I Didn't Always Care About History

the fight against forgetting

Sometimes I tell people that high school history class never set a fire under me, never offered me a way to see why history matters, and that’s true. But also, frankly, I was never a good student. Not of history, not of anything. It’s just not a system of learning that works for me.

So I didn’t start off caring about history.

I do have this memory–maybe it’s false, maybe it’s not–of rejecting some of the lies they told me as a kid. I have this memory of realizing the Thanksgiving story was a myth, and a nasty one, pretty early on. There are so many myths involved in nation-building, especially for a settler-colonial nation like the United States. George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth; he had teeth of a thousand kinds, including those ripped from the mouths of those he enslaved–America was built by men who make the Saw franchise seem tame.

He also didn’t chop down a cherry tree. I know that sounds like the lesser lie compared to the torture he inflicted on his fellow humans, but the thing about the cherry tree is that it’s a lie that teaches the moral lesson of always telling the truth to authority figures. It’s authority lying to us about why we have to tell it the truth. Everything in American history, the way it’s popularly recounted, is fundamentally hypocritical and dangerous.

The line between history and myth has always been hard to distinguish. Often, that line is obscured for propaganda purposes. Yet sometimes there’s beauty and meaning to be found in myth mistaken for history, history mistaken for myth.

John Henry, the steel-driving man, seems like he ought to be a myth, up there with Paul Bunyan. No way did some tunneler out-dig a machine and then die as a result. That’s just folk songs, folk tales.

It turns out that John Henry was a real man. He was a short Black man, born free before the civil war in New Jersey, who had the bad luck of moving to Virginia immediately after the war, looking for work. He was framed up by a racist legal system and imprisoned–enslaved, really, as the 13th amendment offered prison as a loophole. Soon he was shipped out to West Virginia to dig tunnels through mountains. Owners wanted to test out these new steam drills, to see if they were faster than regular workers, so they set man and machine next to one another to dig. Breathing in all that dust kicked up by those machines, John Henry and countless others died. But they proved they were faster than the machines, and John Henry’s body slipped into an unmarked grave in a prison yard while his legend slipped into workers’ songs across multiple industries.

The myth of John Henry contained enough truth that a historian named Scott Reynolds Nelson tracked down the rest of it, a hundred and fifty years later.

Why does that story matter? Why does it matter that it was real? Because it tells us so much about the story of America. About the betrayal of reconstruction, about the very real legacy of slavery that continues to this day through incarceration. Because it tells us about the human cost of “progress.” Because it tells us about a culture and people that have largely been forgotten.

I didn’t care much about history when I was younger, but I do now.

---

When I was a baby anarchist, newly minted at 19 years old, I still didn’t care too much about history. I didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t what mattered to me. The same as I didn’t care too much about theory. It seemed to me that people put an awful lot of their energy into history and theory and not nearly enough of their energy into action. I got most of my theory orally, from folks working on the same activist campaigns as me. This was a good method–the theory stuck, because it was anchored to something concrete. I left an activist meeting at which men had dominated the conversation and a friend patiently explained to me what we’d witnessed through the lens of anarcha-feminism. We discussed environmentalist theory while building blockades to stop loggers from clearcutting forests. I learned about gentrification and redlining while organizing with people who defended DIY urban gardens. I learned anarchism itself from protesters in the black bloc.

I learned the basics of our history the same way, interwoven with action. And slowly, I learned that I cared about history.

---

America is a country that tries to destroy history. It was built on the genocide of indigenous people and the attempted destruction of all indigenous culture and language and history. Its infrastructure was built by enslaved Black people who were stripped systematically of their history. Immigrant groups–marginalized and privileged alike–have been expected to “assimilate,” to abandon their ethnicity, culture, and history. European groups, highly privileged, were also assimilated–into the system of whiteness.

Whiteness is not a culture, it is an eradication of culture. It is the devil’s bargain–ethnic cultures in the US gave up their individuality one by one in exchange for whiteness, in exchange for power. (It is up to the reader to draw the connections here between the nine rings forged by Sauron.) My great-grandparents refused to teach their daughter, my grandmother, Irish. They’d fled from the western coast of Ireland, from the Gaeltacht, the places that had refused anglicization for centuries longer than the rest of the country. From the places that the Irish language survived and has slowly spread back out over the island. Their families had held onto Irish for hundreds of years, but the language didn’t survive a single generation in the land of forgetting.

Our own family name, Kelleher, was only fully anglicized when my great grandparents came to America a hundred years ago. Most of our family in Ireland are Keelers now. It took an incredible amount of work for my aunt to find them, to realize they were our family. As a result of her work, I got to meet my great uncle at his 100th birthday party. He and his brothers had fought in the Easter Rising of 1916, and I shook his hand. I didn’t realize the significance of that then, but I sure do now.

We’d assumed for years that the family name had been changed at Ellis Island by indifferent bureaucrats, but no. We were never Kellehers, we were never Keelers. We were Ó Céileachair and Ní Céileachair, but Céileachair was never written down on documentation, because the English conquerors wrote that documentation and they didn’t like all those funny letters in that funny language.

