By Jin Chang
The most memorable interaction I have had as an oral historian at the Coralville Public Library thus far was with a white woman. While she was excited to do the interview, she wanted to know about my background. I normally read this type of question as, “What makes you someone that can do this interview in a way that is meaningful to me?” Because the goal of these interviews is to capture marginalized and excluded communities, I have often talked about my own racialized background in Iowa in response to this question. However, in that moment, I decided to take my introduction in another direction. Instead of my usual elevator pitch, I told her I grew up in Minnesota, came to Iowa for school, tried living on both the east and the west coasts, and found my way back to Iowa after a few years of working, leaving out any mention of my race. The identity I really wanted to highlight for her was that I was a Midwesterner by both birth and choice. Her response was an elated “How wonderful!” While I had gotten the sense that she was already willing and excited to do this oral history interview, her reaction reminded me about the importance of sharing an identity with your narrators.
Oral historians cannot be faceless and value-free. Our identity and how we are perceived shapes the stories that our narrators tell us. For instance, early oral histories of former enslaved people in America were often done by white government workers. The narrators then would tell lies to the white government worker as a way to play a prank on them and to keep their community history within the community.[1] While these identities can hinder how the oral histories proceed, they can also enhance the story. For example, E. Patrick Johnson believed his identity as a gay black Christian man meant he could get others with a similar identity to open up to him in ways that people that do not share those identities could. Moreover, by using his shared identity as a starting point, he could effectively “put his own body on the line” by sharing his own history with his narrators.[2]
In my previous oral history project, I worked in collaboration with the University of Iowa’s archive and special collections. I interviewed more than 50 Asian and Asian American students and alumni at the University of Iowa to learn about their affective experiences as Asians in the university. That was a year-long project that happened in the middle of COVID, from the summer of 2021 to the summer of 2022. This was a mere couple of months after a mass murder targeting Asian women happened in Atlanta. Before each interview, I told my narrators about my own personal response to the rise in anti-Asian racism and how it has impacted me in Iowa specifically. I tried to put my body on the line in a similar way that Johnson did. Even within the community trauma, I still felt comfortable asking questions about their affective racialized experience in Iowa because I shared a racialized identity with my narrators. I also hoped that sharing a racialized identity with my narrators mitigated some of the power dynamics often associated with university-sponsored projects interacting with marginalized communities.
In my current oral history project, I do not always share a racialized identity with my narrators. With other people of color, I felt comfortable taking a similar approach as my previous oral history project. I contextualize the interviews around the recognition that the traditional historical record has often excluded communities of color despite how I and the narrators both know we exist and have existed in Iowa. However, this method simply did not work when I approached interviewing white people. My strategy for interviewing the white woman then took that unexpected turn of highlighting my Midwestern roots. While I think I was successful in making her excited to do this interview, I also have to wonder if something is lost by me not putting my racialized identity to the forefront as the narrator. Is sharing my Midwestern roots putting my body on the line? Is the mentality of putting my body on the line a sustainable model for oral histories in general? I think the only way to figure out these answers for myself is to continue interviewing and reflecting on oral histories.
[1]Goodson, Martia. “The Significance of” Race-of-Interviewer” in the Collection and Analysis of Twentieth Century Ex-slave Narratives: Considering the Sources.” The Western Journal of Black Studies 9, no. 3 (1985): 126.
[2] Johnson, E. Patrick. Sweet tea: Black gay men of the South. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2011.
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