ABSTRACT

In 1980, Baltimore Voices, a play written from the transcripts of 200 interviews with elderly working-class Baltimore residents taken as part of the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project (BNHP), was seen by thousands of people in Baltimore and on public television. Created by left-leaning oral and public historians, the play was intended to center the voices of white and African American Baltimore residents. However, Baltimore Voices fumbled its opportunity to present a nuanced past to the public through a cascading series of decisions revolving around the ethical question of who had the authority to interpret the oral histories for the stage play and how to frame them for public audiences. Specifically, the play ignored the role of whiteness in shaping Baltimore’s neighborhood history. Instead, the creators saw individual prejudice as the key issue shaping race relations in the city. They forced the stories of Black Baltimore residents into a white ethnic immigrant narrative frame, eliding the privileges that allowed white immigrants to rise in social status and distorting Black history. And they imagined the oral histories and play as modular, with the goal of presenting the history most palatable to the audience. While the theater company practiced sharing authority by giving BNHP narrators multiple opportunities to give feedback during script development, the question remains: when certain community members are more vocal than others, who gets to represent the community? Using extensive archival material, this article discusses Baltimore Voices as a case study of an oral and public history project during a formative moment for both fields. I suggest that progressive oral and public historians at times abdicated their ethical responsibility to frame and contextualize oral history to present complicated histories to the public. Examining whiteness requires this interpretive perspective because the power of whiteness is in its invisibility.

摘要

1980 年，巴尔的摩之声是巴尔的摩市和公共电视上成千上万人观看的戏剧，该剧由巴尔的摩社区遗产项目 (BNHP) 中对巴尔的摩老年工人阶级居民的 200 次采访记录改编而成。该剧由左倾的口头和公共历史学家创作，旨在将白人和非裔美国人巴尔的摩居民的声音集中起来。然而，巴尔的摩之声通过围绕谁有权解释舞台剧的口述历史以及如何为公众观众构建这些道德问题的一系列决定，它摸索着向公众展示微妙过去的机会。具体而言，该剧忽略了白人在塑造巴尔的摩社区历史方面的作用。相反，创作者将个人偏见视为塑造城市种族关系的关键问题。他们迫使巴尔的摩黑人居民的故事进入白人种族移民叙事框架，取消允许白人移民社会地位上升的特权并扭曲黑人历史。他们将口述历史和戏剧想象成模块化的，目的是向观众展示最可口的历史。虽然剧院公司通过在剧本开发过程中为 BNHP 叙述者提供多次提供反馈的机会来实践分享权力，但问题仍然存在：当某些社区成员比其他人更有发言权时，谁来代表社区？本文使用大量档案材料讨论巴尔的摩之声作为口述和公共历史项目在两个领域形成时期的案例研究。我建议进步的口述历史学家和公共历史学家有时会放弃他们将口述历史框架化和语境化的道德责任，以向公众呈现复杂的历史。检查白度需要这种解释性的视角，因为白度的力量在于它的不可见性。