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The Feeling of Forgetting: Christianity, Race, and Violence in America

Online ISBN:
9780226827643
Print ISBN:
9780226827636
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

The Feeling of Forgetting: Christianity, Race, and Violence in America

John Corrigan
John Corrigan
Florida State University
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
6 July 2023
Online ISBN:
9780226827643
Print ISBN:
9780226827636
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

The violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, exemplified the entanglement of religion and race in America. It also revealed the enmeshment of White trauma with trauma suffered by Native Americans and African Americans who, with Whites, are damaged by the historical violence perpetrated by Whites. Whites and the groups they have harmed remain dysfunctionally attached to each other. White Americans have tried to forget their perpetrations of violence against other groups to whom they are attached, but they cannot, even with the help of religion. Christianity throughout American history, and especially evangelicalism, has urged a forgetting of the past. It has urged Christians to forget crimes and misdeeds about which they feel guilt or shame and be reborn for a future. Whites have sought to repress memory of their violence against other groups, but the emotional construction of memory, which entwines it with forgetting, has made that impossible. Whites experience their trauma as a feeling of forgetting, a feeling that something is there but cannot be named. Whites, African Americans, and Native Americans all are haunted by such a feeling of forgetting, which is similar to an experience of the uncanny, or of melancholia, but yet distinct. White trauma disorients, and undermines group identity by raising questions about the legitimacy, purpose, and social standing of the group. Some Whites periodically turn to radical racist and authoritarian ideologies that divide the world into hard binaries as a means of worldview defense. Violence, such as at the Capitol, ensues.

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