About
What is beauty...if not the love for the Black ordinary? Or the capacity to make what we do and how we do it into sustenance and shield?
— Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
The Black Ordinary is a multimedia publication, online resource hub, and national database of community archives dedicated to preserving Black-American history and culture.
Mission
The Black Ordinary platforms Black-American oral histories, artistic innovation, embodied cultural traditions, and multidisciplinary archival practices.
Vision
As Black people live and breathe, so does the Black Archive.
Pillars
Art.
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We believe artistry is an innate characteristic of Blackness.
Creative outputs (art-making, writing, singing, dancing, and even laughter) that contribute to the longevity of Black-American culture can be defined as an artistic practice, even if a majority of Black people do not call themselves artists. ​
Archives.​
​We recognize the memory holders, art-makers, cooks, matriarchs, storytellers, and cultural producers whose intergenerational community-based work has always been rooted in preserving Black history and culture—even if they do not use the title “archivist” to define what they do. ​​​
Autonomy.
While the institutional archive (museums and libraries) is important, we encourage Black-Americans to take charge of preserving their own local and family histories rather than rely on institutions to determine what is worth remembering and preserving.
Frequently Asked Questions
Although museums are technically archival institutions, there are slight differences between the two: A museum's primary purpose is to display (art, artifacts, objects), and an archive's primary purpose is to preserve (documents, photographs, oral histories).
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In an effort to preserve stories by, for, and about the descendants of enslaved people with African ancestry, our Collective Memory Database only features projects and community archives that are not directly affiliated with an academic institution or public library.
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