Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan

Abstract

Many contemporary oral histories are rooted in principles of progressive and feminist politics, particularly in a respect for the truth of each informant's life experiences and a quest to preserve the memory of ordinary people's lives. Feminist scholars have been in the forefront of efforts to elaborate these ideals as methodological principles, seeking ways to dissolve the traditional distinction between historian-as-authority and informant-as-subject and to create what the sociologist Judith Stacey calls an egalitarian research process characterized by authenticity, reciprocity, and intersubjectivity between the researcher and her 'subjects.',1 Such oral history practices have been designed primarily to study and record the lives of who, historically speaking, would otherwise remain inarticulate.2 From this tradition of history from the bottom up has come a rich and sensitive body of interviews with union organizers, feminist activists, civil rights workers, and others whose experience progressive and feminist scholars share and whose life stories and world views they often find laudable. Historians have paid less attention to the life stories of ordinary people whose political agendas they find unsavory, dangerous, or deliberately deceptive.3 Oral history is a particularly valuable source for rectifying this scholarly lacuna since rightwing, reactionary, and racial hate groups tend to be secretive and highly transient, limiting the availability and usefulness of traditional documentary sources. But