What We Won’t Remember

“White privilege is the ability to enact memory laws that institutionalize denialism by prohibiting the recounting of any history that makes Euroamericans feel uncomfortable.”

— Miguel A. De La Torre, Resisting Apartheid America: Living the Badass Gospel

I’ve had so many feelings since I wrapped the first season of Curious Roots. The podcast is the first public expression of my personal journey to understanding who I am through my ancestors. It is part of my own ongoing deep healing and deprogramming from systemically imposed settler-colonial culture.

I’m so thankful to everyone who has listened to the podcast so far. I hope that sharing my own process, out in the light, will help other folks who are journeys to recover their own cultures, cosmologies, and ways of being. White identity extremists committed to the lie of supremacy are hard at work trying to convince the world that the (his)stories of Black people should not exist.

If the attempts to outright erase our history weren’t awful enough, there are the efforts to alter our histories by rubbing out the spots that chafe a demographic who refuses to do the hard work of healing themselves by healing the harms their ancestors caused and choosing a new way of being in in the world that doesn’t include oppression. Learning to come to terms with the ugliest parts of themselves and their histories instead of trying to hide them is a great place to start.

The Guardian has a fantastic series called Cotton Capital that airs out the history of Britain’s involvement with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The series features a story about the Gullah Geechee by DeNeen L. Brown called White Gold from Black Hands: The Gullah Geechee Fight for a Legacy After Slavery and an illuminating piece from Gary Younge called How Britain Buried Its History of Slavery where Younge speaks directly this infrastructure of historical forgetting. In the article he writes:

“The principal issue here is not facts or a lack of knowledge. The most salient facts about slavery and colonialism are not seriously in dispute. What we conventionally call “forgetting,” or even “amnesia,” is really nothing of the sort. Nations are not individuals; they do not suffer from memory loss as they age. This is not a medical condition, but a political one: the wilful and selective process of sifting and filtering to find the memories that fit the narrative you are committed to, and excising, negating and delegitimising those that contradict it. This is how nations construct their own histories. They are made more than they are remembered.”

The pattern to the architecture of intentional forgetting is picked up by scholar and theologian Miguel A. De La Torre in chapter four of his fantastic book Resisting Apartheid America: Living the Badass Gospel (shoutout to the Straight White American Jesus podcast for turning me onto his work!). In this fourth chapter called Celebrating Ignorance, De La Torre says “One often hears we should speak truth to power. But power already knows the truth; they simply choose to ignore truth to maintain their unearned status in society by silencing any contradiction to their worldview.”

No matter the method, these attempts to erase the histories of Black people (and people of the global majority and LGBTQIA people writ large) are profound in their violence. The legacy of this violence is recorded on the pages of the historical documents I gather along my journey. Even as these documented pieces of the past help me to piece together a view of my ancestors lived experiences, there’s no escaping the horrific truths they also reveal. What helps me to metabolize the rancid energies of these harms is paying attention to the clues my ancestors left behind in these documents.

I experience it as a process of inhaling, breathing through the words and the images that activate my nervous system so that I can release that energy in a cleansing breath. Tempering my body and breathing through creates the space to truly hear my ancestors voices calling out from the cold banality of the bureaucratic ledgers that catalogued them with less regard than when they tallied animals.

When I found my 5th Great grandfather Mark Baisden’s name on a Reconstruction era voting registration book, I had such a clear picture of a man ready to access the tools of enfranchisement to begin his family and community’s life anew. There must have been something hopeful in that moment for him and his son Mark Jr. to show up and have their names counted. The long list of names on that oath book let me know that other men in the community where also taking that possibility of democratic power in their hands. According to our resident research and genealogist Terri Ward, Black leaders like Tunis Campbell helped McIntosh County build a powerful Black voter block during this Reconstruction period.

That political power held for a long time, before the Northern Republican politicians allowed Confederates traitors to complete their sabotage years of the Black community rebuilding itself after being held in bondage. Every piece of documentation fills in the picture of incredibly creative, vibrant, talented and strong people who persisted in carving out lives of freedom on their own terms in the face of unspeakable violence.

The more I share the story of my family with others, the more I realize how little we know about each other. It also becomes clear how much there is to learn. Our family, community and personal stories are bound to the larger histories fascist forces desperately want to repress. The simple act of learning more about who you are is powerful. Publicly sharing what you learn is even more powerful. People of the global majority must continue to resist these attacks by sharing our stories together in communities of support, solidarity, and healing.