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ng:
if you want to make that kind of separation between what you think history is and the present, i can't stop you, but i also think that it is naive.
you act as though all that is at issue with that history is firmly located in some past that is separable from the socio-economic order that exists. i dont buy it: what exists in the present is as it is as a function of that history, as an expression of it: it is dependent upon it, and would not and could not be as it is without it. who you are, who i am, are dependent on that history: we as subjects-in-the-world are embodied history, both of ourselves and of the wider networks of institutions etc. that inform what our experience--what shapes it, what makes it possible--and even the smallest perceptual action, we perform the aspects of the collective history that we are part of (i am going to pretend for the sake of jamming this into a post of something like moderate size that i can stop here without explaining this more. we'll see)
you cant get away from it. you--and i--and everyone else--ARE it.
another dimension of the history of the states that persists is in its class structure, in the uneven access to cultural capital--to opportunities in the broadest sense. you--and i--and everyone else in the states operates with reference to this uneven distribution benefitting from it, being disadvantaged by it--generally through no fault of our own---i mean, if education is the main way in which cultural capital is distributed and most of your educational opportunities are shaped by where your parents chose to live (because of the lunatic system of educational funding the states has chosen to adopt) that is by the class position occupied by your family which was expressed in where they chose to live--this choice--which neither you or i made for ourselves---shapes fundamentally you educational options, which shape fundamentally who and what you can be.
---of course there is some latitude for mobility--if there wasn't, i sure as hell wouldn't have had access to the education that i have had and i expect the same is true for many others--but we prefer to look at the fact of mobility than at the background against which mobility stands out, and it is that background that tells the overall story, not the patterns by means of which you or i or anyone else was able (to whatever degree) to get around the limits that are of a piece with that pattern (i think that makes sense...)
so you cant just set up history as a sequence of actions done by plastic figures in some diorama--your (and my) relation to it is not like a spectator who taking a break from the tedium of "real time" in some fictional autonomous "present" goes to look at and maybe feel vaguely bad about and that you get to leave behind once your period of feeling vaguely bad about it grows tiresome. you and i are embodied expressions history. and that's why its a bitch.
this is what i meant: it is not like i disagree with what you say about about whether in everyday life we can develop relationships that are not fucked up because we operate against this background. and it is not like there is nothing we can do to fight explicit and institutionalized racism when we find it operating. we can and should work to make the present better. but that really says nothing about the intertwining of who we are and the past and the ways in which the social structures that shape us are of that past, reproduce that past over and over, and even less how a collective might go about anything like redress for systematic discrimination and what amounts to institutionalized violence across its history.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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