Collective forgetting of historic wrongs demands silence from the wounded

Evidence

Societies disremember all the time; in fact, it seems to be an intimate part of collective memory itself. Societies bury the historic wrongs that lie beneath their feet and tend to remember their heroes and heroines minus the darker sides of their characters. But disremembering historic wrongs leaves vulnerable those among us who are the inheritors of historic wounds, who still bear the scars of past collective deeds (for example, those who once possessed these lands, the descendants of ex-slaves, of forced migrant laborers, and a host of others). Public disremembering, in these instances, amounts to a special offer: if we all join in the collective forgetting, no matter the vested interests that call us to forget in the first place, we make possible a shared sense of destiny. But that sense of shared destiny almost always comes at too high of a cost: our silence and invisibility. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 277

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines disremembering precisely — active forgetting as an intimate part of collective memory — and ties it to the value gap’s harm.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘special offer’ framing — shared destiny bought at the cost of the descendants’ silence — is a dense, nuanced mechanism worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Art commemorating past violence must also fight the slower violence of forgetting. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 772