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• W3136393756 abstract "You stand in line, waiting to go through the metal detector, feeling the warmth of the late Southern spring day, sun shining on the green grass in the distance and, above, deep blue sky. Colleagues stand nearby; you are visiting the Equal Justice Initiative’s Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, known vernacularly as the “Lynching Memorial,” and the affiliated Legacy Museum, as part of a field site visit for the Ethnography Division at the Southern States Communication Association’s annual convention. The memorial starts with a history lesson via signage on the South’s defeat in the U.S. Civil War, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, the “bitter resistance to racial equality,”1 and—the memorial’s main claim—that “continued support for white supremacy and racial hierarchy meant that slavery in America did not end—it evolved.”2* * *“Montgomery, a city shaped by slavery.”3* * *The first installation stands in the hot Alabama sun, a grouping of life-sized statues, the black stone depicting enslaved Africans, men and women, nearly naked and barefoot, shackled by ankle and wrist chains, whip marks on their backs, some kneeling, some standing, some reaching. One figure is a muscular man, bare skinned, standing defiantly, a chain around his neck. His eyes stare into yours, accusing, questioning. You have no answer to his questions. You have many of your own.* * *The main part of the memorial is across the manicured lawn, an open steel structure holding coffin-shaped rectangular boxes suspended from the ceiling. It’s not until you are inside that you see the inscriptions on the boxes—county and state, list of names and dates, representing Africans and African Americans killed by racial lynchings in that county and the dates they died. The box plates are made of steel, now different shades of reddish brown from oxidation. You walk through the open building, past steel and steel and steel. Anson County, North Carolina John Boggan 07.03.1885As you walk, the ground shifts, abruptly, but you continue to shuffle forward. You are below the steel boxes and you gaze up at their forms hanging above your head. In the distance, flowers bloom from bloodstained soil, an eerie contradiction of life and death. You are reminded that “the color of our skin tethers us to the past.”4 You close your eyes and are transported back in time.* * *In front of you, the wall is crying shades of brown. Red rust stains the ground at your feet.Images of interpersonal and systemic violence mix with white guilt and privilege. Words fail. The experience is more visceral than mental; you feel the pain in your body, you feel the pain in your heart.* * *We are four scholars, female and White, here to connect with and understand the crushing hatred and cruelty in this place and in this country, in our world. In this paper, we use poetic inquiry as method because poetry lets us get to the essence of meaning and understanding; it provides a vehicle through which all of us, authors and readers, can come to terms with our own emotional responses to the experience. At the conference, we write a collaborative poem to express the unexpressable, and to connect our conversations at a deep level of meaning. We want to evoke the power of the site, and poetic inquiry is an embodied re-presentation of reality that can help us question and discover and reveal, see humanity and inhumanity, challenge dominant discourses, shed light in the dark corners of life, and engage us in dialogue with multiple and complicated truths. Poetry can be a tool for social justice through enlarging understanding and engaging emotions. Poetry is an active response to social inequities.5 This paper is a haibun, a writing form originating from Japan that combines prose with poetry6.* * * “Is this like a maze?” “Yes, precious one, it is.” Lives mattered then, and they matter now.Burdened, silenced, burdened, heavy; I want to beg for mercy. Blood. Tears. Water.* * *Remembering what is painful, hurtful, and unjust is not easy, but it is necessary. To live in denial of past wrongs is to disavow ourselves of responsibility in addressing relentless and unrequited suffering. In remembering, we acknowledge, atone, account, and reconcile.The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, draws attention to enslaved Africans and African Americans brutally and savagely killed at the hands of Whites. To witness the consequences of those lynchings obliges us to confront the inhumaneness of our White ancestors at the same time we feel the ongoing suffering of Blacks defined solely by the color of their skin.* * *With rage and compassion vying for voice, you stand amidst artifacts that point to the division, fear, and inequality that are the products of racial terror. You feel vulnerable and you have many questions.What would I have done?Would I have been on the right side?What am I actively doing now to resist wrongs?How could we justify hangings, beatings, and enslavement then, and how can we justify them still today?How can we—the collective we and the individual we—be so blind to injustice and inhumanity in our policies, practices, communities, workplaces, and government?How could we have been so blind?* * *My phenomenological predicament and concern “for his distress and his freedom,” says philosopher Emmanuel Levinas,7 is the prophetic signification of the ethical relationship between us all, even those we have never known.* * *As tears flow down your cheeks, they speak volumes in the silence of the moment.We are called upon by these traces of people whose lives did not matter once, but who matter now, beyond their years, to practice truth-telling and actively resist injustices where they persist. From the etched names in steel beams at the memorial, we listen to the cries of others. Lisbeth Lipari8 says, in listening, we find interconnection and take responsibility for the other.The memorial reminds us that truth and reconciliation are still works in progress, requiring ongoing, dialogic processes to craft a better world. Truth and reconciliation will help us retrieve our collective integrity with ethical coherence in a world desperately in need of transformation and redemption.9* * *As we weep for strangers who lived long ago for too short a time, when their lives were literally swept out from under their feet, perhaps we reclaim, at least a bit of, the dignity of human life in others and in ourselves. The path to reconciliation, an ever-unfolding rhetorical process, requires that we tell the truth and carefully attend to the needs of others so that we may all live with greater compassion, mercy, grace, and decency.