When was the last time a museum left you moved? For American visitors within the last two decades, historic exhibits have been increasingly transportive and transformative – through playing with scale and technology to fostering ideas of authenticity through experiences or encounters. Most museums take the emotional encounter history can provide to heart, as seen in their personal and emotive exhibits.
While this experience and historic encounter is pervasive in the field of public history, its roots can be traced back to the 1970s and the fraught public history landscape shaped by the civil rights movement, emerging social histories, and negotiations of patriotism around the American bicentennial celebration. Author M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska locates this exhibition practice within the greater cultural turn to the “real”, a shift in authentic historic engagement from a “logic of preservation” to a “logic of reenactment”1. Her book History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (2017) details the cultural shifts of the 1970s around public history. Americans – after massive social movements in the 1960s and a faltering faith in the government – pushed back against dominant historic narratives, solidified in the traditional museum and impersonal, removed film.
Americans produced a history that was more intimate, more relevant, and contemporary-based. From television series like Roots to socially-centered preservation projects that began to diversify the memory landscapes, authenticity was stressed and emphasized through emotion and experience2. This turn democratized history for participants, history-making thus was not limited to a self-selected few but understood to be universal through the authentic encounters with the past.
Measuring authenticity’s turn took many forms in popular culture, but in museums it was perhaps most dramatic. Where relatable events in Little House on the Prairie could be contemporary needs and situations merely dressed in pioneer garb3, museums were facing the reality their spaces were not encouraging of emotive experiences. A practice where authenticity was measured in objects was incompatible with an emerging measure of authenticity in emotion4. Museum galleries saw dramatic shifts not just in their exhibition of artifacts, but in the built environment. Technological advances and questions of nationhood spurred by federal efforts to commemorate the bicentennial saw a wave of immersive and personal history exhibits sweep the nation.
In “1876: A Centennial Celebration”, the Smithsonian Institution recreated the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. While the exhibit served federal aims to instill patriotic nostalgia, the interpretation revealed tensions and assumptions within the museum field at large. A heavy stylized experience required in situ artifact positioning that presented the feeling and encounter that visitors to the 1876 exhibition would have felt – yet contradicted former professional expectations of display and feeling5. While popular, the intended emotions curators hoped visitors would take away from the exhibit were not guaranteed, opening a conundrum that public historians know all too well some decades away from the empathetic turn.
Reenactment, whether formally in Civil War battlefields or informally at the “1876” exhibit in Washington, D.C., is unpredictable by nature. The emotional angle in historic sites today, as in the fraught Bicentennial negotiations, is unpredictable and inherently open to criticism. Such events opened Americans’ eyes to inclusion that was written in the archive, as in AIM’s protest of Thanksgiving reenactments and covered-wagon trails that ignored Indigenous experiences under colonization6. The 1970s stands thus as a moment when the archive was animated, using emotional capital as currency to communicate with and between citizens7. Museums manifested this turn in seemingly untraditional displays that brought the past to the present, while simultaneously opening up space for critique and dialogue.
Today the immersive experience is prevalent in American exhibitions. Such practices have become synonymous not solely with authenticity but with building empathy. Museums are now in a moment where the emotive turn is transforming into a transformative experience, echoed in the fields’ growing conversations around empathy and social justice. As the previous radical change emerged out of the 1970s dynamic history landscape, we would do well to learn from their challenges and greater cultural shifts. As politically-inclined public historians who understand the role of history and institutions in fostering civic dialogue, we need to step outside of our galleries and halls to take in the greater changes around us. Such field-wide changes do not occur within a vacuum, as Rymsza-Pawlowska demonstrates so well, which raises questions about where we stand now and where we are headed. How are we understanding our empathetic shift within the broader communities we serve? What are we doing as a field to get outside of our perspectives to better address community needs? How are we not only implementing change on an experience level, but on a leadership level? Such questions within the field at large, indicating as broad and dynamic a cultural shift as is explored in History Comes Alive. I for one cannot wait to see what creativity and broader systemic change comes out of this fraught period we inhabit now.
