BANNED: How the Erasure of Our History is the Erasure of Us
As a Black woman, I’ve always felt invisible in this world.
This is nothing new or unique. This is a centrepoint of the Black experience. We exist in this society as outcasts, othered, and disregarded. Our existence: a burden. Our labor: stolen. Our culture: mocked and then appropriated for popular gain and capital. Our history: erased. Invisible.
This is nothing new. I want to make sure I clarify that. The erasure of our history and heritage in this nation is not a new concept. There has never been a time when our history was honored and truthfully told, our heritage was celebrated and revered, and our humanity valued and cherished. We must understand this as we speak of the recent influx of the banning of books that have been written to expose the history that the textbooks leave out, and the recent changes to curricula taught in grade-school. Grade-school curricula have been conveniently telling half-truths and twisting reality regarding Black history since Reconstruction. And school libraries have rarely gone out of their way to carry books that tell Black stories, as well as Indigenous stories and stories that center People of Color.
When I was a kid, I wasn’t getting books that reflected my lived experience and represented my culture from my elementary school library. Those books had to be curated in my home with intention through Black-owned bookstores, cultural festivals, and personal connections. My mom did an amazing job of seeking out picture books with Black girls on the cover. My home library was filled with books that narrated our rich, painful, yet triumphant, history on their stunningly illustrated pages. It was only in those pages that I ever felt a little less invisible; that I finally felt seen, valued, and beautiful as a Black girl.
It has always been our society’s intention to erase Black history because it has always been our society’s intention to erase Blackness.
And, it has always been our society’s intention to erase Black history so that they never expose the stains on their whiteness from their trafficking, oppression, and bloodshed of the Black and Indigenous populations. Doing so would reveal the lie of whiteness as the superior being of all the land, and well, we just can’t have that, right? (note. sarcasm.)
Like most of us, I learned about our history through that superiority of whiteness lens. I learned about manifest destiny, economic prosperity, and the rising success of America as the most powerful nation in the world. We were barely taught any of the wrongdoings of our nation’s past, and when we were taught some of it, it is taught with a justification added to it and a false assurance that all wrongdoings toward marginalized communities are a thing of the past, so we can just forgive, forget and move on. There was never any acknowledgment of present pain, present systemic disparities, and present racism even though I had already experienced my fair share of that racism by the time I was in high school. My history lessons didn’t exist to tell the truthful history of how a country built its entire wealth and supremacy on the genocide of one community and the stolen labor of another. My history lessons existed to train me in the norms, ideals, and standards of white supremacy. If I was conditioned to see my country as superior due to the white, powerful men who made it such, I would learn to worship its sovereignty.
I was lucky to receive an opposing education at home, so, I knew the truth. At least, more of the truth than what I had obviously learned in school. However, there were still so many depths to this truth that I had yet to uncover until very recently. All thanks to books written by bold authors, historians, philanthropists, and humanitarians who dare to tell the truth. Even so, the fact that I had to learn this truth outside of my educational institutions contributed to that feeling of invisibility. That feeling of unimportance — I knew my culture and heritage meant absolutely nothing to this world. I felt it every time Black History Month rolled around and no one in my classes even knew what Black History Month was. I felt it every time our history classes got to the units on enslavement and Civil Rights and they were brief and brushed over. Why was my heritage so insignificant to this nation that I had to travel to Black-specific spaces to feel seen and valued? Why was this nation so hell-bent on hating Black people?
That was the question I constantly asked myself as a kid, and have even continued asking as an adult, though I now know the answer. (I wrote an entire book on it.) All these years later, it doesn’t hurt any less. What has allowed me to remain hopeful is seeing the increase in books and resources written to center Black and brown voices and experiences. Seeing books like, “Hair Love,” and “Born on the Water” become available so that I may show my children who they are in more ways than I had access to when I was their age. (These books are among some of the top banned children’s books in most school libraries.) As an adult, reading books like “The Sum of Us,” and “Stamped from the Beginning,” have opened my eyes to so much truth that has set me free, and now I use that that truth to help set others free.
Those who have made it their life’s mission to preserve the foundations of white supremacy that our nation was founded upon know that freedom is the result of learning this truthful history. That same freedom that I have experienced in the pages of these books that have revealed so much more of the depths of my own history is the same freedom that will be available to everyone who reads these books. The result is freedom. The result of knowledge and education is always freedom.
And that is why they are banning our books and further erasing our history.
The recent “crackdown” of banning books is nothing but a backlash response to our attempts to disrupt the white supremacist status quo in recent years. Since many authors and historians have been making it their mission to dismantle the status quo of white supremacy, the backlash, of course, was to be expected.
And, they’re not stopping with book bans. Now, they’re taking the scraps of Black history that they barely taught and either erasing it all together or twisting the truth to rationalize enslavement and create a narrative that diminishes any fault for the generational harm caused to the Black and Indigenous communities.
The result of this erasure is not just the erasure of history. It is the erasure of our humanity.
Not just the humanity of the Black, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and all other marginalized communities that are suffering the most from these bans. This marks the erasure of the humanity of all of us.
We must stop thinking of our history and our humanity as an us and them problem. When we do that, we allow ourselves to be unbothered by what happens to our neighbor who looks different than we do and experiences a different America. Erasing Black history is not just a Black problem, it is an everyone problem. Erasing Indigenous history is not just an Indigenous problem, it is an everyone problem. Each of our histories makes up our collective American history, and we are all American. When you erase parts of our history, you erase our whole history. And when you erase our whole history, you erase our whole humanity.
The result? A robotic society that feels invisible, insignificant, unworthy, and angry. (i.e. what we see in society right now.)
See, we need our history. All of our history. Our history connects us to ourselves. It carries on our legacies, traditions, and culture. It stops us from repeating the mistakes of our ancestors while continuing the lessons they passed down to us. It gives us a sense of hope, identity, and healing. Yes, there is pain and grief. But, it is sitting in that pain and grief that allows us to move forward from it and build a future filled with hope.
Right now, we are not filled with hope. We are watching our humanity be erased more and more each day. And since this is nothing new, it has just been emboldened recently, we’ve already been reaping the repercussions of an erased history for decades. Now, those repercussions are just amplified.
Erasing our history not only erases our humanity, it obliterates our freedom. And we deserve both our humanity and our freedom.
We cannot actively uproot a problem if we cannot find the roots to begin with.