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January 31, 2024

What happens when we collectively forget?

My friend Kerri Kelly, years ago, said something that still haunts me, that the antonym of "remember" is "dismember" – to sever, to fragment, to tear apart. We see that, here, in these attempts to downplay accurate history. And it’s a violent act; if forced exploitation and systemic violence literally dismembers communities, the systematic erasure of our past serves to dismember our collective consciousness, our shared understanding of where we've been and where we need to go.

The cognitive dissonance is evident online – consider posts fact-checking threads about basic historical events like the Holocaust, heated debates over what constitutes "appropriate" classroom content, and viral videos of school board meetings erupting over books depicting two male penguin parents. Meanwhile, Meta moves away from fact-checking and our president makes wild, bold-faced lies – like DEI is responsible for a plane crash – even as he acknowledged that he had no evidence. All of this creates a kind of digital fog where even the most well-documented truths, past and present, become somehow debatable.

This year's Black History Month theme is African Americans and Labor, “focusing on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree.” And what an urgent call for reflection, as the labor movement grows, from warehouse workers to tech employees challenging the status quo. We’ve got to remember where we started to contextualize this progress, and continue to rally for safety and equity.

Intellectuals and organizers have always placed remembering as a tool for resistance and healing. W.E.B. Du Bois understood that shared memories of both struggle and achievement help maintain cultural identity and pride. When he documented Black historical figures and events often excluded from mainstream narratives, he wasn't just recording history – he was providing tools for resistance.

Then there’s Toni Morrison's notion of "rememory" – the idea that historical trauma lives on in places and bodies across generations. In Beloved, when she writes about the ghost of slavery haunting contemporary America, she's not speaking metaphorically. We see this inheritance in everything from healthcare disparities to the racial wealth gap, making the act of remembering itself a form of defiance against erasure. We’re reading another classic text by Morrison – “The Bluest Eye” – for Banned Books Book Club’s February read. Join us here!

bell hooks pushed this further, arguing that confronting painful memories – rather than suppressing them – is essential for both personal and community healing.

Contemporary scholar Christina Sharpe offers perhaps the most nuanced approach through her concept of "wake work" – the practice of keeping alive memories of racial violence while simultaneously celebrating Black joy, creativity, and resistance. This balanced remembering prevents the reduction of Black history to trauma alone, while still acknowledging the weight of historical injustice.

As we witness growing labor movements and necessary conversations about workers' rights unfolding across industries, remembering where we came from becomes not just practice but strategy. Without these practices of remembering, how can we document ongoing injustice? How can we maintain community bonds or create spaces for healing? How can we imagine liberation without understanding the chains?

Let’s reimagine Black History Month, and every other holiday or commemoration, as a moment to exercise our remembering muscles. Our future begins in our archives, and we can’t get to tomorrow without honoring the progress and pitfalls of yesterday.