1 M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017): 6
I have always liked silence. I was that kid. After years in the Catholic church and summers spent exploring the north woods near my home, I was comfortable with the lack of voice or instrument. I appreciated the resignation after the Eucharist had been put in its golden tabernacle, the priest staring at his hands before closing Sunday mass. I spent long afternoons reading or reflecting in the shade of white pine and birch, wondering how long I could go without filling the quiet. I am someone who enjoys quiet days alone, the person who doesn’t turn on the radio after getting in the car, always someone who is thankful for people who don’t rush to fill a lapse in conversation.
I’d always equated silence with absence until I conducted field work in Rwanda. I unlearned quickly, and often clumsily. Working with trauma, the words need space. They don’t do well in harried bullet-points or quick feet. Silence, I came to embrace, is a practice. The verbal gaps between a sip of Fanta or lingering eye contact played out as roadmaps in my notebooks. Pauses invited reflection, tests for trust, and necessary stops to ponder next questions. Silence, especially uncomfortable quiet, was necessary.
Historians engage silences both directly or indirectly. Patterns of ignorance or pause in the historical record are no shock for even emerging scholars, particularly surrounding race, gender, and sexuality. Working in the fleeting present is a practice in patience and embodied tension, holding the names for events unacknowledged in journals or reports. So the process of oral history, active presence, is an exercise in unpacking the tension between present and past in real time. None of this is felt more than in oral history.
The practice itself is a curated space of exchange and value, of recognizing the significance of the narrator’s perspective in the care and quality paid to the collection of data. In a space dependent on conversation, silence is an alien. It’s loud. And yet – silence is both heavily conversational and heartily populated. It’s a contradiction in itself like the very practice of historic engagement. Silences in the conversation – whether reflective or tense – or in the transcript like emotions not recorded or topics revoked from scholarly use1 are opportunities for greater reflection and study in themselves.
Musicologist Sherrie Tucker wrestles with this in her study of female big bands members. In her navigation of the liminal and complicated world of elderly women, she finds herself wrestling with the fact her narrators don’t define themselves as queer yet weave and duck, “deny” and discourage2. Reading their survival techniques as resistance, Tucker illuminates the intimacy of oral history and collaborative history-making. In the same way overt conversational silences hold meaning and power, themes like sexuality are both “topic and nontopic”3. These silences opened the door for Tucker to uncover the lived-realities of sexuality for her informants both past and present in how they curated their identities strategically to be taken seriously as artists and move safely through male-dominated spaces4.
While oral histories are an engaging space to tackle silences, their effects have implications that inform how historians study gaps in material and communal culture. In the case study of Cooleemee Historical Association (CHA), historian Leon Fink contextualizes the narrative erasures in the historic interpretation of the South Carolina Mill Town and its subsequent invitation of White power movements. In spaces where testimony and community are intertwined, the political nature of that exchange must foster critical engagement, in that all communities are ways of absence-making by their very nature5. In the prioritizing of industrial heritage, the past and present divides along race and class were left to fester and mutate with selective interpretation. CHA stands as a warning for narratives unprovoked by questions of power and agency, testimony and action.
The silences are critical spaces of action for historians. Oral histories, like the narrator or interviewer, don’t exist in a vacuum. The gaps and hesitancies can be filled in or illuminated with diligent care and curiosity. They can invite nuance, empathy, or violence. They are microcosms of the contradictions historians wrestle with, making them necessary zones of reckoning. In this recognition of historians as active agents of social change, the potential of democratic collaborative history-making in oral history has never felt more urgent.
1 Barbara W. Sommer, Mary Kay Quinlan. The Oral History Manual. (Plymouth: AltaMira Press, 2009): 59.
2 Sherrie Tucker, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, 293-310. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002): 295.
3 Ibid: 296.
4 Ibid: 302.
5 Leon Fink, “When Community Comes Home to Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause,” The Journal of Social History 40 (Fall 2006: 135.
Maggie Holmes is telling me a story. If I blur my eyes I can almost make out the snow storm that covered Lake Shore Drive, the one that made her late to work because schools were closed and as a mother of four she couldn’t leave the house until they were taken care of. Maggie Holmes, a domestic worker in Chicago in the 1970s, could be speaking from the year 2020. The specific frustrations and encounters in her labor are universal.
