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Category: Societal Issues
Date Submitted: 05/03/2012 08:00 AM
Race historians seek to remember what national historians and others seek to forget. Discuss.
The study of history is often characterised as simply the dispassionate recall of facts for the purposes of posterity. It is seen in quite separate, often chronological, segments. In reality however, history is more than that, and “provides societies and individuals with a dimension of longitudinal meaning…and connects us with our past”[1]. Subsequently, history has an undeniable social function, and it is this point that is essential to the question outlined above. The past is littered with events that sit uncomfortably with certain groups in society, or even certain nationalities, and only by the specific study of history through the prism of race can many of these issues be addressed. Race historians fulfil the social function of history to a far greater degree than national historians or any other cultural form, by linking the past with the present, and by asking difficult questions that might otherwise go unnoticed and unanswered. Furthermore, it is often essential for race historians to write about these events, as survivors are unable to, either because of guilt at escaping repression while others have not, or simply because they are unable to describe the world they experienced; because language is so “manifestly inadequate”[2]. Therefore, victims, and society in general, are habitually subject to a form of collective amnesia, which undermines their ability to record their experiences. It is the race historian’s responsibility to give a voice to those who are unable to speak, and also to act as a balance against the fallacy of mainstream history, which often makes deductions of convenience to support a national narrative and ideal. Consequently, it can be said that national historians seek to forget events that sit uncomfortably with the national consciousness, whilst race historians seek to remember them.
It is the historian’s trade to record and to...