Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Coming to Terms with Memory
- 1 The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
- 2 Remembering to Forget: Democratizing Memory, Nietzschean Forgetting, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- 3 Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
- 4 Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
- 5 Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory
- 6 In Memory of Democratic Time: Specters of Mexico's Past and Democracy's Future
- 7 The Future of the Past: Unholy Ghosts and Redemptive Possibilities
- 8 Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
3 - Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Coming to Terms with Memory
- 1 The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
- 2 Remembering to Forget: Democratizing Memory, Nietzschean Forgetting, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- 3 Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
- 4 Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
- 5 Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory
- 6 In Memory of Democratic Time: Specters of Mexico's Past and Democracy's Future
- 7 The Future of the Past: Unholy Ghosts and Redemptive Possibilities
- 8 Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I learned to believe in freedom, to glow when the word democracy was used, and to practice slavery from morning till night.
—Lillian SmithNo whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness.
—William Carlos WilliamsWhat happened to the Negro … is not simply a matter of my memory and my history, but of American history and memory. [For] the history the Negro endured … was endured … by all the white people who oppressed him. … I was here, and that did something to me. But you were here on top of me, and that did something to you.
—James BaldwinIn 1935 W. E. B. Du Bois argued that American segregated society relied on a segregated memory. By “searing” the public memory of African American struggle, white supremacist historiography had “obliterated” the black experience. The tourniquet of racist power that prevented black history from bleeding into the story of America's birth and growth stems from the nation's unmasterable slave past. In 1951 James Baldwin contended that this erasure makes Americans heirs to a “dangerous and reverberating silence” that is “the inevitable result of things unsaid.” When Barack Obama gave his revealing speech on race in America, he juxtaposed what he called “the white immigrant” story with the memories aired in black barbershops and beauty salons.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics , pp. 60 - 64Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013