When History Won’t Quit
I keep trying to start the same essay. And I kinda hate it. Not the essay, but the trying which Ross Gay tells me is the origin of the word, from the French essai, to try. But it’s maybe not even the trying so much as the feeling prodded to try. Again and again and again. I’m annoyed, restless and irritable. Why? Because it’s history. Again. Fricking history banging on my door again, yelling “You awake? You up yet?”
I hate this.
In the next-to-last essay in my book, Care At The Core (2019), I tried to make peace with History (capital H, now). I admitted my previous reluctance in school and then as an adult to immerse myself in the study of History. Yes, I resisted, I was ignorant, I’m trying to right my ways. I suppose I wanted to say, sorry. Sorry that I waited so long to appreciate what History had in store for me. I admitted:
History has come for me after all. Neither gently nor quietly. History has refused to take a back seat in my intellectual pursuits. She demands my attention, focused study and application to the here and now…Although I played hooky from History before, I am absolutely here for it now.” — “History Calling,” p. 197
Wasn’t that enough?
Turns out, sure. For then. But this is a different now with a different urgency.
I keep thinking about this tweet:
History is radicalizing! That’s precisely the History that is banging on my door these days, relentlessly. And everywhere I go (while reading) this truth keeps showing up, stalking me. Literally this morning I picked up Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979; Headline Edition 2018) and began reading the foreword by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ in which she says: “…our present lives are shaped by history in ways we cannot afford to ignore. The past isn’t as distant as we often think, we carry it in our scars, our bones and the blood that flows in our veins.” The day before I commented on seeing my mother’s hands in my own as I age, noting “[Our] hands hold the past without even trying.”
Through an exquisite talk to his history students on the last day of school, Jonathan Gold attempts to answer the question: “What Can History Class Offer?” Back when I was as young as his students are now, I would have suggested “not much.” History in school was always someone else’s show, a series of a few groups dominating other groups: war, war, treaty, The Church!, war, treaty, trade, trade, production, war, war, famine, loss, recovery, trade, war, war, peace. A steady parade of men and weapons, conquest and disaster, progress, progress, progress, “life is so much better as a result.” I never had the tools to take those ideas apart; I didn’t even know history could be taken apart.
Jonathan Gold puts the study of History clearly into the context of his students’ now:
But as we’ve seen, whose knowledge counts and whose doesn’t is about power. Why don’t we know?
Protesters are currently engaged in a struggle to assert a more accurate, more expansive version of America’s history. They are trying to change what people know — and how we decide what counts as knowledge. “Black lives matter” means in part black experience matters, black knowledge matters.
The notion of changing “what people know” gets stuck in my hair. It’s a powerful idea that also gives me a headache. Because once you know more, you, I mean, actually I, am compelled to do better.
Which is to say, knowing more means I have to change myself, change my behavior in a way that accounts for that new understanding.
There are so many reasons for individuals as well as institution not to want that. To not want to confront the effort and messiness that change requires. Avoiding fundamental change is what a society built on serial and stacked oppression to the benefit of a shrinking ruling class does best. We are raised believing that reforms and tweaks of the existing systems — education, health care, criminal justice, environmental protections, etc.— will suffice. That these will move us safely along without tipping the scales towards actually meeting the acute and vast needs of the majority.
Meanwhile, The Current Moment™ has grabbed us by the lapels and shaken us to the core. A global pandemic ushering in a crippling economic downturn, another police killing of an unarmed Black man captured on video and circulated worldwide — these as a backdrop against which we process the mass Black Lives Matter protests across the US and the world. What? How is all of this concurrently possible?
Remember 2016? In his essay, “Searching For A New Kind of Optimism,” Hanif Abdurraqib wrote:
Yes, without question, 2016 was a year that dragged on more heavily than most before it. It felt exhausting, and like it would never end. But all past logic was pulling us toward that breaking point: a year that finally pushed us to the edge. And all logic in this moment points to another year that might not feel quite as long but will surely be just as trying.
I have been thinking then, about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety. — From They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio 2017), p. 81
We struggle in so many ways to be and remain present to the harshness of what is while acknowledging the push and pull of historical patterns that have brought us these particular circumstances. Our reliance on digital platforms for news and views coupled with the pace of consumption these platforms encourage, further exacerbate our capacity to register the great interconnectedness of things when all we see/are shown is fragmentation. Curious to note how my particular assortment of fragments keeps pointing me back to history.
I get a hint of hope when I listen to abolitioninst and geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore in conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika talk about what we know of past efforts to create a new way of life that is community-minded and concerned with the welfare of the greater good:
…what we’re trying to do in thinking with so many people in so many places about abolition, is how can it be possible to realize a new way of being, given what it is we already know how to do. We can look back through history or around the world now and see, for example, as Du Bois taught us in “Black Reconstruction in America,” that post-Civil War communities in the South developed all kinds of institutions for well-being and opportunity and safety that did not rely on organized violence, but rather we’re opening up to the possibility of greater and greater freedom through the institution of such things as public education, and so on.
Looking back has not been the direction I tend to turn my eyes in search of hope. Especially not here, not now where those who aim to “Make America Great Again” fathom a world with few to no Black people in it, or if Blacks must be present, then certainly not with any sense of democratic agency. And yet, Ruth Wilson Gilmore dares us to look at what was achieved (briefly) by and among our Black ancestors after the Civil War. That history can be hard to come by in school. But it throws into the spotlight critical questions we need to ask: Whose history is taught? Who chooses? Whose stories are highlighted? Whose struggles are kept in the shadows? Questions are tools for prying history apart, for surfacing the stories of those with less power.
What can History offer you and me? Ways of seeing, ways of examining, ways of building knowledge. History’s very personal banging at my door may be unique, while my annoyance reflects a natural resistance to the strain and effort of growth. I suspect that the process of radicalization rarely runs smoothly. Laying claim to the tools of investigation, putting our hands on the crowbar to pry open the lid on suppressed narratives — there are real reasons not to share this knowledge too widely or generously, if you are reliant on the status quo to remain in power. Mass radicalization (as we are seeing) is a real threat to the standing order.
It also relieves me enormously to recognize that I can access history through multiple means: podcasts, documentaries, oral histories; in art, music and dance. Reading has been my go-to but it has also kept me in a very academic frame when thinking about history. I can learn history by talking to people; by wondering with my 12 year old about a name, a story, a painting. For so long I struggled to see the possibilities in history. I was so preoccupied with not being caught. But in this moment it finally makes perfect sense to me to turn around and face history. Not all of it at once, but in doses that allow me to process and make the connections. This, I can do: Face what was to better recognize the patterns comprising what is.
History: *knocking softly now* You about ready?
Me: Just about. Be down in a minute.
