This page reflects on my path leading up to my career in archives and this particular project, and identifies my focus for this research into the Invisible Histories Project’s support for Black queer Southerners.
Who am I?
Dr. Margaret T.G. Burroughs (1915-2010). Image from South Side Community Art Center.
Margaret T.G. Burroughs was an artist, writer, educator, archivist, and leader in Chicago’s Black cultural heritage field during her life from 1915 until 2010. Burroughs founded the South Side Community Art Center and the DuSable African American Museum of History with other memory workers. I was visiting the DuSable with my dad on our yearly trip to the museum when I first noticed the quote from Burroughs’ poem “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black? (Reflections of an African-American Mother)” on the wall:
“I must find the truth of heritage for myself
and pass it on to them. In years to come, I believe
because I have armed them with the truth, my children
and their children’s children will venerate me.
For it is the truth that will make us free!”
I took a photo of this verse on the wall and didn’t think about it again until years later when I was learning about the history of the field Burroughs helped shape in my own memory work centered around spirituality, creativity, and abolition. These five lines have guided my intentions and praxis as an archivist and memory worker who is guided by their artistic, religious, and political praxis. The ancestral veneration that is essential to my religions, my intentions with creating artwork as a form of documentation (including my own photography featured throughout the website), and my political values based in my experiences with oppression necessarily shape my work as an archivist.
As a transgender and disabled man who is descendant of African-Americans in the South and immigrants from outside the U.S., religion, artwork, and politics have always been prominent parts of my life and environments. Memory work has been at the forefront of my life when it comes to processing the grief that is unnaturally common in my direct communities of chosen and given family, friends, lovers, comrades, and co-workers. In my dreams as a memory worker with spiritual, creative, and political intentions, we have moved past the language of diversity and inclusion to honor the radical and abolitionist transformations that undo the very systems that used this vocabulary to inhibit change. While programs grounded in diversity and inclusion may be well-intended, they are often used by powerful institutions to regain control in areas of change where marginalized people are demanding the abolition of those very institutions.
Rather than center diversity and inclusion in my career path, I hope to question how institutions exploiting my communities manipulate this language to prevent the memory work grounded in abolitionist praxis that honor our needs, values, and beliefs. I trust that prioritizing those historically excluded and actively oppressed by white archival repositories in memory work beyond values of diversity and inclusion is an important part of Burroughs’ legacy and dreams for her descendants to be free . I hope to focus my memory work on the “archive of radicality” that, according to Marquis Bey, comes from following and deviating from “the beaten and unbeaten path of the history of Blackness…that is always already queer, always already Black feminist, and, most fundamentally, always and already trans and nonnormative” (Bey, 9, 2020). As someone who does not wish to have children of my own, I trust that queer and trans disabled family will hold me in this work in this lifetime and when I cannot any longer in the same way that I intend to for them.
Bey, M. (2020). Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism. AK Press.
Diversity
I hope to focus on how the Invisible Histories Project’s work with diversity and inclusion could be taken further to include cultural humility, radical empathy, and transformative praxis to better serve their Black stakeholders in Southern queer communities. Diversity and inclusion may have been meaningful pillars for IHP’s goals as a queer-centered and queer-led organization, but I am hoping to analyze how well these values have served Black people seeking support from IHP’s resources. This research will be grounded in Black queer and trans feminism as described in the 2022 conversation between Matt Richardson, Eve Brown, Trystan Cotten, Che Gossett, Lavelle Ridley, C. Riley Snorton, where the scholars critically consider the effects of history on Black queer and trans people’s lives (Richardson et al., 2022).
Richardson, M., Brown, E., Cotten, T., Gossett, C., Ridley, L., & Snorton, C. R. (2022). Between Inconceivable and Criminal: Black Trans Feminism and the History of the Present. Feminist Studies, 48(3), 807–823.