This article was originally published in the 2019-2020 edition of Primary Source the Department of History's annual newsletter. You can find the 2019-2020 edition as well as all previous editions of Primary Source here.

By Lynnell L. Thomas, 2019-2020 Farley Visiting Scholar

Six months ago, when I began my tenure as this year’s Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SFU, I was looking forward to escaping a brutal Boston winter, teaching a new class, researching the black community of Hogan’s Alley, and making new acquaintances with whom to explore all of Vancouver’s attractions.  Needless to say, that didn’t quite go as planned.  I arrived in one of Vancouver’s coldest and snowiest winters; was sidelined by a pandemic that closed most institutions and required social distancing; and have joined in spirit and solidarity with African Americans protesting anti-black racism and state-sanctioned violence sparked by the police murder of George Floyd.  Bookended by a global pandemic and a global protest movement, my teaching and scholarship during this time have helped to elucidate the relationship between COVID-19 and institutional racism, two crises that disproportionately kill African Americans in the U.S.

My research focuses primarily on race, tourism, urban geography, and public memory in New Orleans.  In Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory (Duke University, 2014), I argue that the city of New Orleans capitalizes on black culture by promoting second line parades, jazz funerals, and Creole cuisine to prospective tourists.  Yet, at the same time, it debilitates the black people and communities that produce and preserve that culture by maintaining stark racial inequities in income and wealth, employment, housing, healthcare, education, and incarceration.   Hurricane Katrina made clear the correlation between race, risk, and recovery as black New Orleanians were more vulnerable to the storm, died at higher rates, and faced greater, often insurmountable, obstacles trying to return and rebuild their lives.  As we have seen with COVID-19 and the international protests against anti-black racism, these racial inequities are not unique to New Orleans or even the United States.

With their multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial histories that predate incorporation into or colonization by the United States, these locales proved to be compelling sites to contemplate decolonizing archives, tourist sites, museums, and memorials.  During the course of the semester, we invited other scholars, activists, and museum curators into our class and ventured out for a walking tour of Vancouver’s gay history.  As a final project, students, many of whom are heritage industry professionals, submitted critically engaged proposals for new or reconceptualized tours, monuments, and museums in Vancouver.  Attuned to Vancouver’s own history of colonial and racialized violence and its recent designation as a “city of reconciliation,” these projects reimagined a more collaborative and inclusive public history of Vancouver, conversant with indigenous epistemologies, popular resistance, and social justice. I may be biased, but I think all their proposals should be funded!

These projects re-envision more than the urban landscape; they re-envision society as a whole.  In one of our course readings, “Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory,” Katharyne Mitchell argues that “the traces of memory left in the landscape point to the political, cultural and economic forces which cohered at that moment to produce a vision of the way a (dominant) society perceived and represented itself to itself.”    It’s telling that so many of the protests against racism around the world have targeted monuments to racist leaders and regimes, including the monument to John “Gassy Jack” Deighton in Vancouver.  In Vancouver, like in New Orleans, activists recognize that it is not possible for a society to venerate white supremacists and colonizers without perpetuating white supremacist and colonial violence.