thinking about confederate monuments and the role they play in shaping southern memory and the words of english dramatist harold pinter come to mind:

“the past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember.”

confederate monuments have given white southerners a fictionalized past to hold onto.

that’s why they’re fighting so hard against their removal.

without manufactured memory, southern white folk will be forced to reckon with the very real implications of southern history.

In order for a historical narrative to acquire cultural authority, it must be believable to its audience.

this is the work of the theater of white supremacy in a nutshell, folks.

the work of white supremacy is to assign the value of black lives and the ongoing destruction of black lives into eternal oblivion.

our collective memory, informed by white supremacy, is the culmination of memories willfully recalled and and memories deliberately forgotten.

don’t believe me? we are witnessing it now. the RNC was a spectacle of forgetting the damage done by covid. the lack of masks, social distancing was all done for the benefit of inducing in the public a state of forgetting the impact of covid.

our cultural memory is currently being shaped. we are being asked to misremember the root of of the BLM protests.

we are being gaslit into underestimating the destruction of this pandemic.

this is the work of white supremacy. happening here. happening now. in real time.

the work of authoritarians and fascists is, precisely, the business of forgetting.

will you remember?