“Adrienne, you know better…The Atlantic Should Be Ashamed of This Editorial Malfeasance and Laziness”

The above words are mine, taken from my email to Helen Lewis, dated TK.

Though, I was directing the words to Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic’s Executive Editor, the words can — and should — be taken to be directed to The Atlantic as a whole. “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat” was a collosal disaster of journalism that is much like the transcript that Helen Lewis based most of her sourcing on — important because of the errors and lies that are rarely seen, publicly, at institutions which believe that they sit atop the hierarchy of America’s leading places of thought and culture.

As I stated here, my family’s ranching history in Texas goes back nearly 200 years (184 years), and the Southern ranching/farming tradition is nearly 300 — roughly 290 years — when we first appeared in Tennessee in the 1730s. The Nichols, establishing families of New York (post-British takeover) and Connecticut, have a farming/ranching history in this country that goes back to the 1630s, which extends back to a tradition in England, where they immigrated from, well into the 1500s, so on and so forth. The tradition continued when in the 1830s, a descendant came to Texas, starting the White and Black Nichols lines, the latter of which are still ranching and farming in Texas. This is not even addressing the Native traditions of horsebreaking, ranching and farming which absolutely contributes to the family history of over 400 years of farming and ranching.

Herein lies the rub: The Atlantic is 164 years old, younger than the ranch by 20 years, and not remotely close to the dates and time ranges listed above. There is a demonstrated lack of care and understanding of what the role of archives, archivists do and what their role is to stewarding culture, especially culture and memories that societies do not want to remember.

In this website, I’ve gone over a number of examples of The Atlantic’s failures — and very specifically, Jeffrey Goldberg’s as Editor-in-Chief and the staff writer he allowed to write the blog post, Helen Lewis — but it’s also worth paralleling how The Atlantic did exactly what the Guggenheim is doing: attempting to discredit me in an attempt to destroy an archive.

One of the editors and writers that I worked with in the making of this website pointed out that The Atlantic published an article about the importance of Black archives, and so totally mishandled the work and scholarship of Defacement. In July 2022, Goldberg announced The Atlantic’s digitized archive, spanning the 164 years of the publication’s history. In the letter, he fervently waxed poetics about the role of The Atlantic’s archive in concretizing its past, but offered the reader very little about the importance of the archive for the future beyond the fact that something had to be done with the physical prints of the magazine. Perhaps a clue into Goldberg’s lack of respect or understanding of the role of the archive is the fact that The Atlantic does not have a full-time archivist, but one editor/research did find this ad for a one-year, temp position, possibly to create the archive announced this summer.

When (White men) editors miss the mark, it’s called “blind spots.” When other people have blind spots, it’s called, “unqualified”. It would be a wonder if blind spots made one unqualified, but that’s a different report. The point is, Goldberg has a blind spot regarding Black narratives, but specifically, Black archives. You cannot understand