“First, that some forms of material culture that we are fairly sure existed simply do not survive; second, that some forms of material culture and everyday practice are not commonly remarked upon by eyewitnesses in various kinds of texts even though they are fairly ubiquitious. Indeed, in some cases *because* they are ubiquitious.”

In short, he is conflating an absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

Jensen’s inquiry would be better served by asking the question of why NINA signs are not abundant in historical photographs or archives. Plausible explanations actually exist for each. Photography was very rare prior to the 1860s, and even then almost always used for portraiture – not randomly capturing “help wanted” signs in the windows of buildings. As to archival collections, I’d suggest that it was no more common to deposit an old handwritten paper NINA sign at the local library in 1860 than it would be for you to do the same today with a cardboard sign following the conclusion of a yard sale.

The far more interesting evidentiary attestation is, of course, the extended list of NINA newspaper ads that Fried has uncovered. Any decent statistician would note that, in addition to being records in their own right, NINA ads (due to their high survival rate) are also likely a proxy measurement for other types of discriminatory employment practices that were less likely to be recorded for the aforementioned reasons. There is no reason to believe that an employer who posted a NINA ad in a newspaper would withhold such stipulations from a paper sign hung in his window, or a verbal disclaimer provided in a job interview. In that sense, the NINA ads are themselves an attestation to the prevalence of sentiments that likely appeared in other less reliably recorded or retained forms.

While Timothy grounds his argument on African research, it is a very important point in the history of East Asia as well. Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s recent Japan Focus article “You Don’t Want to Know About the Girls? The ‘Comfort Women’, the Japanese Military and Allied Forces in the Asia-Pacific War” makes this point well:

“The question of historical sources lies at the heart of the bitter contemporary disputes about the “comfort women”. Those who deny that the Japanese military forcibly recruited women to brothels, or who dismiss the issue out of hand, commonly draw a sharp distinction between official documents and oral testimony, discounting the latter or focusing their energies on parsing specific pieces of testimony in order to undermine their credibility. But both written and oral historical source materials are created by human individuals with human strengths and weaknesses. Why should we privilege one over the other? The bureaucrats who compose an official document are neither more nor less likely to present a full and accurate picture of the truth than elderly women who tell the stories of their past.”

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tessa-Morris_Suzuki/4352/article.html

I do love the conjunction of the above with the PS, below:

Ps. Professor Burke praises Rebecca Fried the “high school student at Sidwell Friends,” saying “a confident and intelligent 9th grader can participate in the achievement of that progress as an equal.” She is indeed impressive. However she wrote the essay while a Middle School student in the eighth grade; she will enter the 9th grade a month from today. Does this blunder demonstrate the usual research skills of a Swarthmore professor?

“You’re unprofessional and you got her grade wrong by one year! Nyah Nyah Nyah!”

Okay, then.

Re: Professor Jensen’s comments. I think “tendentious” is perhaps a fairly good adjective for the spirit in which they’re offered, and that would be one reason why I don’t think his interpretation of the history he’s examining holds up very well. He moves his evidentiary goalposts a great deal–at one moment a very minute difference-that-makes-no-difference is sufficient for him to passing sweeping judgment, at another moment a small difference is easily dismissed by him because it doesn’t fit the sweeping judgment he wishes to pass.

I want to return somewhat insistently to the larger methodological problem I raise in my own response, because it applies to more than just Professor Jensen and his essay. Namely, what do we as historians accept as evidence of presence when we’re talking about ephemeral material culture or equally ephemeral and/or subcultural forms of speech and everyday practice?

As I observed, Africanists have been forced to think very hard about this problem. Most of the archival sources we have to work with actively deny the humanity of the principle subjects of our research, and in any event take little interest in the everyday discourses, practices and experiences of those subjects. But we do not conclude from this absence in the archives that there is absence in historical reality–we do not conclude that Africans had no everyday practices, lives or discourses. At the same time, you can’t just make it up from nothing. But sometimes just a few references in existing material are enough to open up a line of interpretation, to catalyze oral history or ethnography, to suggest new kinds of documents to look at, to see material culture in a new light. More importantly, sometimes just a few references are sufficient to plausibly argue that a particular way of speaking, a particular kind of practice, a particular sort of artifact, was in fact common despite the fact that it’s barely mentioned or documented in the evidence we have to work with.

Stephanie Newell and Osumaka Likaka, for example, have written persuasively about colonial-era practices of naming, about how Africans subversively renamed and spoke about imperial officials and activities. Like anything that’s a “weapon of the weak”, this kind of naming barely registered in the awareness of the imperial archive–or was misread. But that misreading or minimal recognition is good enough to suggest a hidden ubiquity, I think.

So to the question of signs, before we get to ads. Professor Jensen seems to me to have an expectation about commonality that he discusses very little in his original piece, that has if anything deepened in his responses to Fried (and here to me as well). The signs, he believes, either should have survived in some existing collection of antebellum material culture or should have been commonly remarked upon by eyewitnesses in many instances. Otherwise, he argues, it is reasonable to argue that they didn’t exist. But this seems to me to move far too fast past a really difficult problem in historical interpretation. First, that some forms of material culture that we are fairly sure existed simply do not survive; second, that some forms of material culture and everyday practice are not commonly remarked upon by eyewitnesses in various kinds of texts even though they are fairly ubiquitious. Indeed, in some cases *because* they are ubiquitious.

