remembering and not remembering: slavery

"When the Civil War ended, there were no truth and reconciliation commissions formed to process memories, no Nuremberg Trials to enable reflection, no Great Emancipator to free the future from the past — only ghosts and the ravenous politics of memory. The need for national reckoning was quickly subordinated to the political imperative of reunification, and on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, forgetting became more valuable than remembering. "

This from Peter Birkenhead on Slate.  He reflects on his visit to various landmark-esque sites in the American South--living  history museums, restaurants, bed & breakfasts--where the existence of slavery was not mentioned.  It is a long piece well worth reading for its insight into our deliberate national forgetting and inability to come to terms with our collective past.  It is also worth reading for its consideration of the more general matter of how we are all always connected to the past regardless of how well (accurately, wisely, or otherwise) we remember it.  He recalls his youthful nostalgia for decades prior to his own, including his trench coat and tattered copy of On the Road, as an entry to shining some light on the difference between nostalgia and authentic historical memory.

If America is a family, it’s a family that has tacitly agreed to never speak again — not with much honesty, anyway — about the terrible things that went on in its divided house. Slavery has been taught, it has been written about. There can’t be many subjects that rival it as an academic ink-guzzler. But the culture has not digested slavery in a meaningful way, hasn’t absorbed it the way it has World War II or the Kennedy assassination. We don’t feel the connections to it in our bones. It’s hard enough these days to connect with what happened 15 minutes ago, let alone 15 decades, given the endless layers of “classic,” “heirloom,” “traditional” “collectible,” “old school” comfort we’re swaddled in. But isn’t it the least we could do? What is the willful forgetting of slavery if not the coverup of a crime, an abdication of responsibility to its victims and to ourselves?

If it’s true that we’re all breathing Caesar’s breath — that because of the finite amount of perpetually moving molecules on Earth, one or two that he breathed are in each of our exhalations — then we don’t need to dress up in his clothes to connect ourselves to the past, we’re already wearing them. The past is with us always, but we need to live with it, open our eyes and poke around in it, take it all in: the good, the bad and the mythic, if we want to stay connected to the ever-changing present.