"Outside the Law"

"The way a society distances itself from physical structures whose purpose is to hide uncomfortable truths or bury undesirable 'necessities' mirrors the way narratives of history and justice bury, evade and marginalize...Look at how beautifully colonial Williamsburg has been restored and how conveniently marginal or absent are the slave quarters, the amputating axes, the whips and nooses and hanging trees" Daniel J. Wideman, pg 180

I really enjoyed reading this article. As a student who did the Multicultural Summer Institute this past summer, this quote reminded me of something Chris Abani, author of the Virgin of Flames, said when he came to speak to our class. He said that out of the several places he has travelled to, the United States was the only country who had a particular behavior of forgetting it's own history by barely recognizing it. I immediately thought of this when I read this quote above.

I had always thought that the way in which we forget our history had to do mostly with not studying it in school. But this quote made me realize that much more went into it. We also choose not to restore or maintain the sites that remind us of our painful past. And as painful as these sites may be it is extremely important to keep them alive, because it is our history.  We need to be reminded of our all our history, we  can't just pick and choose which we want to recognize, because then we are lying to ourselves.

Another part of this article that stood out to me was the idea of free papers. Wideman wrote that in the past, we had free papers which "were documents obtained from either former masters or local magistrates that serve as legal testament to one's 'free status'"(182). What's interesting about these free papers is that Wideman implies that for some American citizens, we still have a form of "free papers" today. He explains that his Brown I.D. card was his "get out of jail free card" when the police went on wild searches to find the rapist who had scared the town (182).  His Brown ID card and his college credentials was his own form of "free papers".