I hope that didn't sound like was dismissing your "taking it personally," harmony. I do find your explanation helpful.
I'm just trying to explain to my own satisfaction why the kind of reaction I was describing might happen. And in getting such an explanation, use it to help push discussion further into a space where one can discuss things "impersonally," i.e., not as an attack on personal beliefs or individual persons.
The About-face Continues: DCP & Co. on "The Mormons
Blixa wrote:I hope that didn't sound like was dismissing your "taking it personally," harmony. I do find your explanation helpful.
I'm just trying to explain to my own satisfaction why the kind of reaction I was describing might happen. And in getting such an explanation, use it to help push discussion further into a space where one can discuss things "impersonally," I.e., not as an attack on personal beliefs or individual persons.
If it is my great great grand uncle we're talking about, who signed the Declaration, then yes indeed, let us proceed, civilly and impersonally, because he was above reproach, both now and in his own time. But the slave owner? The horse thief? That's a bit more of a problem, because they were not above reproach. I can laugh about them, or skim the surface, or say it's not something I approve of, but that doesn't change that an ancestor of mine put shackles on a man and whipped hiis back bloody when he was too sick to work in the fields. That shames me. Shames my family. Makes me sick to my stomach. I have to get past that in order to discuss things impersonally. Sometimes, it's hard to do that. That legacy still creeps into my family's worldview today, bleached out a little but still... it's there.
Blixa wrote:Still, though, I suspect you could enter into a discussion of slavery without the kind of defensiveness that would deny all potential for knowledge of the past!
Of course! But that wouldn't make it easy. And that's just me. And I'm far removed, several generations from it. The past to me is the past. But to some of the Natives I work with, Wounded Knee was yesterday. They live with the ramifications of genocide, of being forced onto reservations, not allowed to pursue their native religions or previous way of life. Their every-day lives are co-mingled with the past so extensively, sometimes it's hard to talk 2007, instead of 1807, because what happened 2 centuries ago still impacts them today. And they're still dying early, just because they're Native.
When history hurts, people either tune it out completely, or end up buried in it. Maybe it doesn't hurt you, doesn't impact you at all, because you can study it dispassionately. It's not that way here, in my husband's family that have been in the church since the beginning. It's not that way for my friends on the reservation who are proud of a culture that gets so little respect as to be invisible. It's not that way for anyone whose skin isn't white who lives in substandard housing with multiple generations, because they haven't managed to escape the slavery and indentured servitude of generations of their families.