But also in some cases because they are primarily noticed or experienced by subordinate or marginalized subjects. In the case of NINA signs, both problems are in play. For example, how many ‘help wanted’ signs of any kind do we have in existing collections from antebellum America? How often was employment offered via signs in windows at all? How often was employment offered through conversations or direct approaches in relationship to signs? Could some of the memory of “signs” derive from everyday conversation? How much do we know about the denominators in relationship to all the numerators that seem so significant to Professor Jensen? (And to Ms. Fried?)

I drove through several small New England towns in the last week and saw many handwritten “help wanted” signs in the windows of businesses. But were I not having this conversation, it would never occur to me to record or comment upon having seen them. None of those signs will survive for long–I suspect most will be in the garbage within several months. They’re informal, quickly composed, etc. If a century from now it was concluded that American businesses primarily filled their vacancies using Craigslist and Monster.Com or perhaps the want ads in newspapers, that would be in some sense very wrong when it came to small businesses in smaller communities.

The problem of subordinate or marginalized experience is more potent here. Professor Jensen insists with great assertiveness on extensive “evidence of presence” before he will countenance the possibility that signs existed, but dispenses with the need for direct evidence of the actual experience of Irish-Americans between 1840 and 1862 quite handily. Meaning, he is willing to argue that if he can establish evidence of the absence of signs, he is quite free to make strong claims about the process by which collective memory was established among Irish immigrants through indirect evidence–that there was a song by 1862 which had an antecedent form, that immigrants *had* encountered the signs in England, and that there are general sociological claims that one may make about “the invention of tradition”. But if there is no court case of an insurgent Irish youth throwing a brick through an offensive window, neither is there a transcript of Irish immigrants engaged in the construction of memory. Which sounds as if it’s a tall demand, but in fact the historiography of memorialization and the “invention of tradition” often finds surprisingly direct evidence of the conversations, discourses and relations by which people come to believe in shared experience.

I think it’s important in general to start from the premise that if people at a certain moment in the past seem to believe very strongly that something happened to them, it may well have happened in some form fairly close to the text of that memory. It is especially important to do that for dominated, subordinated or marginalized communities. How often has dominant opinion judged the reported experiences of such communities to be fictional or exaggerated only to be compelled at a later date to recognize that what was attested to was in fact quite common?

It’s also very rare for memories to be entirely functional, ideological or just the epiphenomenal traces of some overall process of social formation–their content comes from something real. Now Professor Jensen argues that there is a “real” referent here–the memory, both direct and reported, of experiences in England and possibly Canada as well, or for male workers, the “real” referent of the experiences of Irish-American women seeking domestic work. But he’s very quick to conclude that otherwise the memory is a fiction and a very interested fiction at that.

We are right now in the middle of considerable political and social upheaval in the United States over the fact that long-reported experiences of African-Americans with police violence are being documented in a new way, through ubiquitious video, which I think should give anyone pause about where to place their trust–in the reported experiences and memories of people whose perspectives do not compose the archive to a great degree, or in what the archive says about them.

This is also why I think even a few cases of seen, reported or described “real” signs in Fried’s article matter so much, and why it’s important not to create a benchmark for ubiquity that’s both unrealistic and unfair. How often in Professor Jensen’s measurement would an Irish-American man in the 1840s or 1850s need to have had an experience in which he directly was told “no Irish need apply” (in that phrasing or closely related ones) for him to conclude this was a common explanation for his circumstances? Once in a lifetime? Once a month? Is that a general benchmark for documenting discrimination in history? Would some subordinate or marginalized people be perfectly right to conclude that they are subject to a discriminatory practice even if the only direct evidence is something that happened to someone else in their community? Do you have to wait to be personally oppressed to ‘remember’ that your community is oppressed? If, for example, there was an employment agency in the early 1840s using the NINA formulation in ads fairly commonly, why wouldn’t that be a legitimate basis for a larger, later group of immigrants “remembering” that they might be subject to discrimination? The ads might become more subtle–and Fried documents that there were also significant objections to them, something that the 2002 article says it expects to find but does not, so the objections might also have driven the ads underground or into less-explicit forms. But the early ads would still serve as a credible basis for knowing and “remembering” that there was some discrimination.

After all, discrimination is to some extent by its nature a practice of something not happening, of jobs not offered, housing refused, rights not accorded. And mostly in our own times–and I think others–the everyday practice of discrimination goes on without great ideological fanfare and without a blazingly clear archival trail. That is precisely what has made it so hard in our present day to contest employment and housing discrimination within the legal system, and thus why many who are discriminated against simply accept it as a social fact. A given landlord can refuse to rent to African-Americans who make inquiry and as long as they make no statement to that effect, each individual who is turned down is left without an overall sense of the pattern. So when there are moments of rupture or contradiction–when the system does provide a sign or an ad or a statement–I think it’s often fair to see those moments as the visible tip of something pervasive but invisible.