D6 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020
that Black lives mattered.
“I made people uncomfortable,” Ms. Gor-
don said by phone from her Brooklyn home.
“That’s the thing about navigating a white
space — you’re OK until you start asserting
your Blackness, and then that becomes a
problem for some people. I actually had
people DM me outright and say: ‘I didn’t
follow you for this. I followed you for the
scrapbooking.’ And to those folks, I said,
‘Well, go with grace.’ ”
White Is Not a Default
Certain hobbies conjure a certain ster-
eotype. Scrapbooking is one of those for
which it is hard to shed the mental image of
a white, middle-aged woman. But as the in-
dustry and community that is built around
this craft has learned in the past few
months, whiteness in scrapbooking is not a
given.
Scrapbooking “feels like a radical act of
self-care, to write the words of my own life,”
said Ms. Gordon, who is Black. “No one can
take this from me, even if they burn all my
albums 20 years from now.”
The antiracism protests this year have
had well-known brands, including Nike and
Gushers fruit snacks, scrambling to signal
their support for Black consumers. A simi-
lar response is coming from small scrap-
booking companies and individual design-
ers.
Ali Edwards, a designer and scrapbook-
ing workshop star in Oregon, shared the
books she was reading to learn more about
racial inequality, and she invited her follow-
ers to join her.
Kelly Purkey, a designer with a shop in
Portland, Ore., shared how she was docu-
menting protests she was attending
through the pages of her personal scrap-
books. She also began offering Black Lives
Matter-theme stamps, stickers and cards,
designed by the artist Salomée, with pro-
ceeds going to charity.
But many of the biggest companies in
scrapbooking initially remained silent or
struggled to respond appropriately.
One of them was Studio Calico, which is
beloved for its monthly kits packed with
trendier scrapbooking tools, like washi tape
patterned with rose gold moons or leopard
spots.
When Azzari Jarrett, a photographer and
designer in Wilmington N.C., noticed that
Studio Calico had been silent about the anti-
racism protests, she commented on one of
the company’s Instagram posts, asking
why there was no message of solidarity for
the company’s Black customers, no com-
mitment to work with Black designers or
anything else about standing with Black
employees. (Ms. Jarrett, 41, was featured on
the Studio Calico blog in 2018, and said that
she had been a customer for seven years.)
Her comment went unaddressed. Then it
was deleted by the Studio Calico account.
“By the next morning, I had so many
other women in scrapbooking supporting
me and saying: ‘Hey, Studio Calico, you’re
silencing your customers. It’s not right,’ ”
Ms. Jarrett said. “I did get an apology, but
then I responded with: ‘If you do feel this
way, then what? What are you going to do to
change it? Do you know how many Black
employees you have? How many Black de-
signers do you have?’ ”
“They probably don’t even know how
many Black customers they have,” she said.
Ms. Gordon saw all of this unfold and
“called them out, like, immediately,” she
said. “If you don’t want to post anything
that says Black lives matter on your feed, or
anything about what you’re doing to com-
mit to diversity, that’s your prerogative. But
when you start actively silencing Black
voices that have been marginalized, that’s
where you get called out.”
April Foster, the chief executive of Studio
Calico, said in a statement that “the conver-
sations happening in our communities right
now are important and impactful, and we’re
listening and learning.”
The company, she said, was re-evaluating
its processes and products. “We’re inten-
tionally featuring inspiration that lifts up di-
verse creators, intentionally reaching out to
even more diverse designers and creators
for our creative team and product designer,”
she said.
Ms. Jarrett and Ms. Gordon said they
found support from others in scrapbooking
communities, but the disappointment the
two women shared felt squarely within the
experience of being a Black person in a
space deemed “white.”
That reality is reflected in how little
scrapbooking ephemera there is on the
market that shows Black or brown faces or
hands. Ms. Purkey, who is Asian-American
and a 15-year veteran of the industry, said
she had worked at some of the biggest com-
panies in scrapbooking and “never worked
with a Black co-worker anywhere, in any
company.”
Ms. Jarrett, who is Black, said she began
scrapbooking about seven years ago be-
cause she wanted to document the birth of
her third daughter, and a traditional baby
book wasn’t quite her style.
She discovered a style of documenting
called pocket scrapbooking and, she said,
she “hasn’t looked back.” (Pocket scrap-
booking involves using plastic protectors
that are divided into segments to showcase
cards, photos and ephemera of different
sizes.)Ms. Jarrett’s profile in the scrapbooking
world began to rise as she posted some of
her spreads onto Instagram, where albums,
layouts, process videos and tutorials prolif-
erate.
“I just wanted to share a different per-
spective,” Ms. Jarrett said. “You know,
someone brown.”
Ms. Jarrett became known for her min-
imalist style, but she said that was partly
out of necessity. A page from her scrapbook
was recently shared by someone else on In-
stagram to highlight Black scrapbookers;
on that page, she’d used a stamp depicting
women’s faces and had colored the faces
brown herself.
Seeing her own work again, Ms. Jarrett
said, made her realize: “I didn’t think twice
about having to paint a brown face, because
that’s how I move through the world.”
“I want something that’s reflective of
me,” she said. So she recently released her
own Black Lives Matter stamps and cards
for pocket scrapbooking. One depicts a
woman with curly hair; another says, sim-
ply, “melanin.”
