Try turning to Black history.
 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
When I was raising my daughter, I often tried, like many parents do, to protect her from exposure to the world's hardships and cruelties. It didn't work. As she grew, the gentle life lessons she'd absorbed from Elmo and Dora the Explorer faded and gave way to the constant drumbeat of a 24-hour news cycle, social media and a culture driven almost entirely by the internet. |
By the time she left home for college last year, a vivid awareness of mass shootings, natural disasters, the climate crisis, poverty, racial and political hatred and violence, and at last, the unimaginable — a silent, invisible pandemic that has so far killed nearly six million people — had all become undeniably woven into the fabric of life. It had become impossible to look her in the eye and tell her everything was going to be OK. It wasn't, not really, and she knew it. |
Yet, somehow, our family found ways to keep a sense of enjoyment and purpose in our daily lives, and an openness to possibility — even optimism — about the future. Regardless of the circumstances we face, it's what humans do. |
In a guest essay this week, the Harvard historian and National Book Award-winning author Tiya Miles describes her own reckoning with what she calls "a condition of apocalyptic anxiety" that seems to have crept into so many of our lives. That reckoning was forced by her child's expression of despair at the state of the world and her desire to stand by her parental assurance: "This is not the end. This is a change." Remaining in "this foxhole of doomsday thinking," Miles writes, will not do. |
Miles, a Montana resident, and a scholar of African American, Indigenous American and women's history, found a "hack" for avoiding panic about the future in the area she knows best — history, in particular Black history. Enslaved Africans, she argues, certainly faced a sort of apocalypse: torn from their homes, families and homeland; sold; brutalized and dehumanized; their daily lives featured the constant threat of annihilation. How did those who survived slavery find their way? What did they value? What did they do? |
Miles's take is both unflinching and hopeful. She views history as the human record of not only cruelty, calamity and human failure, but also of change, adaptation and survival — what we now often call resilience. In revisiting the transformative story of a Black mother and daughter in the mid-19th century separated forever by the slave trade and the journey of a family keepsake that had symbolized their physical and spiritual survival, Miles finds her own map to lead her out of anxiety and despair. |
Miles's insight is rooted in Black history, but it is not only about race. It is about how we choose to understand the past, and how we use it to face the future. A careful and compassionate consideration of what has gone before can shed light on what we got right as well as what we got wrong. It might even give us hope. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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