Holmes is one of dozens of Chicago workers speaking out of Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974)2. Terkel’s vast collection of labor testimonies is remarkable. From housekeepers to janitors to cops, the stark and personal narratives leap off the page, offering insight and refreshing reflection on work in a dynamic American moment. A radio host, Terkel understood the power of human testimony, allowing the individuals to speak themselves off the page, encouraging length and freeform dialogue. It feels intimate, it feels powerful. It reminds me of archival work, of encountering testimony decades or centuries ago.
Terkel’s oral histories highlight a paradox in the historian’s work: how do we represent voices that can no longer speak for themselves?
For “The Alley Cast” , a recent podcast by Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia, historians meet this challenge by earnestly naming the obstacles to historic silences. Where Terkel briefly mentions issues of race and gender that impact laborers, “The Alley Cast” explicitly positions historical absences within contemporary understandings of gender, sexuality, and race. Podcasts, author Heather Hethmon illustrates in her 2018 volume Your Museum Needs a Podcast, have the ability to reach new audiences and even discuss new and groundbreaking knowledge3. “The Alley Cast” embraces this, able to go beyond Elfreth’s Alley thirty-two residential4 New Republic homes in Philadelphia. In doing so, the cast is able to effectively broach connection and intimacy with characters of the past who might evade everyday museum programming, people like the Public Universal Friend.
Portrait of Jemima Wilkinson/the Public Universal Friend by J.L.D. Mathies, 1816. Wilkinson Collection, Courtesy of the Yates County History Center, Penn Yan, NY.
The Public Universal Friend was a Quaker preacher, subverting traditional gender norms in dress, expression, and philosophy. While inhabiting religious spaces and working in faith, the P.U.F. was able to manipulate and challenge traditional male and female oriented spaces5. In a society where labor was upheld with visible gender roles, where unmarried women faced challenges to income and agency6, the P.U.F. challenged not only the rationale for determined labor but the legitimacy of gender’s assumption.
Labor is a meaningful entry point. While the specific experiences of domestic labor outlined by Maggie Holmes or the doorman Fritz Ritter may not be applicable to most visitors to a heritage site, the experience of working and embodied practice of labor are universal. Even in the case of the P.U.F., positioning and defining realities of labor and agency and gender expression in society make for great connections with the public.
This is what public history comes down to: making space for personal connections with the past. As a museum educator, even in particularly challenging sites like former prisons or sites of trauma, the need for personal testimony is essential. It makes a big difference when a visitor is allowed to share a story or when a group on a historic tour get to hear the past speak to them. As Terkel so gracefully illustrates, and how podcasts like “The Alley Cast” uphold, the impact of testimony shouldn’t be overlooked. With testimony and oral history, historical figures (even those as seemingly untouchable like the P.U.F.) take on accessible form, making the potential for personal connection all the more possible and meaningful.
2 Terkel, Studs, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: the New Press, 1974. See esp. chap. 3, “Cleaning Up” and chap. 4, “Watching”.
3 Hannah Hethmon, Your Museum Needs a Podcast, (Hannah Hethmon, 2018), 8, Kindle.
Between the conflict of the museum field, beginning my graduate career, and the demands of the present moment, I reflect on what has informed my interest in the field of history.
This is a love letter.
Like all history, it starts personal. My paternal grandparents, pictured above, were my entry point to history. Like so many they were witness to many historic moments: the American Great Depression, the Nazi occupation of Denmark, the Korean War, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. Like countless others they were witnesses and survivors, dreamers and adapters. Over meals and walks, they humanized the past and encouraged present action.
Every Sunday we would dress against the northern cold, applying layers of wool and knit. It was only a short drive in the family van to my grandparent’s apartment on the lake, but never one long enough to warm the car fully. Our grandparent’s apartment was always warm and bright, smelling of food and coffee and old books. Between the two of them were over a hundred years of medical knowledge (both being practicing physicians) and resilience. My grandfather was born before the Great Depression in Minneapolis, the son of Swedish immigrants. My Farmor 1 was an immigrant from Denmark. Over holidays, birthdays, and the Sunday night dinners we produced a local history, intertwined with global superpowers and legacies, curating a personal connection to the past by their proximity to textbook events. Their stories, remarkable on their own, glowed together offering personal insight to some of our country’s most striking events.