My great-grandparents survived all of that, came to America, were offered whiteness, and took it. Their children would not know Irish. They also, of course, became settlers themselves, fleeing the horrors of colonization to participate in the infliction of that horror on others.

Whiteness is the eradication of culture in exchange for a nearly infinite amount of privilege. It’s a deal that ethnicity after ethnicity has taken. Goodbye language. Goodbye culture. Goodbye history. All that’s left are strange little mascots of your heritage. Irish American? Have a leprechaun and maybe you’re allowed to talk about drinking all the time (or you can misconstrue the Irish Republican Army, who were socialist revolutionaries, as Republicans in the American sense). Italian? Here, have Columbus, a mass murderer. Maybe some spaghetti.

Of course, many people have held onto culture to varying degrees despite whiteness, and my family’s history is not representative. But there’s always a pressure to lose where you’re from.

The culture of whiteness in America, if it can be called a culture, is a strange and banal thing, full of myths like “George Washington Was A Good Person” and “Manifest Destiny Was Fine Actually.” It rings hollow, and as far as I can tell the reason that white people in America are so keen on cultural appropriation is because we are hungry and because we’ve been told that everything in the world is ours. Privilege and emptiness, paired.

White people learning history does not destroy, or even necessarily challenge, our white privilege. It cannot undo the devil’s bargain. Whiteness, as a social construct, must be destroyed. I specifically say “whiteness” here and not just “white supremacy” because whiteness was created for supremacy. It has no other purpose. There is no specific reason for the conflation of the Irish and British and Finns and Austrians, of all these Catholics and Lutherans and pagans and atheists, besides to create a privileged category. To unite settler-colonists in the United States across class lines in order to oppress indigenous people, Black people, and non-white immigrants. It was a way to break class solidarity and turn us against one another.

White people learning history does not destroy white privilege. But any people learning history in this cursed settler-colonial state are learning forbidden knowledge, the knowledge this country seems founded on the idea of destroying.

---

I never cared about history until I became an anarchist, and suddenly I realized we’re all part of it. History is the greatest story ever told, the story that contains all stories, and we’re all characters. I care about what came before me because I care about what comes after me.

Sports analogies aren’t my strong suit, but if you’ll forgive me: If you observe a baseball flying through the air, you can’t determine its trajectory from a still frame. You need to see it in motion to see where it’s going. You need to observe its history to see its trajectory. Even better, you need to see the windup and the pitch. Better still, the other pitches thrown by that pitcher. The more context you have available to you, the more likely you are to know not just where the ball is, but where it’s been and where it’s going. The more likely you are to hit the ball.

The more history you know about oppression and resistance to that oppression, the more you can evaluate what has worked and not worked in various contexts and for various people. 

Growing up white and assimilated in America, I wasn’t used to having a history. When I became an anarchist, I suddenly had a history. It wasn’t a history of ancestry. It was a history of shared values, shared struggles. We’ve always been internationalists, and we’ve always seen our histories and struggles as interwoven by shared ideology across cultural and ethnic lines.

Suddenly I had a history, and it was worldwide. German socialist anarchists in Chicago plotting to run the city without the state, Catalan and Spanish syndicalist anarchists in Barcelona who did just that, for years. Japanese and Korean nihilist anarchists who plotted the death of the emperor. The Russian evolutionary biologist who developed the modern theory of mutual aid. The hippies in the bay who popularized whole wheat bread. The christian anarchist who abandoned pacifism to kill a mass-murdering military officer in Argentina. The Mexican women who led that country’s first successful strike. The muslim mystic who tried to kill the Tsar’s general and wound up stealing his kids and raising them without gender. The Jewish anarchists who fought pogroms and zionism both, who went on to keep anarchism alive in the dead time after World War II. The punk rockers who built a worldwide network of DIY spaces, the peace activists who started Food Not Bombs, a movement that still feeds millions of people across the world.

Everywhere I’ve been, every rock I’ve overturned, I’ve found anarchists, I’ve found my history. Things to be proud of and things to be ashamed of–but more the former than the latter.

Even before the invention of the words I use for myself today–anarchist, vegan, trans woman, queer–I’ve found revolutionaries who didn’t eat meat, I’ve found people raised to be men who’ve lived as women. I’ve found queer after queer. I’ve found people declaring that all authority is invalid, that mutual aid and solidarity–by those words or others–are the foundations of a healthy society.

The further back in history I looked, the less concerned I became with specific labels. I’ve realized we’ve always been here. That I’ve always had a history.

By looking back before anarchism, and realizing there are values I share with people with whom I’ve never shared a label, I’ve been able to more generously look at the recent past as well, to see people who’ve done good and beautiful things under the banner of god, or the banner of Marxism, or under no banner at all. 

I’ve found history in my ancestry too, and I’m proud of some of that too. My uncles in the Easter Rising, my grandfather in World War II. My family survived Cromwell and the potato famine, and that’s not nothing.

None of us exist in a vacuum. Each of us are interrelated in a thousand ways. If, geographically speaking, it’s by seeing landmarks that we know where we are, then as people, it’s by seeing our relationships with each other–the living and the dead–that we know who we are.

I care about history because it shows me who I am. Who I can be.

Also, I care about history because the stories are fun.