Updated; originally published February 1, 2023
“Silence kills the soul; it diminishes its possibilities to rise and fly and explore. Silence withers what makes you human. The soul shrinks, until it’s nothing.”
— Marlon Riggs
Sometimes, it hurts to remember. But it is far more dangerous to forget.
The distortion or erasure of history is how kings and kingmakers attempt to control the marginalized. By preventing us from learning the truth about ourselves, and themselves, they succeed at keeping us scattered, confused, defeated; at each other’s throats over, mainly, bullshit: man vs. woman, straight vs. queer, tribe vs. tribe, and so on. Purposely and purposefully misinformed and uninformed, we take our sadnesses out on each other rather than on the architects of it. And the blight passed on is called generational trauma.
I want to make a small push against that by highlighting a few historical figures intentionally buried under the onslaught of the American propaganda posing as history (or maybe all history is propaganda and it is time we started uncovering newstories).
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Witness to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.