Active forgetting distorts a people’s self-understanding as it blunts pain

Evidence

Disremembering enables the characters in the novel to ward off, temporarily, the pain of past events. Disremembering blots out horrible loss, but it also distorts who the characters take themselves to be. Something is lost. It is this sense of the word that strikes me as particularly useful for our current moment. Disremembering is active forgetting. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 123

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines disremembering as active forgetting, distinct from passive forgetting — a precise concept for the value gap.
• XREF: connects to: Absorbed activity makes pain present yet un-noticed until reflection.; All science and technique rest on forgetting the suffering they overcome — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 212; Reification results from forgetting the pain nature inflicts under domination — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 804