The Feeling of Forgetting

"The dual traumas of colonialism and slavery are still felt by Native Americans and African Americans as victims of ongoing cycles of white violence toward people of color. In The Feeling of Forgetting, John Corrigan trains our attention on an underexamined aspect of this historical trauma: the trauma experienced by white Americans as perpetrators of this violence. By tracing the practices of remembering and forgetting in the Christian tradition, Corrigan shows how experiences of racial violence and efforts, on the part of white Americans, to deliberately forget race are drivers of Christian nationalism and white supremacy. White trauma, Corrigan says, is detectable as an underground river in American culture. Sometimes it is powerfully joined with evangelical Christianity and surfaces at times in acts of brutality, terrorism, and insurrection. The Feeling of Forgetting is an attempt to understand how that process occurs, and how it is braided with the trauma of victims, so that we might be better positioned to address both"--