A Year-End Reflection from Jamie Kalven

Gloria Dickson and daughter. Stateway Gardens, 2001. Photo by Patricia Evans. Gloria Dickson wrote the letter to Terry Peterson, then CEO of CHA, mentioned by Jamie in the letter below.

December 22, 2021

Four months have passed since I stepped down as executive director of the Invisible Institute in order to resume full-time reporting. In the future, I will describe for you what I have been up to. For the moment, though, I want to share some thoughts about what distinguishes the work of the Invisible Institute and what is required to sustain it.

With a fresh perspective afforded by my new role, I have been brooding about “human rights reporting,” the term colleagues and I adopted more than twenty years ago to describe what we aspired to do.

Our use of the term back then might best be described as a moral intuition awaiting articulation in action–a process that continues. Over time, several essential features of the practice have become clear.

First, such reporting resists abstraction and insists on bringing full attention to the concrete harms to particular people caused by abuses of power. This orientation is manifest in our practice of “centering the source” by working to make immediate the experiences and perceptions of those most directly affected by abuses. Present in our work from the start–see, for example, “A Letter to Terry Peterson” in 2001, one of the very first pieces published in the View From The Ground--this approach came to full flower in our podcast series Somebody and continues to shape work-in-progress. 

Second, the cornerstone of human rights practice is the moral imperative to know what can be known about affronts to human dignity and to act on that knowledge. It follows that an essential aim of human rights reporting is to expand that which is knowable and hence has moral claims on us. We do this most obviously through investigations that expose what would otherwise be hidden, but we also do it by other means, such as bringing litigation to challenge official secrecy, curating public information on behalf of the public (as exemplified by the Citizens Police Data Project), and deploying innovative strategies such as the use of machine learning to excavate evidence of gender violence by the police from masses of citizen complaints in our Beneath the Surface project.

Finally and most important, the ultimate aim of human rights reporting is to contribute to full public acknowledgment of documented harms. A necessary condition for meaningful change, such acknowledgement is an elusive goal in a society in which public discourse is polarized, ideology trumps evidence, and communication technologies are more often a source of incoherence than clarity. How are we to break through into the moral imaginations of our neighbors and fellow citizens with reporting on conditions in communities oppressed by persistent patterns of abuse? That is the question that drives our work.

It is customary in appeals of this nature to trumpet one’s achievements in a tone that cannot help but sound self-satisfied. I appeal for your support on a different basis: although we have done some good work, our primary objective has eluded us. I have sometimes said we haven’t yet broken the story. That way of putting it conveys an emotional truth, but it doesn’t adequately capture the reality. It would be more accurate to say that we have long been engaged in a campaign and that, building on past work, we continue to carry that campaign forward into an uncertain future.

Sustained by faith in the vitality and integrity of this process, we are deeply grateful for the gifts of your attention, companionship, and support.
 

As ever,

Jamie Kalven