As I develop as a historian, now in my first graduate semester at Temple University, I can identify the privileged roots of knowing my history. I can position my Farmor’s escape story within the racial politics of the mid-20th century. I can grapple with the reality of my grandfather’s presence on the Korean peninsula. In the city they settled, one they loved so much for its wildness and beauty, I can confront the reality of stolen land.
My past is not just mine, it is shared. My grandparents understood this best, not just in the way they reflected on their lives, but in the way they encouraged us to be curious and empathetic. When I mentioned interest in modern history my grandparents embraced it: selecting books on Minnesota’s entanglement with starvation experiments during WWII, letter writing during the Civil Rights movement, and sharing their own stories fleeing Denmark or treating POW in Korea. Overwhelmingly, my grandparents’ lived experiences informed their value for shared experiences, community and curiosity. They were embodied examples of what happens when we hold tight to each other during difficult moments, why we engage the present with as much integrity as the past, and look critically at who is included and who is not, taking action to remedy inequity.
I was lucky to have my grandparents for as long as I did and so fortunate to hear their testimony. Their willingness to share their stories, even if they were abridged for a child, instilled a deep compassion for history and narrative. They illuminated the person inside every archive, making personal the often distant “past” I seek as a historian.
After dinner, after the coffee was cleared away and Grandpa would sneak us each a chocolate-chip cookie out of the hidden tin in the kitchen we would sleepily pull our boots on and bundle again against the dark cold, turning back and waving to the open door before turning left to take the elevator down. Once outside, we would look up a final time to their apartment. Farmor would always be in her study, the lamp on, waving from the window. Without fail.
Eastern State Penitentiary is an 11-acre monument to White supremacy, embodying the geopolitics of a worldview grounded in White superiority at the expense of Black and Brown lives and bodies.
Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA. Source
Trauma is embedded in our landscape, through the commemoration of events past and the upholding of oppressive world-views built on racism, sexism, and colonialism. Many embodied traumas come in the shape of statues, monuments, and memorials. Eastern State Penitentiary is a site of trauma not exempt from such critical engagement, though it has evaded accountability through its positioning as a heritage site. But whose heritage does the architecture of oppression represent?
I’ve long been fascinated with public memory. It was the inspiration behind a one-way ticket to New York City to study the 9/11 memorial and what made my later work as a museum educator as interesting as it was enjoyable. Now as I make my home in Philadelphia, I enjoy the rich texture of testimony the city presents in its storied architecture and human stories that reveal themselves with patience and care.
Like many cities around the world, Philadelphia has begun to confront the physical legacy of racism in its public memory. The removal of Frank Rizzo’s statue and mural marked a turning point, for potentially honest and real community conversations about who is visible in the landscape, who is excluded, and what are the implications of this power divide. While a transplant to Philadelphia, I knew Rizzo’s name to be associated with state terror and racism — Philadelphia had condemned him in their hearts long before the honorable action in June. As I followed Rizzo’s demise, I couldn’t help but think of another landmark to oppression located just a quick drive down the parkway.
Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1971) is often referred to as the world’s first penitentiary, the birthplace of psychological punishment enacted through solitary confinement and religious instruction. While it is not the oldest prison in the United States, its influential design (replicated over 300 times worldwide) and penal philosophy has deeply informed our collective carceral imagination. It stands today in semi-ruin both a historic site and haunted house (more on that later) in Fairmount neighborhood, a brutal interjection of oppressive architecture amidst the city’s row-homes.
Eastern State Penitentiary is an 11-acre monument to White supremacy, embodying the geopolitics of a worldview grounded in White superiority at the expense of Black and Brown lives and bodies. It is a site of trauma that is protected and monumentalized through preservation efforts and tourist engagement.
What does a prison have to do with White supremacy?
