10th and Page is a neighborhood in Charlottesville, whose residents are predominantly Black and have been since the 1920s, when most of the original houses were built. Its northern border has a new boundary: yet another one of the sleek glass buildings that have been recently added to the landscape of Charlottesville. It purports to be “bringing the national food hall revolution to Charlottesville.” In offices above the food hall, tenants include a commercial real estate data analysis company, a medical device tech company, and my offices at Virginia Humanities (VH).
The New Humanities is an initiative at VH that is developing a podcast with residents of 10th and Page where our move into the neighborhood isn’t just the subtext. We openly wrestle with it as we try to disrupt cultural narratives by dismantling hierarchies of human knowledge production that are rooted in white male supremacy. We are supporting and compensating residents to document their community histories. I imagine that the podcast at the end of this project will explore questions like: how does the intertwined nature of property and whiteness always made that American dream of homeownership impossible for some? What does it mean today that Black residents were denied the ability to build generational wealth through homeownership and that their access to healthcare, education, and resources was reduced through displacement? We see a need to offer communities a forum to examine and ask questions about the legacy of those racist policies and practices as we try to live together now. What are the implications of the American dream of homeownership on communities? What are the other forces at play when we choose to move into a gentrifying neighborhood? How might we make decisions differently if we thought about our communities as long-term investments? How does knowing the history of a place change our relationship to it? What do we want this place to look like 100 years from now? How do we decide? Who is the we? How can we stay open to creating new worlds together? And since these are only my questions, how do we ensure that our process is dialogical, provisional, open-ended, generative, and revisable (thank you, Katherine McKittrick)? The livability of Charlottesville has always been contingent.
Since training in ethnography wasn’t part of my master’s degree, I decided to take a film and experimental ethnography class at UVA in Fall 2020 and do my final project on our internal work as the staff of VH to prepare for the podcast outreach. The ethnography ended up asking questions about how the New Humanities represents a departure from the existing VH organizational and programming structure. How can the internal and external ongoing relationship building required for this work pave the way for more local community engagement across the organization and more inclusive models of programming? VH is a predominantly white organization. Our thinking about this podcast was part of a broader conversation happening within the organization about how we see white supremacy in our work culture. If we are attempting to reverse the organization’s model of top-down (white supremacist) program development to take a more bottom-up approach, when do we bring in the bottom? What does a democratic production process look like? How much control are we really willing to give up? If collaboration is mobilized as a research and production strategy, how do we account for imbalances in power? If we see the process (of community-making: VH in community with 10th & Page, that is) as an outcome for this project, how can we challenge ourselves and our funders into new ways of measuring the goals of the project? How does institutional change actually happen?
The ethnography was based on recordings of our planning meetings and interviews that I conducted with my colleagues. As we move forward with the podcast, it’s been useful to be able to refer to the ethnography to remind us of our thinking at the beginning and help us to affirm our agency within the organization. And when other programs wanted to adapt our approach to their own work, it offered them, if not a roadmap, then questions to consider.
I ended my interviews with each of my colleagues by asking, “is there anything you'd want to ask other team members?” With the ethnography, I was trying to create a space to have conversations that aren't normally given time in VH work culture. I was mimicking and expanding on the openness, thoughtful, and unhurried quality of the New Humanities team meetings, which are unique within the organization. Indeed, I know that the ethnography created something of a positive feedback loop. A couple of times, in the New Humanities meetings, my colleagues referred to something they said in an interview with me. I wonder if people felt they could be more vulnerable with the group, knowing that everyone had been asked to respond to the same questions. My hope for the New Humanities initiative and the ethnography is that they can open possibilities for that same sense of candor and reflexivity among VH staff beyond the New Humanities team.