Empirical Absences Across Generational Memory: How White Southern Families (Don't) Share Their Histories with Racialized Violence

• In Event: Joint Roundtables: Social Psychology Section and Sociology of Emotions Section
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 6 - Identity & Race

Abstract

Social memory narratives, or the ways in which groups remember and share the past, have strong political and cultural implications. Further, family is an important site through which laypeople share memories about the socio-historical events their group has experienced. Most family memory work to date has focused on families who have faced oppression based on their racial and ethnic identities, national origins, and economic locations. But what do intergenerational familial social memory processes look like among those with historically advantaged identities, who have been witness to (and often benefitted from or even perpetuated) these historical eras of social harm and exclusion? To this end, taking White multigenerational business-owning Southerners as a case study, I ask: How do White Southern families narrate (e.g., frame, remember, share, discuss, and/or debate) their own family’s roles, experiences, and actions during eras of social exclusion and harm in the South? To address this, I am conducting a series of in-person interviews and site visits with White families who have owned businesses in the South since the 1960s or earlier. My methodology entails site visits and at least four in-depth interviews with 2-3 participating members of each family. This includes a one-on-one “history-focused” interview with two guided activities – a timeline narration activity and community historical event notecard-sorting activity – that allow me to compare knowledge about family and community history across generations within the same family. These data collection methods are well-suited to examine empirical absences, because I am able to identify socio-historical events that are: 1) noted in public records but missing from participants’ own memories, and/or 2) remembered by some family members but missing from other members’ memories. Here, I present preliminary emergent themes, such as known connections to racialized violence, historical learnings from schools and activists (rather than families), and emotional responses to difficult pasts.

Author

• Anna Holliday Shelton-Ormond, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill