Black memory collapses past and present betrayals into one trauma

Evidence

But many black people did not forget, and carried that sense of history experienced in the moment when something triggers the recollection that collapses past and present. History and time blur as the traumas of the present call forward a litany of past betrayals. Slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, police killings, prisons, black ghettos, failed schools, and the people and politicians who sanctioned it all packed into one pile of American shit. This is what the late poet Amiri Baraka called, in his classic work Blues People, “the changing same”—that sense of alienation rooted in terror and trauma, which remains no matter the shifts and permutations in our lives, and is exacerbated by the country’s forgetfulness. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 456

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains ‘the changing same’ (Baraka) as the persistent trauma that national forgetfulness only compounds.
• XREF: connects to: The sheer volume of trauma erases event intention and interpretation. — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 3276; Living memory of expulsion decays and must be replaced by institutional commemoration — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 957; Black fear of betrayal pairs with white fear of exposure