How should we respond when a public historian engages in, or has experienced, sexual harassment?

14 January 2021 – Gregory Samantha Rosenthal

Over the past several years, many of us have participated in conversations about the prevalence of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the public history field. This behavior has occurred at conferences, in workplaces, and in educational settings, among consultants, audiences, frontline workers, students, and others. How should we, as a public history community, respond?

Imagining long-term solutions to violence, including sexual harassment, is part of a larger abolitionist project to foster community-wide changes instead of distributing individual punishments. Illustration credit: Naomi Ushiyama.

I think about this often since, as a trans woman, I have experienced sexual harassment firsthand. Two years ago, my ex and I decided to drive an hour away to visit a small historic site and take their guided tour. Upon arrival, the docent, while speaking to my partner, gestured at me and referred to me as “him.” My gaze suddenly averted to my feet. I did not speak; neither did my partner. We were shocked. Just as the tour began, the docent did it again. My palms began to sweat. As we walked through the many rooms filled with interesting objects, I could only focus on replaying the docent’s words over and over in my head while acute anger bubbled up inside of me.

The following morning, I woke up still stewing. People who regularly experience sexual harassment know how this feels. Your mind gets derailed by someone’s off-hand remark, and the initial pain or hurt does not easily subside. I wondered aloud to my partner: what is it about public history sites that feels so dangerous to me as a trans woman? How can we change this?

This is not just a rhetorical question. NCPH’s Board-led Subcommittee on Gender Discrimination and Sexual Harassment, of which I am a member, has been meeting for the past eighteen months to study these issues and propose solutions. I have been working with a small subgroup of the committee exploring how to specifically apply a transformative justice framework to NCPH’s policies. A transformative justice approach means looking beyond punishment against offending persons as a solution to interpersonal violence. Rather, we seek to work towards long-term, community-based changes to how we treat one another.

NCPH has been discussing these issues for several years. The NCPH Board created the Subcommittee on Gender Discrimination and Sexual Harassment after NCPH’s 2019 Hartford conference and the revelations of a colleague at that time of their experiences dealing with sexual harassment. The subcommittee’s emergence built upon earlier work by NCPH’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, which held an “On the Fly” session one year prior, in Las Vegas. There, NCPH members, including myself, spoke out about our experiences with sexual harassment.

Since its formation, the subcommittee has worked to study the issues of gender discrimination and sexual harassment within our field. We developed a survey for public historians about their experiences with gender-based discrimination and harassment. We are currently working on educational resources for public historians on these issues, as well as draft policies for NCPH to use when responding to claims brought by or against our members.

The policies team comprises Joan Zenzen, Modupe Labode, Kristen Baldwin Deathridge, and myself—all dedicated NCPH members with a particular interest in this issue. We are tackling the question of how NCPH should respond to allegations of harassment and discrimination. We have each witnessed in our own professional lives the ways that bias and harassment limit public historians’ abilities to do their jobs. Over the past eighteen months, we have begun to draft guidelines for review by NCPH leadership.

We began by surveying the policies of roughly twenty other professional associations. We reviewed both published and internal draft documents, with particular attention to how other professional associations were responding to the growing #MeToo movement. We discovered that most professional associations’ policies stipulate that the findings of an outside body—governmental, judicial, educational, or otherwise institutional—are necessary in order for their society to take any action against one of its members. These organizations have recognized that as small professional societies with limited financial and human resources, they are unable to conduct their own independent investigations. NCPH faces similar limitations, and this approach may therefore be an applicable one for us, too.

However, as we reviewed the work of our colleagues, we became increasingly frustrated by what we saw as an explicit lack of language or guidelines centering survivors. Nowhere did we see language that explained to survivors their rights, or defined their abilities, to determine what justice might look like. We did not find models for how survivors could put forward specific recommendations or steps for remediation. We did not witness language that focuses on community-level solutions. We wondered: what would it look like if we embraced values central to our work as public historians—centering community and collaboration as our touchstones? What if instead of penalizing people, we brought about a transformation in the culture of our organization and in our field more broadly as public historians? What tools do we need to support this work?

We ultimately decided to educate ourselves on transformative justice (TJ). According to the activists Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, transformative justice frames “violence as BOTH an individual, interpersonal issue AND a social and political one.” Mia Mingus relates, in the same volume, that this work is not just about reducing harm, but also to “actively work to cultivate the very things that we know will prevent violence” in the first place. The Creative Interventions Toolkit further states that the goal of TJ is not simply to “address the specific situation of harm in question, but to transform the conditions and social forces that made such harm possible.” Inspired by what we had read, we began to wonder how NCPH might implement a TJ approach in tackling gender-based harm within our community.

As a first step, we began to draft guidelines that center survivors and give them agency in determining how NCPH should respond to their claims. We want to give people who have been harmed a variety of options for defining just what remediation might look like in regard to their specific circumstances. These options could range from a private reprimand of the person who did harm to the revocation of NCPH awards, honors, or membership.

However, in order for this work to be truly “transformative,” it must also address the wider conditions that allow for gender-based harm to occur in the first place. We have wondered whether survivors might be empowered to ask NCPH to engage in various forms of restitution, repair, or harm reduction. This could involve the responsible person (or potentially a partner institution or even NCPH as a whole) attending certain trainings or engaging in service or reparations to a specific organization or community. Or perhaps NCPH might offer workshops or programs to address an issue or amend policies so that a similar incident hopefully does not occur again. In my own personal example, shared at the outset of this essay, perhaps NCPH could connect the offending historic site with resources on how to be more inclusive towards transgender employees and visitors. Still, this is not enough. A transformative justice approach requires community members to work together in a collaborative process of healing and accountability. But what that might look like in an NCPH context is far from clear.

We are at a crossroads in developing our policy recommendations, and we wish to invite public historians to give their input. It is our intention to share more of our preliminary ideas with the broader NCPH community at a session at the annual meeting in spring 2021. If you are unable to attend the session, you are welcome to send feedback directly to me at rosenthal [at] roanoke [dot] edu. We welcome your input on our approach to this issue, as well as your ideas for how to make whatever processes NCPH ultimately adopts more ethical, accountable, and just. We owe it to our friends and colleagues who have experienced gender discrimination or sexual harassment to get this right.

~Gregory Samantha Rosenthal is an assistant professor of history at Roanoke College and co-founder of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project. They are a member of the NCPH Board-led Subcommittee on Gender Discrimination and Sexual Harassment.