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Of What Import: Social Justice, Accountability and Archival Work
Katie Sleyko
Archives
December 17, 2010

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INTRODUCTION
Social justice is broadly defined as the efforts made towards a goal of equal, fair
treatment of all people, especially those in disadvantaged or historically oppressed groups. In
relation to archival practice, this goal seems to be far removed. When one talks of social justice,
one may think of involving oneself in soup kitchens or in volunteer programs, or in methods of
public protest. These direct methods of action contrast strongly with an archivist’s perceived role
of the passive collector of documents. Yet within the archives, an archivist can preserve the
history and memory of oppressed peoples, giving them both an established background and a
space to disrupt neat historical narratives which explain away their absence. Stocking the
archives with materials from disadvantaged groups and allowing open access to those materials
can thus be its own form of activism: preserving the heritage and contributions of these groups
for the historical record and as a highly-valued form of social memory.
The interest in the archives as a space to collect the contributions of the underprivileged
is a new one in the history of archives, starting especially with the introduction of postmodern
theory into the profession. This theory provides a new take on the profession which makes the
archivist not simply an organized collector, but an active, political, participant in the creation of
history. These theories unfortunately coincide with some of the most heinous of human rights
and civil liberties abuses, which attempted to strip out of the archival record all memory of their
actions. Looking particularly at South Africa, these cover-ups of political scandals have erased
documentation, with the goal of eventually erasing memory, of their wrongdoing. These
incidents provide examples of failures of the archive towards the public trust. In the case of
South Africa it also provides an example of a way to try to build back the lost information and
public goodwill towards the archives and towards the healing of a traumatic history. There is

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much to be done for the handling of politically-embarrassing and minoritarian information and
materials that archives can still work to, though, and the scholarship on this is very much in its
early stages.
EXPECATIONS
My working hypothesis was that, given the prevalence of postmodern theory regarding
the use of archives as a historical tool rather than a passive collection, there would be a plethora
of information on the examples of such. Instead I found many studies on how archives have
failed in the mission to preserve much of minoritarian history, and how oral history projects and
popular archival projects are coming into place to replace much of the information lost. There
were also many examples of archival failures in spectacular ways, such as in the case of South
Africa after apartheid, where most of the social structure was in upheaval for some time. Many
of the more subtle failures of archives, especially in Western countries like America, have gone
largely unremarked on, at least in the materials that I have access to, which are largely American
and centered around archives.
LITERATURE
Much of the postmodern literature sets the stage for the use of the archives as a source of
social justice. Postmodernism, in general, rejects the notion of an objective truth, and sees truth
and meaning in a more subjective light. Greene credits postmodernism with a more coherent and
less rigid way of seeing archives and archival services; an archivist would collect those items
that would contain the most meaning, given the contexts and goals of the archive.1 This also
frees archivists to collect items that have meaning for society as a whole, and not just those
records, described by Jenkinson, as belonging to an organization and recording their transactions.
This is repeated in Cook and Schwartz, who emphasize the archive as place of power and of
1
(Greene 2002)

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finding one’s roots, yet most archivists do not think about the power they wield. There is also
resistance to the idea that archives are socially constructed and dependent on people to interpret
them.2 Given this, the archive can be an active participant in the highly-charged arena of social
justice and dedication to the minoritarian populations without endangering their status as an
archive.
One of the earliest calls to action is from Howard Zinn, a renowned historian, who
criticizes the archival profession for its complacency in his paper Secrecy, Archives, and Public
Interests. He claims that archivists, along with teachers, his fellow historians, and journalists,
believe that their profession is apolitical and that their decisions do not affect the society as a
whole. The American notion of exceptionalism also is particularly insidious when it comes to
believing that society can have ingrained biases and that one is feeding into them without trying,
something echoed twenty years later in Derrida, who is cited in much of the literature on social
justice in archives. These biases aim archivists towards collecting “official” documents and
ignoring the documents of the poor, the racial minorities, and other groups who have been denied
social power. He concludes with saying that archives, as they stand at that moment, are little
more than tools to perpetuate systems of power. The archive itself must not be primarily
concerned with what is already historical, but in holding onto documents that will be of historical
use in the future. 3
Zinn’s work may seem on first glance to be a screed from someone outside of the field
coming at the profession without understanding it. Half of this is true; he is particularly
concerned about archives becoming a “profession” and thus being entrenched in social biases,
without accounting and adjusting for those biases in the collections of the actual archive. He
2
(Schwartz and Cook 2002)
3
(Zinn 1977)

