Daily Archives

Attending the Unseen event was definitely inspiring for me, especially because I saw so many students, faculty, staff, alum, and members of the broader New York community in attendance, which showed that people are interested in understanding the hidden lives of so many that are now being unveiled. However, as someone who cares about active change and work towards social change, I wondered how the event would actually impact the actions of people in the Barnard Community. The two speakers spoke about how this archive would impact the photo editing practices at the New York Times, as editors will pay closer attention to how they are choosing photos and if those photo choices are in any way shaped by biases. However, I questioned the impact this would have on people outside of the world of photo editing who attended the event. Would they actually change their understandings of how race impacts their every day lives or would this just be another event with an interesting topic but a lack of action to combat racism.

My most pertinent question following the event is how do we as people within an elitist community of Barnard make certain ideas or perspectives unseen as well and I hope that I can answer this with due time. I want to ensure that I am not feeding into the erasure of certain voices or ideologies. I hope that we as a college, and that each person that attended that event is actively thinking about the ways they may be silencing certain perspectives because I think even that as a first step could be helpful. However, this needs to go further and people need to take active steps to ensuring that people and communities are seen. Even in our work in different archives, we should be looking to ensure that they are used in such a way that the most unseen and hidden perspectives are brought to light. It is our duty, especially with the access that we have been granted at Barnard and Columbia that we uncover silenced and undermined people and communities in every way we can.

Like for many of us, I think a major aspect of my feminism stems from my mother and her influences. For me, I still think I am exploring my own “name” for my feminism. Growing up, my mother didn’t use very explicit language or phrasing when she discussed her feminism. Maybe she didn’t have the language to describe her feminism, or maybe she couldn’t find the perfect word for it. She expressed her feminism in actions, in what she said to people, in how she held strength, despite so many forces trying to make her weak, and so many other little acts of feminism that I am proud to have witnessed and hope to continue. Right now, I struggle to define the feminism that I identify with in one word or phrase, but I hope and strive to be persistent, strong, and an example of  what my feminism is. Despite, being unsure of how I would define my feminism, the closest I have come is womanism, probably because Alice Walker was one of my first examples of Black feminist literature. My mother has always talked about and quoted The Color Purple, making Alice Walker and that book an important part of my household and how we think about Black women and feminism. From a literary standpoint,  Celie, Shug, and Sofia were all important parts of the development of my feminist identity but most importantly, I was and am influenced by my mother and the other Black women in my life.

In terms of how I would identify the feminists we have discussed in this course, they all have different identities and are all a part of different feminist classifications, but if I had to identify them all under one word, it would probably be transnational feminists. I think that encapsulates these radical feminists in the best way and would be the most useful term to unify their various identities and positionalities, and how those impact their feminism. I think the term transnational will be useful to my archives project, as an overall term, but I hope that I can still identify the differences among these feminists because I think that understanding how these women were different is important to truly understanding their impact.