Pay Attention When They Tell You To Forget

When Natasha Trethewey’s maternal grandmother housed visiting white missionaries—in a region of North Gulfport, Mississippi, originally founded by former slaves—white residents threatened to bomb the local church and Bible camp in retaliation. Some burned a cross in the driveway of the home in which young Trethewey was sleeping. “In my grandmother’s house,” Trethewey explains, “the act of remembering … was meant to ensure my future safety, protection gained through knowledge and the vigilance it brings.”

Martha S. Jones’s great-great-grandmother Susan Davis was born in 1840, knew enslavement, and became politically active upon her freedom. Davis’s daughter, Fannie Miller Williams, was an educator and voting-rights activist. In 1889 she was physically assaulted by a local marshal when she sat in the white section of a Kentucky theater.

Claudia Rankine tracks how she herself navigates the fallout of white supremacy in contemporary encounters. She connects subtle and overt impulses toward “conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect, and abuse,” like being stepped in front of in line or cut off in a discussion. She analyses how her white peers’ reactions to these encounters illustrate a form of whiteness that relies on inattention, “defending itself from my knowledge of our shared history to the point of becoming ahistorical.”

What binds these authors and their three most recent works together? Perhaps the answer is best summed up by something Trethewey recently urged during a talk: “Pay attention to what they tell you to forget.”¹

Each of these books illuminates ways in which amnesia, whether it be personal or national, is debilitating; the act of remembering, as Trethewey put it, is essential. As such, these three authors and their many protagonists make visible the omnipresent but often disremembered means by which anti-Black violence—how it is perpetrated, navigated, and resisted—has been the central, relentless dynamic of United States history.

In Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, Trethewey offers a personal narrative of loss that enjoins readers to remember larger-scale traumas of American history. In Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, Jones’s kaleidoscopic study of Black women’s politics, she recovers many of the unsung leaders central to our national story who have been obscured in the historical record: figures like Hallie Quinn Brown, whose own 1926 book, on Black women’s leadership, was meant to help us “cleave more tenaciously to the truth.” Finally, in Just Us: An American Conversation, Rankine interrogates contemporary discourse, from social-media dialogue to sociology research, to reflect on whiteness as a form of institutionalized forgetting that impacts how we recollect ourselves and others.

While their genres are distinct, the books are in conversation, parsing a collective American history too often obfuscated by nostalgia and amnesia. As these authors illuminate how the past continues to bear on the present, they encourage us to think about how a clear-eyed reckoning with history could shape the future. In so doing, these three books indirectly address an existential question that Jones has posed when discussing her work: What kind of ancestors do we want to be?²