Active forgetting of blackness sustains twenty-first-century white supremacy

Evidence

But there is the idea, and it has been a feature of postwar American liberalism since the beginning of the Cold War, that the price of wholesale inclusion in this society is that we actively forget we are black people—that we become just Americans while white people continue to benefit from being white. The irony, of course, is that the active forgetting—the disremembering—is one of the crucial ways white supremacy in the twenty-first century sustains itself. And black liberalism has helped it stay alive. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 436

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The ‘disremembering’ mechanism echoes how Glaude’s value gap operates silently; connects to post-Obama assessments of racial progress as illusion.

Related

• Forgetting blackness is the price of inclusion and sustains white supremacy (similarity 0.94)
• Active forgetting distorts a people’s self-understanding as it blunts pain (similarity 0.80)
• Disremembering exists to hide the value gap and protect national innocence (similarity 0.80)
• Public disremembering of historic wrongs trades collective unity for minority silence. (similarity 0.79)
• White-liberal concern for forgotten Americans masks identity-politics dismissal (similarity 0.78)
• Racial progress coexists with persistent white supremacist structuring (similarity 0.78)
• Active forgetting of the past shapes and distorts present identity (similarity 0.78)
• Contemporary black liberalism demands a price that reinforces white supremacy’s racial habits. (similarity 0.78)
• Modern conservatism abandoned explicit white supremacy for color-blind individualism (similarity 0.78)