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implicates his own field, history, as being complacent as well. He links the two especially
because both archives and history share a place as professions of “disseminations of
knowledge.”4 Zinn is actually treating archives how many wish to be seen in the wake of
postmodernism: as locations where history is recorded. He creates the archive as a place of grand
importance as well as a place of current negligence, the former perhaps explaining why so many
archivists took his words to heart. Giving the archives their due as places of history-making starts
the conversation on the politics of the archives while giving the archivists power.
Another snarky article on the need for accountability on the part of the archivist comes
from Hurley. He believes there should be professional standards that archivists live by,
established by an outside authority, instead of having a profession of “god-archivists” whose
word is the final one when it comes to saving or removing archival items. The profession needs
to be accountable for itself, with established procedures in place should there be archival
mismanagement or sanitation.5 This would go a ways to making the decisions of the archivist
more public and transparent, which would allow more public interaction with the archive and
more checks in place against situations such as the South African purge or the Australian Heiner
case, where an archivist destroyed records needed for a public court case6.
A sociological paper by Cassin, “The Politics of Memory on Treatments of Hate”, looks
at the variety of responses to traumatic history that have been taken in several places. One of
these, the TRC project, is covered later in this paper, but the looks at how the governments of
ancient Athens and modern-day Western countries handle their politically-embarrassing
incidents make this article very worthwhile. Our modern idea that truth is the same as healing
was unheard of in Athens, and after a civil war the Athenian government swore each citizen into
4
(Zinn 1977)
5
(Hurley 2006)
6
(Hurley 2006)

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silence about the war, making them take an oath that forbade them from “recalling the evils of
the past against anyone”, since bringing up the war was an attack on anyone it was brought up to,
and would necessarily interfere with the healing process of the state. In modern France, archives
about the government and featuring government papers are unavailable to the public for 30-120
years after their creation, making sure that no one finds documents while they are still relevant,
or “hot”. While this theoretically makes life much easier for the archivist and the government, it
ensures that the government’s version of events is the one that lasts, since after 30 years there
may be no one available to contest them. 7
Some further insight into the archival needs of those minoritarian/disadvantaged voices
comes in Bastian’s “Reading Colonial Records through an Archival Lens.” She focuses mostly
on the field of Subaltern Studies and their use of colonial narratives, the only ones saved and
archived, to disprove some of the colonial culture’s ideas of itself. The items saved by archives
tended to be those written in the colonizer’s language, and since many former colonies did not
have writing traditions nor were educated in literacy, this helped to create a series of archives
that record history only through the eyes of the European colonizers. Creations of memory-texts;
emphasis on non-Western forms of archives and memory, such as murals or oral traditions,
performances and architecture: these are becoming more recognized as traditions that can put the
creation of history into the hands of the formerly colonized. These traditions are important,
especially in cultures like those of some Native Americans, where only certain individuals are
allowed to know certain rituals. Imposing a global standard of an archives or a material can
become another form of colonization, where cultures must be up to the Western standard to be
said to have any “real” history at all.8
7
(Cassin 2001)
8
(Bastian 2006)

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This paper summarizes some of the hidden portions of social justice through archives,
namely, respect and inclusion of the minority voices speaking for themselves. In the case of
South Africa, there have been multiple criticisms of the TRC project, especially as a top-down
form of justice imposed by the government on certain communities, not formed by members of
those communities themselves. This could conceivably be one of the heritages of apartheid: that
even when trying to solve problems of systemic discrimination and harassment, the government
of South Africa treats its Black citizens as interchangeable and without input.
USE OF ARCHIVES AS SOCIAL JUSTICE TOOL
South Africa was under apartheid for thirty years. This system divided people into racial
categories and stripped non-White people of South Africa of their citizenship. In this time, many
of the South African government agencies created and destroyed records on imprisonment of
anti-apartheid political workers, silencing of anti-apartheid sentiment, assassinations and board
meetings detailing such, and other records every day. As the political machinery moved towards
apartheid being repealed, however, a massive multi-agency governmental santitization was
enforced. This was undertaken not with secret missives and word of mouth, but via law changes
and court decisions.9 Most of the documents created in the years of apartheid were destroyed by
the time Nelson Mandela came into office. Though the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC), an archive dedicated to recording people’s experiences with apartheid, was created in
1995 to fill such gaps in the national memory, the purging of records is so extensive that the
TRC doesn’t even know how little of a percentage of records they hold. 10
The TRC is an elegant approach to solving the problem of the archives not representing
the people—it goes out and asks people their stories. Though concentrating mostly on the human
9
(Harris 2000)
10
(Harris 2002)
10
(Harris 2002)

