“Don’t forget, you are doing this for those who came before you” has rung in my ears for as long as I can remember. Growing up Black and in New Orleans, it has always been made clear that the weight of the past is tasked to those who can survive the promise of the future. Between every accomplishment and sorrow, I have been reminded that our ancestors need tending to: The future belongs to them as much as it does to us.
In the containment of the walls of my apartment throughout the ongoing pandemic, time has been freed of its usual contraptions. Solitude asks so much of us and soundlessness is always roaring with the thoughts we’ve avoided. My mind has been allowed to wander but continues to retreat to the same question: How do we enrich the future while honoring the past?
Anytime someone asked my late maternal grandmother how she was doing, she would hum “I’m blessed” as if it was a song. The song she sang was one of resolute absolution as, she often explained, blessings came to those who understood their history. The past was a weight she carried with honor.
Weights have a way of passing through generations. In the early days of the pandemic, when “We’ll be free in July or August” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, all I could think about was another of my grandmother’s songs: “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.” All I knew to do with my idle hands was tend to my personal past and develop a family archive from film negatives across time.
The past, as Lucille Clifton illustrates in her poem “i am accused of tending to the past”, is waiting for us when we come. Archiving photos across my lifetime offered shelter from the grim reality that was housed outside my door and perspective into possibilities beyond it. The dreams, hopes, and ambitions of those who came before me are worth nurturing and acting upon.
While constructing my familial story digitally throughout the summer and during the George Floyd protests, I began to understand the Black collective memory was being reimagined before our eyes. The seemingly impossible asks of the summer’s George Floyd’s marches — abolition, redistribution of police funding to community services, and the ending of systemic racism — was a dream delayed, but not denied, of our ancestor’s tomorrow. Studying the past, understanding what has already been done, forces us to recognize where change is possible and begin a constant pursuit for more seemingly impossible things. This moment of racial reckoning, like all moments before it, is a culmination of everything dreamed, written, imagined, organized, and promised of the Black radical past. Just as my visions of a more radical Black future are emboldened by my ancestor’s promise of tomorrow, we all have to come to understand just how bold the Black tradition of rioting for radical transformation is.
A quest to make sense of the past is one commonly shared by Black women scholars. In 2004, Toni Morrison during a commencement speech to newly minted Wellesley graduates: “The past is already in debt to the mismanaged present. And besides, contrary to what you may have heard or learned, the past is not done and it is not over, it’s still in process, which is another way of saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed, it yields new information about itself.” Many of us want the past to answer immediate questions, but, as Morrison notes, what has come before us is not done. It continuously yields new information about itself. The adage “those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it” feels only partially true in that lens.
Those who believe the lessons of the past are fixed are doomed to repeat the failings of yesterday.
We have all borne witness to the cosmetic concessions — anti-racism webinars, Black Lives Matter press releases from predominantly White organizations, and appointments of Black decision-makers long after the decisions have been made — that have been made as a fraught effort to preserve business as usual during the pandemic. During our finite time on earth, decision-makers have made infinite, incalculable damage to the Black future.
However, I am reminded that what is done is not final. The future is not inevitable. Last summer’s resistance, continued organizing, and lived histories tell us we can change the world. As we continue to collectively examine the ways racism and capitalism are intertwined, the future requires us to tend and build upon insights from the past.
Throughout our time in quarantine, many of us have envisioned the ‘post-pandemic world’, hoping it will be like the one before it. The resounding lesson of the past is to not use the present or immediate past as a measure for what the future can be. Our dreams for the future can be more expansive. World building requires us to carry our entire past with us and the freedom to imagine the world we want and our ancestors dreamed is possible.
Like my maternal grandmother before me, the past is a weight I carry with honor.
Don’t forget you are doing this for those who came before you.