Interviewer effect.

When we were studying the Civil War this past year, I made some use of "slave narratives" as primary sources.   I had thought of these as authentic, true descriptions of what it was like to live through slavery and emancipation.  

But primary sources are not always as primary as they seem.  Ta-Nehisi Coates highlights a commenter who points out something that had never occurred to me as I used them and read them to the children:  the invisible role of the interviewer.

…The biggest problem with the way that many of the slave narratives are transcribed is that they leave out the dialouge of the interviewer. That hurts because it encourages us to ignore the interview situation itself. 

This doesn't mean that we have to go straight to the idea that the interviewee is being ironic, or falsifying how they feel, but it does mean that whatever they are feeling includes being in the presence of an interviewer who might be a stranger, or just as often might be someone they know, but who is almost certainly better off and almost certainly white. Several of the interviews I read were conducted by people from the family that the subject worked for or even the family that they had been enslaved by….

…all of that is important to keep in the front of your mind because otherwise it's tempting to read the narrative as a missive straight out of the subject's head, straight from the time of slavery to us, and it;s not. It includes that room, and all of the getting by that it took to get both of those people into that room.

…The WPA narratives are terribly valuable, but they are also incomplete documents and I think we should always read them as such whether they confirm or contradict our deeply held positions. You have to kind of hold off closure as you read them.

Definitely something I will keep in mind when reading interview-sourced texts in the future, whether historical documents or in current periodicals.

(As I think I've mentioned before, if you have any interest whatsoever in Civil War and antebellum history, you should be reading TNC's blog, which is about many other things besides.   I think he's cooking up a book, which I'll be in line to read; I read his memoir The Beautiful Struggle last year and was just blown away.)