Community Archives

This is Jamaali Roberts performing a djembe solo at the 9 Year Memorial to Keaton Otis, who was killed by Portland Police for driving while Black. The officers who killed him were rewarded with bonuses and paid time off work. Keaton Otis’s father demanded justice, and now both Keaton and his father are dead, and justice has still not come. But our community is not giving up. We say we will not forget, we will not stand down, we will not desist until justice is established. This is one of over two hundred photographs I made at the memorial, and until yesterday I had no idea what to do with the 20,000 or so photographs I’ve been making of social justice efforts in Portland since 2011. 

But yesterday my view shifted. A group called Doc Now offered a  “Digital Archives Workshop” and introduced the idea of “Liberatory Memory Keeping,” which is the practice I’m involved in, though I didn’t have words for it till now. Photographs of our resistance belong in “community archives” kept by people who refuse to be erased or to be complicit in the erasure of others.

Erasure is one of the tools of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. It denies the existence of Black people, women, and poor people and regards our work as of no importance. Systemic erasure hides our stories, our art, our actions in the public sphere, and most of all our resistance to the corporate state. One example of erasure is holocaust denial. Another is “white-washing” the truth of slavery, lynching, mass incarceration, and police killings of black people. 

Photographs of uprisings, protests, rallies, and movements for social change created by photographers who are part of communities fighting for change can subvert erasure. But because we do not commodify our photographs, they are generally disregarded. We offer them freely to our communities. We post them in blogs, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and in those networks our photographs appear alongside photos of people’s dinners, their sports events, their birthday celebrations. So the work appears to be ephemeral. It exists outside the capitalist system, so it seems to have no value. After a time, it disappears. Not only is history written by the victors, but in our time it is written by the corporate state. Social media since about the year 2000 has been a tool for resistance, but it is owned by corporate entities, and it can also be a tool of surveillance and intimidation. And so there is a global movement to build “community archives” that store and preserve the history of resistance.

The workshop leaders were all African-American academics, archivists, and researchers. The group included Dr. Meredith Clark, a professor of Media Studies, and  Jarrett Drake, who describes some of his thinking in “Liberatory Archives: Towards Belonging and Believing.” After looking at some of my photographs, Drake said, “these are exactly the kinds of photographs we are talking about. These photos should be preserved in community archives. They will be invaluable fifty years from now, a hundred years from now. You need to organize them and store them so that others can find them long after you’re gone.” 

When people ask how the world coped with the systemic racism that the current US president typifies, our work will show that many of us fought against it, and we fought against the idea that we can’t change it, that we are too small, too poor, too weak, too unimportant. We rebelled, we spoke, we marched, we spray-painted children’s shoes, we played the djembe, we did everything we could do. This is our holy ground. We’re making a record of it together. 


Aimee has been sent home from the hospital, but she is still in fierce pain. I’ll go see about her tomorrow. Thank you for your expressions of concern.