Public disremembering of historic wrongs trades collective unity for minority silence.
Evidence
As I suggested a few chapters ago, disremembering involves active forgetting. 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’ as active forgetting that leaves inheritors of historic wounds vulnerable.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s ongoing definitional task of locating the value gap and racial habits as distinct from prejudice. — connects to: Public art revitalizes community by giving voice to silenced groups — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1822; Elite public silence helped segregationist defiance escalate in Charlotte. — Matthew D. Lassiter, The Suburban Origins of “Color-Blind”…, 57