10 Ways Historic Preservation Policy Supports White Supremacy and 10 Ideas to End It
Creators: name: Wells, Jeremy C.
Publisher: name: Digital Repository at the University of Maryland
Year: 2021
Subjects: historic preservation
social justice
diversity
inclusion
equity
public policy
cultural heritage policy
White supremacy
racial bias

description: In the United States, policy-driven work in historic preservation comprises about three-quarters of the field’s work. Preservation policies, especially through rules and regulations, directly impact millions of Americans and redistribute billions of taxpayers’ dollars each year. These policies principally revolve around federal regulations that arise from the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966: the National Register of Historic Places, the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards, environmental (preservation) reviews of federal undertakings, and the Rehabilitation Tax Credit. At the local level, the most important policies are embodied in preservation ordinances that require property owners to retain the “historical integrity” (or authenticity) of locally-designated buildings when changes are proposed to these properties. Support for White supremacy is a cultural practice that places a high value on perfectionism, the means justifying the end, protection of power, objectivity and measurability, dominance of the written word in communication, binary thinking, paternalism, fear of open conflict, workplaces that reward individuals and not teams, and a definition of “progress” that is synonymous with continual expansion. To be clear, this paper does not address contemporary individuals who hold or act upon racial bias; it only and very specifically focuses on how preservation policies support White supremacy. Addressing issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity in federal and local preservation policies has usually been synonymous with the need to recognize the history of people with non-dominant racial or ethnic identities. While this omission is very much a policy problem, it is far from the only manifestation of how preservation policies support White supremacy. Moreover, the intersection of the field’s pervasive regulatory climate and issues in equity and inclusion are largely unaddressed in the literature. This paper therefore explores how White supremacy manifests in the 70% of the field’s practice that is driven by regulatory requirements, or, in a broader sense, the area of preservation practice that relates specifically to policy-related endeavors. Although important, this paper does not focus on the remaining areas of the preservation enterprise, which encompass site interpretation, advocacy, and construction/design/materials conservation, unless there is an explicit overlap with preservation policy. The main themes that this paper therefore covers are as follows: 1. The vast majority of people who work or volunteer in policy-related preservation endeavors or who study in historic preservation degree programs are White. There is a significant lack of representation from African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx people, or Indigenous people (among other possible groups with non-dominant identities) in policy-driven preservation work or in educational programs related to this work. 2. Preservation policy sustains the erasure of the place-based history of people with non-dominant racial or ethnic identities; policy is used as a paternalistic tool to force marginalized groups to adopt racially biased historical narratives. 3. Preservation policy makes it more difficult to document the lives and places of people associated with non-dominant racial or ethnic identities. 4. Historical integrity, as promulgated by rules and regulations for the National Register of Historic Places, is biased against people with non-dominant racial or ethnic identities. 5. Preservation policy supports placation and tokenism in its public “engagement” requirements related to planning efforts; there is too much emphasis in preservation policy to be an objective, check-the-box endeavor. 6. Preservation policy reinforces many of the stereotypes around the field’s support for White material and visual culture. 7. Preservation workplaces that primarily exist for the purposes of regulatory compliance suppress innovation and dissent, including efforts around diversity, inclusion, and equity. 8. Preservation policy makes little or no attempt to support affordable housing. 9. The doctrinal values that undergird preservation’s rules, regulations, and guidelines originate entirely from the ideas of White men, some of whom espoused racial supremacy ideals. 10. There is very little, if any, funding to address the problems around how preservation policy supports and sustains White supremacy. Using these ten problem areas, this paper then makes a recommendation for ways to solve some of these issues, with a central recommendation that the National Park Service and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation need to open up the rule-making process around the National Register of Historic Places and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards. These federal agencies also need to create and support a platform for widespread engagement with a diverse public in addressing these issues. A secondary theme is to support people-centered changes to historic preservation policy, including more flexibility around what have often been dogmatic approaches to significance and integrity. Lastly, the end of this paper presents a table that gives example arguments that support White supremacy in preservation policy and some potentially useful responses.