Scrapbooking design teams for the big
crafting companies are often made up of a
handful of high-profile customers who, for a
period of a few months or a year, receive
products before the general public. In ex-
change, they are typically encouraged to
post layouts on social media sites or on their
blogs, if they still have those.
In early July, American Crafts, a Utah
company that oversees about a dozen
scrapbooking brands, announced its new-
est design team — about a dozen women, all
seemingly white.
Lydia Diaz, a crafter and lifestyle vlogger,
called the exclusion “a huge letdown.”“When it comes to how ignored and how
invisible we can feel as Black people in
America, and the crafting community is one
small slice of the pie, and even there, we’re
not represented,” she said on Instagram.
“There are so many amazingly talented and
creative Black people thinking outside the
box, doing big things in this community, and
you wouldn’t know it if you were looking at
some of these large crafting brands. You
wouldn’t see our work, you wouldn’t see our
hands on the table holding a craft we just
made, you wouldn’t see our faces smiling in
one of their online courses, you wouldn’t see
us on the ambassador team.”
American Crafts apologized and re-
moved the post, adding that it would soon
add more Black women to its team. In late
July, Ms. Gordon and a longtime scrap-
booker named Victoria Calvin were added,
as well as several other women of color and
a man. The company did not respond to a
request for comment.Exclusion Is Bad for Business
Throughout generations, all types of people
have kept photo albums, commonplace
books and scrapbooks, including free Black
people and former slaves who documented
the Civil War and their postwar lives.
But scrapbooking boomed as an industry
in the late 1990s with the help of companies
like Creative Memories, in Minnesota,
which hosted Tupperware-style parties for
scrapbooking all across Midwestern sub-
urbs.
Ms. Purkey recalled that she started
scrapbooking after attending one of those
parties as a child. “Those parties and the
scrapbook stores back then were all in these
nice, rich suburbs,” she said. “It was all forthese rich suburban women.”
The scrapbooking industry also has ties
to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, which has a well-documented his-
tory of relegating Black members to sec-
ond-class status until the late 1970s.
Mormons, as part of their faith practice,
prioritize documenting family history and
genealogy. In the 1970s, a Mormon woman
named Marielen Christensen from Spanish
Fork, Utah, began showcasing the way she
preserved photos and written stories at
record-keeping conferences. In particular,
she pushed the use of binders and more du-
rable materials, like acid-free papers, that
would lead to better scrapbook preserva-
tion.
In 1981, she opened Keeping Memories
Alive, a shop and mail-order catalog dedi-
cated to helping others document their fam-
ilies’ stories, and it became a destination for
scrapbookers. Other stores copied the mod-
el, and within about 10 years, scrapbooking
was a full-on craze.
Through the decades — and with the pro-
liferation of digital cameras, then higher-
resolution camera phones and social media
platforms where scrapbookers began shar-
ing their work — the craft inevitably made it
to a broader audience of people who enjoy
playing with paper, stickers and stamps.
Today, social media plays a significant
role in fueling the idea of who scrapbookers
are, but status is signaled by which
customers are chosen to be on the rotating
company design teams. It’s rare to see a de-
sign team with more than one person of col-
or on it.
“There are some days where that’s a lot to
carry, being a visible person of color in a
community that” doesn’t seem diverse,“like, at all,” Ms. Gordon said. “And then
there’s some days where it just feels like a
badge of honor, because if I can get women
who didn’t think that this community was
open to them, or if I could just get somebody
else to tell their own story, then I feel like I
did my job that day.”
Before starting her own company, Ms.
Purkey had been on a number of design
teams. When she broke out on her own, she
said, she wasn’t specifically thinking about
guaranteeing diversity as a cornerstone in
building her own teams, but it happened or-
ganically.
“I didn’t think about, necessarily, diversi-
ty, but I knew I wanted people represented,”
Ms. Purkey said. “Like I knew I had Asian
customers. I knew I had, you know, moms of
boys. It wasn’t specifically about race. It
was just like making sure that we were kind
of showing examples for everybody that
shopped in my store.”
After Ms. Jarrett (who has been on one of
Ms. Purkey’s design teams) released her
own scrapbooking cards and stamps with a
Black Lives matter theme this summer, she
said she was surprised when so many peo-
ple voiced their support.
“So many people reached out to me or in
my DMs, and on Instagram to say: ‘Hey,
thank you for this. Scrapbooking is always
seen as such a white craft, so it’s good to see
other products,’ ” Ms. Jarrett said. “I just —
I’m floored, I’m happy to see other women
of all races document these stories and that
they matter.”
She wasn’t surprised, though, that her
Black Lives Matter stamp and Brown Girl
stamp set have sold out. “There is clearly a
market for these types of products,” Ms.
Jarrett said.Above, a scrapbook by Tazhiana Gordon, who showed more of her pages in front of the Brooklyn Museum, below. Azzari Jarrett, seated below, worked on a pocket scrapbook at home in Wilmington, N.C.
JEENAH MOON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESCONTINUED FROM PAGE D1
In a Pinterest Era, Paper Still Has Power
Ms. Jarrett’s Black Lives
Matter stamps, top. “I want
something that’s reflective of
me,” she said. Ms. Gordon said
that her scrapbooks, above,
celebrated her Blackness and
that she wanted to help others
“tell their own story.”‘I’m happy to see other women of all races document these stories and that they matter.’
KATE MEDLEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESJEENAH MOON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES