A Letter to a Region of My Country: Self-Education in the Wake of George Floyd
(originally written in 2020, reposted in 2024)Read on:
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As a black, first-gen, young woman in America, I came upon the writing of James Baldwin as the revelatory voice of reason that I had been struggling to define within this country and within myself. I had always thought it a shame that the immediate worth of these works did not seem to translate to those who were somehow allowed to move through life unaffected by their poignancy. It felt as if these texts held the answers to all the nagging plot-holes in the narratives that we had been taught. For most of my relatively comfortable life, I felt resigned to seeing the manifestations of these ‘radical’ visions in the only imaginable alternative outside of the demographics previously described. This being, people who recognized the clarity with which our country was described but chose to unwittingly weaponize these radical texts against the voices of the people that they had been written on behalf of. For these semi-affected but comfortable people, acknowledgement of the value of these works never seemed to go beyond piece-mealed quotes. Quotes, taken only to be used as tools in enforcing the feel-good narrative of “look how far we’ve come”. These people came in the form of educators, classmates, and my peers. Unseduced by the status quo, I approached these texts as proof of the contrary. I was mentally preparing myself to sit with the realities of the lingering inequality of our country in ways that could elicit variations of life-long cognitive dissonance. This seemed to be the inevitable result of picking up the proper attitudes that paved the way to varying degrees of personal success for someone like me. This is to say that we, as a country, are indebted to those who attempt the path to progressive action instead.
Regardless, I do not presume that reading some texts and watching a few documentaries is enough to keep the words of these civic leaders from remaining relevant in the next generation. This is merely the bare minimum. However we have proved that, as a country, we have not been doing the bare minimum for a significant portion of our population. How many iPhone videos do we need to see of Black Lives being sacrificed by federal and state government to prove this point? If our country has no common understanding of the insidious ways it has perpetuated the struggle of Black Americans, it becomes impossible to move past that fact.
Like the systemic oppression of BIPOC in this country, the idea that a conceptual foundation of knowledge is necessary in order to process similar new information is not unique to this moment. It has been studied and discussed for centuries. The acknowledgement of this psychological phenomenon is the driving force behind cultures of censorship, from Orwell’s 1984 to totalitarian regimes of the past and present.
In his immersive exploration of the mechanisms behind memory and learning, journalist Joshua Foer writes of the development of thought in Moonwalking With Einstein.
“As infants, we also lack schema for interpreting the world and relating the present to the past. Without experience — and perhaps most important, without the essential organizing tool of language — infants lack the capacity to embed their memories in a web of meaning that will make them accessible later in life. Those structures only develop over time, through exposure to the world. The vital learning that we do during the first years of life is virtually entirely of the implicit, nondeclarative kind.”
Memory and language influence critical thought and our country has been disproportionately robbing its citizens of both. The divisions we see today have been systemically created. Until recently, we have seen this in the mainstream media we consume, the holidays we celebrate, and the curriculums we have been taught. Until recently, so many Americans with the privilege to do so have had an infantile understanding of our government, of its history, and of its impact on the lives of BIPOC today.
The BIPOC experience is just one of many experiences that have been obfuscated by our own education systems, stunting its people and our country. Because of this, the United States is left fumbling with semantics to prove who has been historically deemed worthy of life while it encourages some to take the word “Great” for granted. In establishing a universal language, the Black Lives Matter movement is freed of convincing people of the failings of our country and allowed to move towards enacting the change to properly address them. Foer goes on to write of a conversation with a South Bronx High School teacher, “…education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can’t have higher-level learning — you can’t analyze — without retrieving information.’’ Embedding the unfiltered history and raw voices of BIPOC into our basic school curriculums gives everyday Americans the tools to hold the United States, our government and the people who vote for it, accountable. Only then can our country’s sense of civic duty be rooted in the ideals of equality that this country purports to be founded upon. We can not continue allowing the responsibility of its failings to achieve such ideals to fall on the people it continuously and systemically fails to protect.
George Floyd’s death has sparked a sudden call for the reexamination of our country’s core beliefs that seems to have an unprecedented amount and variety of individuals adopting the personal responsibility of answering. During this movement of relatively wide-spread solidarity, these old and recent works are receiving the critical attention that they deserve. Yet I am left with the nagging question of ‘why now?’. I ask this rhetorical question, the question that COVID-19 has managed to answer so comprehensively, to the ruling majority of our country, to our leaders and de facto advocates: White America.
It has to be said that these works were never made to be hidden from anyone. They were made to be heard and to communicate a long-overdue message to those willing to hear. The fact that they had to be presented to anyone anew is part of the problem. Although they may not have seemed to speak to you before, this moment is just one of many in our history that proves the America that they describe IS and HAS BEEN your America.
However this a call for further solidarity. It is not intended to isolate. This is what being American means, out of many, one. Accepting the reality of one does not hinge on negating the other. Those who feel guilty about that need to listen because those who have spoken up did not have the choice not to. The value of choosing to educate yourself in this way is to come to terms with that. Next is to empathize with it, understand your role in it, and arm yourself with this knowledge in order to close what Trump’s election has proven to be a divisive gap in the perception of our country.
For those who have embarked on this journey of cultivating critical thought on the issue, I can only hope that you will not defect to the camp of the willfully ignorant and that this momentum continues. Until our education system revises the conceptual schemas indoctrinated in its exclusionary core curriculums with a vigor equal to the media’s Black Lives Matter movement, please continue to promote these works. Consume them, value them, learn from them, feel for them, feel with them, and love them as they have been loved by your fellow Americans. Maybe then we can move towards effecting comprehensive change and come closer to eliminating the gap between experiences within our country.
architect & urbanist
@BETHLEHEM TESFAYE, 2025. All works, unless noted.