White supremacy relies on the supposed superiority of the White race, legitimizing exclusionary and capitalist practices from chattel slavery to prison labor. White supremacy monuments are those memorials, structures, and installations that propagate said supremacy or take the perspective of the oppressor in enacting it. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), a network of jails, prisons, detention centers, probation mechanisms, and surveillance, embodies White supremacy as much as the plantation and the segregated bus stop. Prison served an ancillary mode of incapacitation to accompany chattel slavery, so it’s not so much that the prison system evolved out of slavery, but that they evolved together. ESP grew alongside this as well, incarcerating disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown men and women throughout its 141-year history. As the prison closed in the 1970’s, it signaled the rise of incarceration nationwide as civil rights legislation dissolved social segregation by equalizing job and housing opportunities, turning the nation expanded legislation that targeted POC through veiled language (Wacquant, “The New Peculiar Institution”, 2000). ESP’s history encapsulated the evolution of the PIC that now sees the United States with the highest prison population in the world.
The PIC is a vehicle for legally and physically enforcing colored lines as POC, particularly Black Americans, are disproportionately policed, incarcerated, and disenfranchised (Brewer & Heitzeg, “The Racialization of Crime and Punishment”, 2008). The prison is a geographical solution to social and political ills (Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference”, 2010), disappearing people instead of addressing problems (Davis, “Masked Racism”, 2000), from the internally displaced to mentally-ill citizens, those that pose a threat to White supremacy rooted aims of societal purity.
We can thus situate ESP within the PIC, both in the historic prison and in the present museum. ESP cannot be extracted from the narrative of racism motivated by White supremacy that the Prison stands for and imposes in its segregation of communities, capitalization off of forced labor, and unequal policies that indiscriminately target POC. ESP expands the PIC by profiting off of it, while not condemning it.
Can we call a prison, especially this prison, a Monument?
Monuments are not found. They are produced and manipulated, curated through a series of rituals and legitimization (Mason, “Fixing Historic Preservation”, 2004). By this nature, ESP is a monument to the implications and manifestations of White supremacy. ESP is a monument by its fixed narrative and in its resistance to change — natural or initiated. The emphasis on preserving the architecture of oppression will always reinforce the oppressor’s intention, regardless of intentional interpretation. The ritualistic engagement with select narratives inside the now-historic site, namely White male narratives, perpetuates the exclusionary aims of the PIC. ESP is monumentalized by its preservation, protection, and selective engagement. By its nature and its practice, ESP is monumentalized away from the roots of its reality, and in doing so solidifies punishment as an American value, legitimizing psychological punishment and the reliance on a carceral future.
Preservation is political. The motivations for historic preservation, statements of significance, are made — not found — through capital and social ritual (Mason, “Fixing Historic Preservation”, 2004). The building, the prison, is deemed worthy of protection and significance through the legitimization of a historic site, the funds thrown at stabilizing punishment cells, crumbling cell -blocks, and armed guard towers. Fixing historic narrative in the selective preservation process removes the very real implications that structures of oppression and segregation continue to enforce. The prioritization of oppressor’s aims through the physical stabilization of cell-blocks, preservation of punishment cells, and the cultivation of the prison’s form, is an endorsement of the aims and intentions behind the construction. The choice is selective and amplifies White supremacy roots (Weyenth, “The Architecture of Racial Segregation”, 2005) by its erasure of trauma and struggle of prisoners.
Ultimately, the prioritization of historic fabrics of oppression is an endorsement of the ideals and intentions behind them. The interpretation of trauma is not contingent on its mechanisms. The proof of prisons is erupting and evolving around us, so the elevation of its birthplace is contrary to any intention to act. Significantly, preservation is a reflection of societal values. The legitimization of prisons in the nation’s past is an imagining of a carceral future. What are our values in preserving solitary punishment cells below a cell-block? What does it say about our community in our desperation to save a building dedicated to psychological punishment?
The museum’s dependence on historic fabric and prioritization of its stabilization, as prisons continue to be built nationwide, speaks to a stark discrepancy in such publicized aims of advocacy. The prioritization of the prison’s preservation opposes prison reform by cementing its significance in the historic fabric of the city and minimizes the opportunity for its communities to imagine a future without prisons.
Eastern Penitentiary of Philadelphia, Engraving, ca. 1839. Source.
What about the history?
