When I chose this picture, my first thought was: this will get a GREAT response! And it did! The faces are pretty compelling and open to captioning. However, what I didn't consider was the possibility that comments could be racially charged and insensitive. The fact that someone (who is probably not of native heritage) is dressed as a Native American did not phase me because this is just an older rendition of North Carolina's traditional play The Lost Colony. However, I have come to reconsider the use of the picture in the caption contest.
I tried to distribute the contest as widely as possible, and as a result, I even garnered some captions from high school students. I was extremely excited at the thought of engaging these students with the archives in a unique way. Now, I don't want to be down on high schoolers, because we were all there once. In fact, I think I could expect an insensitive comment from anyone. If you scroll through any online humor site (you could start with Pinterest's humor section), you will encounter some very funny but very off-color jokes. So, when I asked the public to caption a photo, I should have expected that the joke might quickly become inappropriate. The questionable caption is below:
Breaks Wind lived up to his name much to the chagrin of everyone in a five foot radius.
The captioner named the man in Native American costume "Breaks Wind." Well, the joke is funny on one level since that man does have a grin on his face that reeks of mischief, but it is also wrong on many levels. Probably the most obvious is the casually incorrect, irreverent, and misunderstood reference to Native American names. Now, I cannot speak to the other levels on which this is offensive because I am not Native, an expert on any Native American culture (including naming conventions), or an expert on their history. However, using a repressed culture as the butt of a joke may not be the best idea. As I said, I am not an expert, but the fact remains that I represent the University Archives and that the University Archives represents the University. The University is a public institution. We are an academic institution of higher learning and higher purpose. We are representatives of the state and people of North Carolina, and that includes Native Americans. As such, we cannot and should not support jokes at the expense of any culture. Now, off-color jokes aren't always inappropriate. Well, maybe they are inappropriate, but there are accepted avenues for those jokes such as South Park. However, we aren't Seth McFarlane. And we are responsible to constituents.
The moral of this story for me has been that popular humor cannot always have a place in archival outreach. I do want the public to interact with archives in a unique and fun way; however, I do not want to open the Archives to cultural insensitivity.
Do you think that archivists walk a tightrope when eliciting a response from the general public? Or do you find that our experience is unique?