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rights abuses of the apartheid years, it allows people to publicly share their memories and
experiences of life under apartheid, in what the TRC hopes will spur healing on a national
scale.11 Oral histories were recorded in many areas of South Africa, though some places where
the worst abuses went on were not visited by the TRC.12 These histories were then added to the
TRC archive, where people would have access to their stories and those of their neighbors.
This project is in direct opposition to many of the records sanitation and other social-
amnesia programs enforced by embarrassed governments all over the world. Even within the US,
the amount of documents kept secret to avoid being questioned by the public has increased in
recent years with the installation of the second Bush administration and their routine denial of
Freedom of Information requests.13 This effort is taking place within the same lifetime as the
injustices took place—something that would not happen in the US, where records are
declassified every 10-15 years or so. 14 These records are thus remarkably free for being
sponsored by a government, especially compared to Western ones.
Though the TRC is a national effort to heal old wounds, there exist problems with the
project. Harris concedes that there were some sanitation efforts done to remove the name of
former President de Klerk from some of the abuses. There are also problems of access and
transparency, something that the TRC prides itself on; researchers have been refused access to
the TRC and many of the TRC’s decision-making practices are kept secret.15 Cheryl McEwan
points out many other problems with the TRC’s approach, as well. The focus on gross human
rights abuses ignores persistent social problems that did not go away with the last president, such
as the grinding poverty and extremely high rates of rape in South Africa. The public forum
11
(Harris 2002)
12
(McEwan 2003)
13
(Jimerson 2007)
14
(Cassin 2001)
15
(Harris 2002)

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provided for giving one’s oral history is a nice thought for transparency, but could be an
unsurpassable boundary for a victim of sexual crime. The reports of women collected by the
TRC also tend to place women in supporting roles, dealing with supporting or missing a brother,
son, husband, or male friend. She also faults the TRC with creating a narrative, of bad
government vs. good anti-apartheid protestors and regular people, when in the lived experience
of apartheid has a much more complex—the South African state funded both sides of a regional
civil war during the 1990s, for instance.16 This fits with some of the worries stated by Cassin,
that missions like the TRC can become ritualized and prescriptive, not descriptive and as part of
a natural process. 17
Though the case of South Africa’s TRC is one of the most popular to write about, there
are many other cases in which archives have helped heal or prove wounds. In class, there was
discussion of the Klan membership card acquisitions by Central Michigan State,18 which spurred
controversy and upset some of the family members of deceased Klan members, but which does
place the uglier side of history in people’s hometown. In facing the fact of known family
members participating in hate organizations, some of the distance between the Klan as a
bogeyman and the Klan as a historical fact may be bridged, and people may be more ready to
face racism and injustice if they recognize that it exists in a particularly violent form in their
hometowns. Even given the link to social justice, this paper concludes with reminding the reader,
though it may have been written to remind the author, that multiculturalism can be a good thing.
This seriously undermines its apparent commitment to social justice.
Even in America there have been cover-ups and mismanagement of documents with the
intention of fooling the public. Iran-Contra and Watergate both blew up as a result of someone
16
(McEwan 2003)
17
(Cassin 2001)
18
(Boles 1994)

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finding copies of records made detailing each. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was discovered
as a result of an archival search.19 Though many of these scandals have involved people clearly
coded as “bad”—the Klan, the apartheid-supporting South African government, people
destroying court evidence—the practice of purging archives and trying to clean the archival
record is not reserved for cartoon villains. It happens in the West, and in our own backyards.
CONCLUSION
The archive can become an incredible tool for social justice. The collections and the
professional ideal may have to shift, as well as get involved in the political arena. Archivists can
help with the contributions to the archive by making their own processes more transparent and
by respecting non-Western traditions. Even in efforts to create justice in the archive, there can be
flaws in the process. Seeing the social justice tradition as bad-guy-versus-good-guy can erase
more complicated narratives, especially when “good guys” behave badly. We should also not fall
into the trap of believing that these archival problems only exist in the third world—to fight
injustice, we must also look at our own society.
Works Cited
Bastian, Jeannette Allis. "Reading colonial records through an archival lens: the provenance of place,
space, and creation." Archival Science 6 (2006): 267-284.
19
(Jimerson 2007)

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Boles, Frank. ""Just a Bunch of Bigots": A case study in the aquisition of controversial material." Archival
Issues 19, no. 1 (1994).
Cassin, Barbara. "Politics of memory on treatments of hate." The Public 8, no. 3 (2001): 9-22.
Greene, Mark A. "The power of meaning:the archival mission in the postmodern age." The American
Archivist 65 (2002): 42-55.
Harris, Verne. ""They should have destroyed more": The Destruction of Public Records by the South
African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990-1994." Transformation 42 (2000).
Harris, Verne. "Contesting remembering and forgetting: the archive of South Africa's Truth and
Reconciliation Commission." Innovation 24 (2002).
Hurley, Chris. "Archivists and accountability." Archives and Manuscripts 34, no. 2 (2006).
Jimerson, Randall C. "Archives for all: professional responsibility and social justice." The American
Achivist 70 (2007): 252-281.
McEwan, Cheryl. "Building a postcolonial archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in post-
apartheid south africa." Journal of South African Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 739-757.
Schwartz, Joan M., and Terry Cook. "Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory."
Archival Science 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 1-19.
Zinn, Howard. "Secrecy, archives, and the public interest." Midwestern Archivist 2, no. 2 (1977): 14-27.