“We are trapped in history and history is trapped in us.” ~ James Baldwin

I love history so much so that while in college, I seriously considered making it my major.  But, my desire to study history was not rooted in a love for the past but in my ignorance of it– both social and cultural but more importantly, personal.  I wanted to know where I came from.  The present didn’t seem to have much to offer and I would spend the first two years of college looking back, looking for answers to questions that I was too afraid to ask my parents.  My mother simply did not talk about the past, even if it was my own beginning and at the time, my father and I were not speaking to each other.  This was the reason that I plunged head first into African and African American culture, joining a group because my individual identity was still unknown.  Though far away, it was much closer and more accessbible to me than that of my family’s history and heritage.

This match made in textbooks, my untested relationship with the continent of Africa brought more relief or maybe a brief respite from the questions that seemed unrelenting in their pursuit for answers from me.  The questions simply would not accept quotes from others.  They wanted to hear from me.  And so these cultures became more of a hiding place.  I hid behind Kiswahili, taking the language course as a sophomore because I was too afraid to listen to my own voice.  I hid behind the brightly colored fabrics of Africa because I did not fit in anywhere.  I couldn’t even pretend that I was like everyone else.  In this instance, history accomodated my fear of reality and my true self that would emerge no matter where or how I attempted to hide. 

I love history because it can assist us in analyzing who others have been.  But it cannot tell me who I will be.  Though history does repeat it’s self, I do not have to lend my life to its efforts. It is for this reason that history can be a snare as we can become so comfortable with the facts of history that we do not attempt to change the present reality or its future.  Worse still, so dependent upon the facts of history, we do not discover the truth of our own lives.  Society’s history does not say who we are but who others have been and my parents could only have told me who they were.  Today, I realize that I needed only to turn to myself and let my life speak, to borrow the title of Parker J. Palmer’s book on the voice of vocation.

It is history that I think about when I hear the stories of James Craig Anderson of Jackson, Mississippi and Mark Duggan of London, England and their alleged murderers.  We are simply trapped, trapped in history.  Stuck in a time of hatred, unable to move past our unconscious and unfounded prejudices.  This racial terrain is nothing more than a wilderness as we circle around the same attitudes and behaviors, producing the same conversations and life responses.  But, I hate wandering as it suggests a lack of direction and guidance.  I hate repetition for it speaks of an inability to gain what was presented the first time.  I would rather not keep doing the same thing as it relates to race and its progeny.  We must not look to history for a response but we must listen deeply and truly to ourselves.

Still, it seems that we are both enamored and afraid of the past, as if to move beyond it or to not always acknowledge it is somehow disrespectful or dismissive of its contributions.  Metaphorically speaking, though we know that Moses will not make it to the Promised Land, we continue to choose leaders that remind us of our time with him or her.  Consequently, when Joshua begins to speak of his or her new vision or what the Lord has promised, we pat him or her on the head and pass them over for promotion because Joshua is too young or lacks experience.  Joshua does not know “the trouble we’ve seen,” “how we got over,” or traveled the “mighty long way” that the Lord has brought us.  But, Joshua did wander with them.  In fact, he along with Caleb, were the only ones allowed to live to enter the Promised Land.  But, Joshua will not to retrace their footsteps.  And the fact remains that Moses is dead; thus, our time of wandering is over. 

We don’t want Joshua to lead; we want another Moses because all we’ve seen is race/ism and all we know is race/ism.  We know this way.  We have markers and we have memories.  We know how to reach this conclusion so a new point of view, a new direction would not be beneficial because we have the wilderness all figured out now.

We are afraid to move forward because we believe that at some point in our lives, we will have to play the role and know the lines of the past.  We are afraid to step in front of history because we do not believe that we can change or that there is a Promised Land ahead of us.  We fall in line, too afraid to run ahead of time past.  Instead, we prepare ourselves to follow the lead of history.  And we won’t listen to the Joshuas that emerge because though they can tell the story, they will not relive it.  And though I love history, this Joshua believes that we make history; history does not make us.