My first real education about U.S. history happened in college. I was studying for a final exam in a class called “America in the 60s,” and as I worked to piece the socio-political chronology of that era together—civil rights, JFK, MLK, Vietnam, the race to space, the Beatles—the seminal dates, events and voices of that decade in our country began to interconnect and weave together in ways I hadn’t considered; it was then that I first understood history to be a web, not a line.
It’s a web that is infinitely complicated and intricate. It connects Obama to Trump and now to Biden, connects 1619 to 1964 to 2020, and connects the coronavirus pandemic to the pandemic called racism. It connects my grandmothers to my daughters. It connects Emmett Till to Rodney King to George Floyd, and to countless other named and un-named casualties woven throughout, in between and since.
And when Gianna Floyd raised her arms up in the days just after her father’s murder back in May, proclaiming with arms outstretched that her “Daddy changed the world,” the threads of that same web spun out in a million directions, connecting George and Gianna Floyd to the whole wide world, and to me.
My place in history’s web is unique to me and my story—everyone’s is. But it is inevitably interwoven with, and is a product of, all that has come before me and all that exists in the world around me right now. I don’t have to look far or work too hard to begin pinpointing my current location among the threads of it; I sit here writing now at the intersection of privilege with whiteness, of whiteness with womanhood, of womanhood with motherhood—and of course that’s just for starters.
I view the understanding of my own coordinates in the web as critical to living my life well, but I also view them only as a point of origin. What I make of my history and my circumstances, and where I move out from here is equally, if not more, important. What work will I do, what steps forward will I take, for example, to acknowledge and make sense of my connection to those who live in the before, the during and the after? To Breonna Taylor? To Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, yes, to Amy Coney Barrett? To Kamala Harris? To our future first female President? The journey is mine to make, and each day is a new day to “light out for the territory,” to use the parting words of Huck Finn.
Many of you know that I’m a huge fan of Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda’s epically beautiful and significant re-framing of our nation’s founding through word and music. At the core of the musical, which I regard as The New American Anthem, resides the important truth that there is enormous power in controlling the narrative: who will be the one to tell your story? In our United States, control of the public narrative was commandeered from the start by white people (read: men), and has been kept closely guarded ever since. But, so importantly, because of those who have for generations refused, sometimes at enormous cost, to concede or even blend in their own brave voices, and because, in my view, of the inexorable drive of the human spirit toward something better, the American story is—very slowly, in stops and starts and by way of backward steps that need to be first retraced and then rerouted—being retold, evolving day by day into a new narrative that is richer, truer, and filled with real promise. I get to be part of that, and so do you.
So: Control of what I say and what I write is, by virtue of my place in history’s web, entirely mine. My story is my story to tell, and I have the power and responsibility to tell it; I get to control this narrative and how I use it—a privilege I do not take at all for granted.
Today, because we have cast our votes and used our voices, we have elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to lead our nation. It is an incredibly special, emotional day for those of us who have felt weighed down by so many impossibly ugly, difficult, tragic plot twists and turns in our American story. For those of us who have felt anxious, and guilty, and restless, and angry, and terrified while surveying the political landscape these last four years—and yet left speechless, waylaid and ultimately paralyzed—today marks the beginning of a new trajectory and a new chapter, with countless new sturdy threads flung out far and wide, weaving each new American moment into the next.
Today, now that we have cast our votes and used our voices, feels to me like the perfect day to commit—to embark on the deconstruction and reconstruction of my understanding, my perspective, and my narrative. Today marks a new chance to re-examine and refocus the view from my singular place in history’s web.
To this end I’ve decided, after much hemming and hawing (there are too many blogs; blogging feels self-important; who cares what I think anyway), to (surprise!) start writing a blog, both in order to keep myself accountable and to create a written record of what I consider to be my continuing education. I’ll let you know when the site is built—I’m just getting started—and look forward to seeing you there.
I’m planning to call it Write In Place.
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