For many Philadelphians, the penitentiary is synonymous with its annual haunted house Terror Behind the Walls, not the active decades of trauma and incapacitation. The questionable programming takes over the historic fabric, creating a dynamic and immersive fright experience. While the historic site is quick to affirm they no longer engage depictions of prisoners inside the haunted house, the optics and ethics of hosting such an activity inside a site of trauma is questionable enough. The Trauma Minstreldom enacted through reducing the penitentiary’s ongoing afflictions to aesthetic is on par with plantation weddings or Holocaust yoga. The selective acknowledgement of ESP’s realities, both past and present, speaks to an institution utterly removed from its content, reserving the right to comfort for visitors and staff, restricting true reckoning with the ethical ramifications of what it means to preserve a site of trauma for individual profit. It delegitimizes any meaningful historic interpretation that might be occurring within the historic site.
Such historic programming throughout the year examines a selective historic moment. In not acknowledging ESP’s own disproportionate numbers of POC incarcerated and in segregating mere mentions of race away from typical visitor footpaths, ESP maintains a narrative grounded in the same exclusionary worldview that the prison embodies. Reducing ongoing human rights abuses to programming, while not condemning the ongoing injustices behind the country’s 5,375 prisons and jails, speaks to an institution utterly divorced from the human impact of the PIC, reflected in their obsession with the physical structure of the penitentiary. The building, segregated in its active years, curates the ongoing segregation of a population divided by prison walls and discriminate legislation in its inability to see itself as both a benefactor and perpetrator of mass incarceration.
The harm extends and is perpetuated outside its 30-foot walls. The neighbor who remembers the confusion and fear the penitentiary brought to his childhood, who would never feel comfortable even coming into the shade of the gatehouse entry on hot days. The folks returning from prison who experience flashbacks, pain. With the prison only closed since 1971, trauma and healing are still incredibly fresh, and there are barriers to active participation for families whose loved ones served time in the cold cell-blocks.
Families must pay the museum for genealogy reports to find any information relative to their loved ones and the loss of agency doesn’t end there. Their family members, often reduced to numbers and intake cards, are subject to the museum’s narrow interpretation. In some instances, their loved one’s image attempts to make amends for the PIC, a byproduct of removing family and lived experience from curatorial decisions. The prisoners, whose agency was denied by the nature of their incarceration, experience further disenfranchisement under curatorial decisions removed from reality. They are restricted both thematically and physically from the site, restricted by costs to entry and costs to familial data. The historic site is upholding and endorsing barriers to family engagement that the PIC enacts through costs to entry, limited access, and silence. In a system where family members must pay, on average $.21 cents/minute, to speak to their loved ones in prison, ESP is no different in demanding access funds from descendants and relatives of incarcerated individuals in their own site.
As a former museum educator with the historic site, I was eager to convey what I had learned at fellow sites of trauma to engage the public and students in the ongoing human rights abuses afflicted by the Prison Industrial Complex. However, almost immediately, the museums’ spoken intention of starting a national dialogue stood at stark odds with the same museum’s priorities of preservation and institutional neutrality. The engagement with visitors did not suggest a site of trauma, a hallowed site of shame and reckoning that I saw and believed the perimeter wall to suggest. At a site where some 14,000 men, women, and children died behind walls, I was disturbed to see such a lack of accountability by the museum and staff. The oppressive historic fabric permeates even staff relations, where dialogue was not encouraged and calls for accountability were ignored at the expense of staff safety. The prevailing attitude is that prison is some unfortunate margin of society: regrettable, but necessary. The hesitation to name solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment in its birthplace speaks to ESP’s subliminal endorsement of the conditions that perpetuate the world’s highest incarcerated population and subsequently the deadliest hotspots of Covid-19 in the present moment.
Prison isn’t your playground. It isn’t a quirky setting for horror entertainment. It isn’t beautiful. It’s more than a space for Instagram clout. It is a landscape of pain and torment. There is no honor or dignity in preserving the landscapes of oppression that speak to power and control.
What we preserve matters. What we signify as significant is reflective of who is valued in our society, who has worth, and whose testimony is heard. In valuing historic fabric over human lives, the museum is revealing deep investment in the prison system, and in mass incarceration. The world’s oldest penitentiary is the embodiment of White supremacy. It is embodiment of exclusion and segregation and representative of the selective and visceral harm the PIC perpetuates right now. Preservation legitimizes the carceral landscape in the present, and the future. As long as the penitentiary is prioritized for preservation, we will be perfectly fine sacrificing the lives of men, women, and children to the cogs of mass incarceration for our profit.
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