Remembering after Great Forgetting
I wrote most of this a few years ago. It is the first in a series of raw posts I’ll be making about what it can mean to be white at this time on the clock of the world in the place called the United States of America.
I was not raised with any awareness of being white, male, heterosexual, or privileged. I can say this with confidence as I reflect on the experience of my own son who I’ve actively raised in a way that he is aware of these identities and many more — including a complicated one we call American.
I think my first moments of racial awareness came when a close friend who was Black was targeted with KKK writing on his locker and someone called him “nigger” on the basketball court in middle school.
Digging deeper . . . I think that’s not really the root of it. Maybe my first exposure to race and racism was watching North and South, the miniseries on TV, with my family (which was a big deal in my life at the time). Watching TV was a “before” experience where my friend’s experience was current, lived, witnessed.
I had several other friends of color — some Black and many Latino, but their lived realities of Apache Junction, Arizona in the late 80’s and early 90’s were not something I had any real awareness of. Or I could just say — a lack of racial awareness permeated my life growing up in the Arizona Southwest.
My parents and family had no words or insights, or at least it seemed to me, about privilege, oppression, or systemic forces tipped toward injustice. I certainly had the belief, unconscious, that I and my family had earned what we had. And that rang true because of the story of my father growing up “dirt poor” in West Virginia in a town of 900 people. And, to be clear, that isn’t a made up story.
Both my mom and my dad’s family history, as it relates to race, went mostly undiscussed.
There were provocative moments etched in my psyche, to be sure, like when, at 10 years of age, a great uncle who was warm and generous to me showed me his KKK card with pride in West Virginia. Or when at 16 years of age a great aunt shouted at a interracial couple from her porch while I sat snapping peas. The history, the details, any larger understanding or analysis was left undiscussed, untouched, forgotten.
On my mother’s side, what I knew until recently was that my great grandmother came to Arizona via train from Alabama after her husband had died.
Through cherished inquiries with my mom, aunt, grandma, and daughters, I’ve come to learn of my family’s settling in Tallasee, Alabama where, over generations, they were sharecroppers, land owners, and slave holders. Online records have led to the painful and clear-eyed reality of the selling of black people by my ancestors. Family owned slaves became employed Black sharecroppers and “help” as laws changed. This isn’t a special story — but somehow tracing the actual story and getting to the actual names of people and places has a power that abstraction and historical fiction do not.
There is more to the stories of both my parents and my larger family. Stories of resistance, of change, heartache, and grief. The stories of my parents, my aunts and uncles, and my grandparents are worthy of more of my own attention. I share what I have so far as an opening because it informs one way white folks seem to show up to the world of Whiteness and White Supremacy in the U.S.
To borrow a phrase from Daniel Quinn, a Great Forgetting has been the dominant reality for whites in the U.S. This Great Forgetting is a personal forgetting. It is a family-by-family phenomenon where stories of settler colonialism, racism, and white supremacy go undiscussed or unnamed.
This may be privilege, it may be survival, it certainly isn’t a new concept — but it might help white folks grappling with the Remembering that continually calls for our attention. In my work with other white folks, it is uncovering and naming specific stories where the wells of emotion and pain can be found and that can help us get our minds around what can otherwise be treated and experienced as abstract, intellectual, and even elite concepts about privilege and power.
The trance of Whiteness in America continues to lift, with shuddering, real danger, and real harm. Somehow — getting to the actual stories — informed by pain — takes white folks to places that are hard to reach.
Remembering is happening daily for thousands — maybe millions of white folks. It’s an ugly wake-up process. The promise of a brighter and healthier future for all of us — including us white folks — rests in our ability to get real with each other and our history.
