Quokk.au"Democracy cannot survive without memory or it runs the risk of turning itself into an authoritarian state
Miguel Afonso Caetano"Democracy cannot survive without memory or it runs the risk of turning itself into an authoritarian state. It requires citizens to confront injustice, to learn from the crimes of the past, and to imagine futures that do not repeat them. William Faulkner’s warning still resonates: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In America today, history itself has become a battleground. The ghosts of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy remain with us, shaping institutions and social life. As Angela Davis reminds us, we live with these ghosts every day. The real question is whether we choose to acknowledge them, or to erase them. For when a society turns away from its own horrors and promotes forms of historical amnesia, what kind of culture is normalized? What political order emerges from the silence of forgetting? Under Trump, we have already been given a terrifying answer: a society organized around violence: against immigrants, Black people, youth, students, dissidents, women, the unhoused, and all those who fail the regime’s loyalty test to white Christian nationalism.
As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observed, our times are not marked simply by the fading of collective memory, but by “the aggressive assault on whatever memory remains.” That assault takes the form of book bans, censorship, intimidation of educators, and the replacement of critical history with patriotic myth. Kimberlé Crenshaw has noted that the panic over “critical race theory” was never about pedagogy, it was an attempt to whitewash slavery and racism from the national narrative."