Bearing Witness From a Distance: Texas After Violence Project and the Covid-19 Pandemic
It’s been hard to concentrate on anything the last few weeks as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads through our communities, the US, and the world. We feel helpless sitting at home, or at our desks, when all we can do is bear witness from a distance to the mass suffering, loss, and grief happening all around us.
As an organization that advocates for transformative justice by documenting, archiving, and sharing personal stories that reveal the multitude of ways retributive criminal justice systems compound harm and trauma for everyone involved, it’s been especially heart-wrenching and exasperating to read story after story about the spread of Covid-19 through jails, immigrant detention centers, and prisons largely unabated as county, state, and federal officials refuse to take serious action to save lives. While some jails and prisons have begun to slowly release inmates, advocates and public health officials are pleading for the immediate release of many more inmates to prevent Covid-19 from ravaging jails, immigrant detention centers, and prisons. (For outstanding coverage of the the coronavirus and the justice system, follow the Marshall Project’s Keri Blakinger and the Texas Observer’s Michael Barajas).
We’ve been particularly inspired by the many journalists who are devoted to telling stories about the coronavirus and the justice system that go beyond the numbing statistics. Two recent examples that come to mind are Maurice Chammah’s obituary for Patrick Jones, the first federal prisoner to die from Covid-19, and Emily Kassie’s story about Salomón Medina-Calderón, one of nearly 40,000 immigrant detainees across the US who is fearful of becoming infected with the coronavirus while being incarcerated in a detention center while awaiting an immigration hearing.
As a community-based archive, we also feel a sense of urgency to document in real time the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives, health, and well-being of our community. This week, we will launch a remote oral history project to document and archive how the Covid-19 pandemic, physical distancing mandates, and shelter-in-place orders are impacting the daily lives of formerly incarcerated people and other victims and survivors of state-sanctioned violence. This project joins broader efforts to document and archive the impacts of Covid-19 (#doccovid19), including A Journal of the Plague Year: an Archive of CoVid19 and the COVID-19 Oral History Project.
For us, the idea of remote oral history is almost an oxymoron. The nearly 200 oral histories we have conducted over the last decade have been in-person because the power of oral history originates in the sharing of space between the interviewer and storyteller, as one bears witness to the stories, memories, meanings, and truths of the other with empathy and compassion, and without judgement. This sharing of space is especially important when documenting stories of loss, grief, and survival in the aftermath of violence. To bear witness to another’s suffering is to say: I see you, I hear you, I am here with you.
But we feel that such a documentation project is necessary right now even if it means temporarily forgoing the benefits of in-person interviews. As we already know, the stories of oppressed and marginalized communities are often distorted, suppressed, and erased. Especially those whose lived experiences are counter-narratives to everything we are told to believe about violence, criminality, and the “urgent” need for harsh law enforcement and criminal justice policies and practices. In their powerful public statement to the media, One Voice: The Impact of Coronavirus on Incarcerated People, their Families, and Their Communities, write: “When you discuss who is most vulnerable and susceptible to the public health and economic implications of COVID-19, remember us…Have a dialogue with us. Use your platforms to elevate our voices and help us show that we are more than the worst thing that’s ever happened to us or the worst thing we’ve ever done. Show the world what it looks like to treat everyone with human dignity.” That’s what we aim to do.
Although we are very thankful to still have our jobs when so many others have suddenly lost everything, and to be able to continue advancing TAVP’s mission while sheltering-in-place in our homes, like many other community-based archives across the US, the Covid-19 pandemic and economic shockwaves it is causing have introduced new challenges and concerns for us. As our good friend Bergis Jules writes:
“While the legitimacy and necessity of community-based archives have never been in question, at least not in the communities that gave them life and that continue sustain them, the coming storm of disruptions to their operations post Covid-19 will be significant. Especially as the people in those same sustaining communities, already suffering from the effects of inequality, are being disproportionately infected with the virus and will be the most likely to be overlooked in the economic relief effort.”
The immediate impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on TAVP’s projects have been the indefinite postponement of a new participatory action project that aimed to use research and storytelling to highlight the needs of victims and survivors of gender-based or sexual violence, and the failures of mass incarceration and retributive justice systems to meet those needs. We are also thinking of ways to continue to develop our community advisory board — people whose life experiences are reflected in our archive who can advise us on our research, documentation, collection, and dissemination practices — which is one of our main goals this year.
Last year, I was feeling very optimistic about the long term viability of TAVP. Covid-19 has changed that. 2019 was a year of incredible growth for TAVP, both in terms of how we do our work and the relationships we built with our community, collaborators, and supporters. 2020 was supposed to be just as promising. Then, at the beginning of March, things started to change, to get more real and devastating every time I checked the news. It was slow at first, and then all at once, everything came to a stop.
It’s still too early to know for sure what the long-term economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic will be for TAVP, but there have already been some immediate impacts. Not only have we had to significantly decrease our already modest expectations for potential of revenue generation this year — when we originally planned to grow our online training program and experiment with other earned income projects — we have also decided to step back from asking our loyal supporters for donations because we recognize that so many are financially struggling or paralyzed by the uncertainty of what will happen to their jobs and livelihoods in the coming months (Recognizing that people may be looking for interesting learning opportunities while sheltering-in-place, we have made two of our online trainings, “Documenting Narratives of Violence: Why Its Important and Mitigating Risks,” and “Working in Clinical Settings of Family Members of People Sentenced to Death or Executed,” available through Vimeo for $1).
It’s uncomfortable to have to think about things like funding when thousands of people are becoming sick and dying every day. But, as Bergis’ quote above points out, many of the same marginalized and oppressed communities that are served and represented by community-based archives are the ones that are being disproportionately affected by the coronavirus and the economic fallout. This is especially true for the communities that have always been disproportionately affected by violence and the state’s counter-violence through over-policing, police brutality, immigrant detention, mass incarceration, the death penalty, and other forms of structural violence. So, even though it was already difficult to secure funding for community-based documentation and archival projects in the pre Covid-19 world, it will be more important than ever for TAVP and other community-based archives to find ways to continue to do our memory work in the post Covid-19 world.
Writing about how the pandemic has exposed the urgent need for better health-care systems, paid family leave, and real protections for workers, and how the progressive nonprofits that work toward these goals are the same ones that are most at-risk of losing funding during and in the years following an economic recession, the Progressive Multiplier Fund’s Phil Radford calls for a philanthropic stimulus for progressive nonprofits. “This is the time to invest in people and organizations,” Radford writes. “If we expect to strengthen the social safety net, which has atrophied over the past three decades and especially during the Great Recession, then philanthropy must adopt a new strategy.” This is also true for cultural memory organizations and community-based archives.
We’ve been encouraged by the outreach of support we’ve recently received from some of our funders, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Life Comes From It, and the Progressive Multiplier Fund. Some have adjusted our grant reporting timelines and others are trying to secure emergency funding for us and other grantees. This is a good start. We know we are among the lucky ones to have this support right now. Bergis is right to bring attention to the barriers community-based archives will face in accessing these much-needed resources, to call for putting mechanisms in place now to help avoid these problems in the first place, and to remind us that community-based archives — who, by their very nature, demand equality, inclusivity, justice, and an end to all forms of oppression — are “models for sustainability, innovation, and creativity that we need in our current moment of crisis.”
