the present, and we should ask ourselves what we owe to improving the modern journalistic discourse around underrepresented peoples and communities who have for too long been overlooked in our history and our journalism.”
Continuing my thoughts around the necessity of linking the past and the present in order to secure a better-informed future for our discipline, I would like to pick up on Delbanco’s lecture, particularly his statement that, “no one living today is to blame for the sins of the past, but everyone has a responsibility to help redress them.” I began to wonder what this might look like, not in terms of monetary, but, rather scholarly terms. Delbanco ponders whether recognition is a better word than reparation in response to the question of what we owe, making the argument that recognition is a necessary precursor to freedom.
So, if we can agree that it is productive for media organizations to revisit past coverage with the goal of not only acknowledging, but also attempting to repair, past harms could we not also agree there are steps we as a scholarly organization could take to do the same?
I have already suggested revisiting past scholarship and making space at our conferences and in our journals to review and critique oversights and omissions. Some of this work is already being done as evidenced by the diversity analysis of Journalism History as its 50th anniversary approaches, by the journal’s diversity essay series, and through the commitment of the Journalism History podcast editors to intentionally seek out and include topics related to diversity in journalism history.
Strong leadership certainly is an important part of making progress, but I would also suggest that at the individual level, we as scholars, can go far in offering the recognition that Delbanco argues precedes freedom. First, we can recognize newer scholars among us and seek opportunities to introduce ourselves to them and introduce them to others; second, we can actively and deliberately seek to cite these scholars in our work, rather than defaulting to the same tried and true body of literature that we oft rely on; third, if we are engaging in scholarship involving a historically underrepresented group it is a prime opportunity to partner with a scholar who is a member of that group or to reach out to an organization that can offer accountability to our efforts.
So, then what connection should one feel to acts committed or omitted before one was born?
Delbanco, quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates, defined reparations as, “the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences.” In considering those consequences and what it would mean to offer reparation from a scholarly perspective, perhaps it is to do no further harm, instead seeking to recognize past harm and take concrete steps to allow those historically overlooked voices among us to enjoy the professional freedom that so many of our number have enjoyed with much significantly less emotional labor.