* * * Lives mattered then, and they matter now.Standing in the midst of ghostly witnesses to hate, hanging, there is no peace. Blood. Tears. Water. Dignity.* * *Our bodies shake. And we feel confusion. How can people become so disembodied and disconnected to commit these acts of violence? As Beard suggests, “this is the crux of the mechanics of white moral damage: with every additional action of committing violence toward known kin and insisting upon unknowing, white people become more wretched.”10 How can a person “insist upon unknowing”? We cannot fully comprehend this sheer disregard for human life.Our stomachs turn. Guess11 reminds that the first Africans to land in North America during 1619 were not enslaved; however, by the late 1600s, “slave codes” had been enacted. These codes, a “racialized worldview imbedded in the cultural consciousness,”12 became a dominant narrative of the colonies. We are witnesses to the persistence of this “racialized worldview,” now hanging above us. Would our bodies have touched? Our pale-colored skin intertwined with dark limbs. Entangled. Bodies. Her/histories. Our bodies have been shaped by this history13* * *Your skin crawls. You feel horrified, exposed. Your skin has never been milk-white. There’s a little bit of tan to it, and a scattered array of freckles adorn it. However, your whiteness glows against the bronzed color of the coffin-like boxes. It is in this space that we are all invited to make the invisible visible. It is here that we remember even centuries later “harm done against those marked by race often literally goes unnoticed, is minimized or relativized even if it is physically seen.”14 We cannot ignore the visceral response to witnessing the harm.Each person traveling above, below, and through this site embodies a different experience. We cannot understand or fully grasp the magnitude of this past. Engaging with the irrational is a trap. Instead, we try to learn more about the site to gain “more totalizing understandings of space.”15 We seek to “examine the diverse and disparate ways humans represent space, and the implications these engagements have for interracial relations.”16 The power of this site lies in the interconnectedness of past, present and future, reminding us that we are “literally bound (by blood) and therefore morally bound together.”17 There is no slave without a slave owner. We are in this space together. Yin and yang. We bleed together.* * *Standing in the midst of ghostly witnesses to hate, hanging, there is no peace. The wall is crying shades of brown. Dignity. A narrative inheritance I cannot escape.One naïve—and by now cliché (and still too common)—narrative of the civil rights movement is that it is a war long ago fought and finished—the end of slavery and inequality reached for African Americans. This rhetoric is tempting, and allows for phrases such as “I don’t see race” and “the past is the past.” It’s a “move on” approach to the systemic, institutional realities of our racist history. While this storyline is comfortable for some (mostly White) people and seems on the surface to champion both White and Black southerners and our aspirational, idealized post-race world, it is deeply troubling. Such a perspective frames current discussions of racial inequity as irrelevant at best and political propaganda at worst.Certainly, there are parts of the story we would all like to forget, but there is danger in forgetting. Forgetting entails ignoring intergenerational trauma, structural racism, and privilege. There is danger in remembering, too. Remembering elicits feelings of guilt, hate, blame, and shame. Remembering makes our shared experiences in community uncomfortable and upsetting. While our collective histories include moments of honor, love, and sacrifice, they are heavy with centuries of dehumanization, hate, and oppression. These polarities are inextricably woven. It is impossible to tell one story without the other. To share the proud history of spirituality, community, resilience, and art in the United States is inevitably to confront the history of slavery in the American south.* * *The steel structure encircles an open square. You stand on the lynching block at the center of the square and look around; you are surrounded by lines of reddish-brown steel, hanging. You feel their eyes watching you.My ancestors were Jews who fled the Ukraine to escape the violence of the pogroms. My ancestors fled Ireland to escape poverty and hunger. Compassion for the marginalized is in my DNA. But the image that pops into my mind right now is this: I am in elementary school and preparing a report on the Civil War. My mother delicately hands me some yellowed papers, handed down from her great-grandparents. The first is a “Loyalty Oath.” It is hard to read; the old script is faded and the lettering unfamiliar. It was a document citizens of Confederate States had to sign after the Civil War, to declare their loyalty to the Union. On the back, the words written in difficult-to-read handwriting, “a bitter pill to swallow.” The other document, a small piece of paper that says simply, “Bill of Sale of a Slave.” The signature is illegible but the meaning clear.A bitter pill to swallow indeed.And a narrative inheritance I can’t escape—I am a descendant of oppressors and oppressed.* * * The wall is crying shades of brown. Burdened, silenced, burdened, heavy; I want to beg for mercy. A narrative inheritance I cannot escape. “Is this like a maze?” “Yes, precious one, it is.”Adopting a dialogical stance that “brings self and other together even while it holds them apart” is needed for compassionate community.18 Becoming comfortable with the idea that our collective history is a complex story containing both love and violence, pride and shame, beauty and horror is necessary if we are ever to see one another. We must not fear remembering all of our history, both the painful and the beautiful, for they are inextricably interwoven, and in remembering, we must recognize that we are products of our history and simultaneously that this history need not be fatalistic nor deterministic. Acknowledging the pain and privilege that result from living within the narrative of the world as we know it is important. However, moving our relationships into the space beyond, into “that [which] is larger than the human symbolic capacity and from which our stories emerge,” is foundational to building a compassionate community.19 Lives mattered then, and they matter now.Standing in the midst of ghostly witnesses to hate, hanging, there is no peace." @default.
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• W3136393756 title "Narrative Inheritance" @default.
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