Disremembering restricts permissible narratives of racism to protect national innocence

Evidence

Our silence about the suffering throughout the country conspires with injustice. People who have suffered from past wrongdoings and present failings find it difficult, if not impossible, to call attention to their suffering when a precondition for American civic life is that only certain events can be recalled and must be recalled in certain ways. We have to talk about racism in a certain way. Dr. King is the model. We have to invoke love and nonviolence. Talk of white supremacy isn’t allowed. We have to talk about poverty in a certain way. “Ladders of opportunity” are better than redistributive economic policies or what some call “class warfare.” To ignore this is to risk being accused of trading in victim talk or, worse, to be declared “not one of us”—a traitor. The primary purpose of disremembering is to hide from view the value gap and to protect our national innocence: to keep the ugliness of our deeds at arm’s length or buried deep in our national subconscious. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 129

Categorization

• DEFINE: Glaude here operationalizes ‘disremembering’-the forced code of how racism and poverty may be spoken about-as the mechanism that shields the value gap.