Citing Our Sources, Reclaiming Our Lineage and Humanity
This is part of February’s “Our Public Memory” PIES Intellectual Practice on Politicizing Our Experience. If you missed this newsletter, read it here.
“When we recognize the breadth of heroes in our lives, especially heroes that aren’t always celebrated, we are claiming our full selves and able to recognize what we deserve and what liberation should look like.”
Written by Angum-Peri Check
This Black History Month the Political Healers Project is inviting you to think of and celebrate the everyday Black heroes in your lives, especially the Black women, femmes, genderqueer, non-binary, and transgender folks. As an act of resistance. Of reclamation. And of love.
We call it all these things because that is exactly what we are doing when we tell the stories of and speak the names of the ones often forgotten, neglected, abused, and made invisible. And yet, these same folks are often the ones who hold us, carry us, nurture us, and fight for us. As Political Healers, we are tasked with using ritual to bring cultural trauma into public memory. To change the conversation and reach people in a new way. To force ourselves to grapple with this gross neglect and injustice, and to begin to heal it.
Racial capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy shapes so much of our public memory. Who and what we collectively recall and celebrate permeates even in the retelling of ourselves and of our people. Black history is mainstream-filtered through the white supremacist cisheteropatrical lens to erase and undervalue Black women, femmes, genderqueer, non-binary, and transgender folks. It’s more popular to begin and end the story with Thurgood Marshall winning the Brown v. Board case than citing his source of inspiration from Pauli Murray and their book States’ Laws on Race and Color. Marshall used Murray’s direct arguments to convincingly display the unconstitutionality of racially segregated schools.
It’s often not emphasized or talked about enough how Ella Baker was the architect not only behind the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) but also Dr. King’s organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) at the beginning of its inception. Sometimes what is being retold to us is so distorted and whitewashed, we don’t even see ourselves in it and claim it as our history, like a major motion picture of the Stonewall riots propping cis white gay men as the face and leadership instead of the actual Black and Brown trans women, sex workers, and genderqueer folks like Marsha P. Johnson and Miss Major Griffin Gracy. But because all these heroes I named were/are Black woman and genderqueer people, they are often erased and undervalued, even in spirit.
If we know that “famous” Black heroes who are women, femmes, and transgender are not being honored enough or properly, how do we think the ones who are not “famous” are being remembered? They are not any less extraordinary, because Black people are extraordinary through just navigating this world that tries to kill us everyday. It is the deliberate work of racial captialism and cis-heteropatriachy to cut us from our lineage, our full history, and our full humanity. Because when we recognize the breadth of heroes in our lives, especially heroes that aren’t always celebrated, we are claiming our full selves and able to recognize what we deserve and what liberation should look like.
So I conclude by calling out the names of my grandmother Ebot, who has worked hard her whole life and been the backbone of our family. My auntie Dr. Shonda Goward, who helped me survive and thrive in college. And my sister Frih, who truly carried the eldest daughter's burden with grace and a loving heart.
And I invite you all to also take a moment to call out the names of your ancestors or living Black heroes in your life who deserve to be remembered. And keep doing it, so that it becomes an everyday practice of gratitude and claiming our lineage, not just on Black History Month.