Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1980, Baltimore Voices, a play written from the transcripts of 200 interviews with elderly working-class Baltimore residents taken as part of the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project (BNHP), was seen by thousands of people in Baltimore and on public television. Created by left-leaning oral and public historians, the play was intended to center the voices of white and African American Baltimore residents. However, Baltimore Voices fumbled its opportunity to present a nuanced past to the public through a cascading series of decisions revolving around the ethical question of who had the authority to interpret the oral histories for the stage play and how to frame them for public audiences. Specifically, the play ignored the role of whiteness in shaping Baltimore’s neighborhood history. Instead, the creators saw individual prejudice as the key issue shaping race relations in the city. They forced the stories of Black Baltimore residents into a white ethnic immigrant narrative frame, eliding the privileges that allowed white immigrants to rise in social status and distorting Black history. And they imagined the oral histories and play as modular, with the goal of presenting the history most palatable to the audience. While the theater company practiced sharing authority by giving BNHP narrators multiple opportunities to give feedback during script development, the question remains: when certain community members are more vocal than others, who gets to represent the community? Using extensive archival material, this article discusses Baltimore Voices as a case study of an oral and public history project during a formative moment for both fields. I suggest that progressive oral and public historians at times abdicated their ethical responsibility to frame and contextualize oral history to present complicated histories to the public. Examining whiteness requires this interpretive perspective because the power of whiteness is in its invisibility.