Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

I have long told students and would gladly tell anyone else, You don’t know what you don’t know until you find out that you don’t know. Often we don’t even realize, in various situations, that there is more to know. And so we go on with our decision-making, presuming that we’ve got all we need to make a solid assessment. Epistemologically, though, it is one thing to be aware of not having all the facts, but it is something else entirely to proceed – even unwittingly – under the incorrect assumption that all relevant facts are in-hand. That’s when it gets easy to err in judgment— to think we know everything, when we don’t.

This conundrum garnered my attention recently when I was reading a journal article titled “Collective Forgetting and the Symbolic Power of Oneness: The Strange Apotheosis of Rosa Parks.” In it, social psychologist Barry Schwartz asks why this Civil Rights icon became über-famous and mega-symbolic, while so many others now occupy a murkier space in the public conception of our history. It’s a good question: why is Rosa Parks remembered so widely, but someone like Aurelia Browder not so much? His explanation says that our brains only have the desire to remember a scant few things within a given area of life, so unless someone is a scholar or is personally connected to a certain subject, the brain will probably remember one or two facts – or people – and be satisfied with that. A problem arises, though: to make good decisions, we often need a base of knowledge that exceeds a few vague (and possibly misremembered) factoids.

Meanwhile, the collective memory is ever-evolving via our experiences, observations, conversations, interactions, and decisions. The often-remembered things are mentioned or discussed more often, while the lesser-known naturally appear less. This latter group then falls away from public discourse and ends up clinging to longevity within textbooks, museum exhibits, archives, academic journals, or family photo collections. These resources with limited audiences result in limited exposure for the mass of people, and because they exist out of view, rarified conversations about them can lead to the idea that their obscurity equates to “silence.”

So . . . while some may assume that “silence is often tightly coupled with forgetting and talk with memory,” it’s not necessarily that simple. A 2010 Social Forces article titled “Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting” tells us this, which we certainly know: “absence and silence have often resulted in protest by groups who have shared the assumption that recollection is impossible without talk and representation.” These protests result from “distortions in what had hitherto been perceived as the truth about the past as well as to processes through which people and events were excluded and forgotten from collective memory.” But there’s even more to it . . . Silence is not simply “the complete absence of talk, ritual or practice.” Just because it’s quiet doesn’t mean that nothing is happening.

Silences can be useful or meaningful themselves when it comes to our narratives— as we each decide when, where, and around whom to discuss certain aspects of our lives or beliefs.  The processes of crafting narratives and making meaning necessarily involve the exclusion of some things, and part of that exclusion is deciding not only who gets to participate in crafting a narrative but also in who gets to receive it. Put simply, there are some things that I (or you) don’t know because the people who do know make sure that I (or you) don’t know. And that practice doesn’t just go one or two directions; it goes in every direction, all the time. (Think about Michel Foucault’s entangled web of power relationships.) What I understand these things to mean is: some silences may be exclusionary, yes, but others may be gestational or even protective. 

Telling or highlighting forgotten or neglected stories has come into vogue these days, and I’m all for it. Our modern American society is opening up a bit more, and we seem more ready to embrace the lesser-known, the nuanced, the complicated, the myth-busters. Books like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and movies like Milk have brought previously lesser-known stories into fuller view. Other books and movies have tried and failed to gain their subjects a similar notoriety. I’ve been part of this vogue myself, in a smallish way, having written books about poet John Beecher and artist Clark Walker, about the killing of Bernard Whitehurst, Jr., and through student projects like Taking the Time and Sketches of Newtown. These projects have been generally gone well, but I have learned something from them that I hadn’t expected: people with a story to tell often want it told, only to realize that once it is told, it doesn’t fully belong to them anymore. The decision to eschew silence and let a story out does not mean that the tellers will get to determine how the story is received, how it is interpreted, how it is repeated or shared, how it used, who embraces it, who rejects it, who ignores it. And that, for some people involved in these stories, can yield disconcerting emotions. What we think is going to happen or what we want to happen when our tale is told . . . isn’t necessarily what will happen. When silence is protective, speaking out means that we relinquish that protection. 

As I was reading the academic articles I cited above, both of which deal with collective memory and collective forgetting, I couldn’t help but think about the current state of our politics and our society. These days, myriad discussions surround public memorials, school curricula, book bans, and news coverage, many of which involve and affect the collective memory. Narratives are being crafted, with varying inclusions and exclusions, because there is no way that all of us can remember all of the things, people, and events that might warrant attention and respect. If Schwartz is correct, our brains just can’t hold it all. Which means that a great many someones and somethings will recede into the murky spaces. Despite our current fervor to document, record, photograph, notate, and save darn near everything we do, say, and see, some things are just going to fade away.

Being idealistic about it, if more – or even most – people understood our history and our culture more thoroughly, our society would be better off. But that’s not going to happen. We each pick and choose what is important enough to remember, to discuss, to affirm, and to validate. I know more about Southern history, culture, and politics than just the names of Rosa and Martin; on the other hand, the only professional hockey player I can name is Wayne Gretsky. We all do this, decide what is worth remembering. Among these acts of remembering and forgetting, our individual and collective narratives swirl all around, and sometimes they crash into each other. That’s when people get pissed. Yet, as individuals, we will never fully know what we don’t know. So the least we can do for each other is know that.