Healing History: Honoring Holocaust Remembrance Day & Black History Month
Sitting on the couch a few days ago, trying to relax after a hard work day, my friend and I talked about Black History Month and International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Both would soon be upon us. The former event could be more celebratory. Both could also be read as a way to avoid the evaporation of history that takes place unless we have our eye on the ball about human tragedy’s presence in our psyches. And how remembering allows us to grow and possibly transcend.
Here is a link to learn more about Black History Month from the Library of Congress.
Both domains teach us to work against our “resistance” to remembering and, thus, feeling—and, moreover, utilizing our imagination to bear witness. Resistance is a word we all know. However, in psychoanalytic therapy, “resistance” signifies a refusal to allow one’s conscious mind space to open up to a threatening thought. Freud teaches us that resistance operates beyond our control. Unconscious defenses control resistance. That’s what makes working with resistance attractive and mind boggling. Resistances greets us as a puzzle, a maze, an Iron Curtain, a form of mental totalitarianism, a banality, a strength, an appetite. Resistance is probably the Royal Road to True Agency and true feltness. But finding its gold means suffering to get there. Working through resistance produces a golden feeling. But it a treasure hard to attain.
Too little resistance means no friction; too much resistance means the patient cannot bear much engagement. A healthy dose of resistance makes for interesting conversation. Many of us resist the truth. Remember, how Oedipus was told over and over again by that annoying Greek chorus that he was susceptible to murdering his father and taking his mother to his bed. Would you happen to know if he listened? Do we listen?
Today, my friend and I felt we had to work with our resistance and understand what each event meant on the calendar, not just our computers but our souls. We had felt worse than sad and burdened by the problem of evil in human actions and the imagination. People are talking a lot about evil these days. It was interesting that no one had much to say about psychological causes. Does transgenerational trauma cause evil, passed down from one traumatized tribe to another? Is evil an instinct somehow connected to what Freud called “the death drive?” Is evil what C.G Jung referred to as the human shadow, a place inside the psyche where the conscious mind (the ego) remains unaware but exerts enormous control over the human personality unless the shadow is personified and an ongoing dialogue with that part-self takes place.
Does the tendency towards resistance in human nature cause evil. Does resistance create tribes. Do tribes insist that we projec the disowned human shadow onto a “less-desirable” race? My friend and I agreed that humans were a ways off from acknowledging the problem of evil as a psychological fact.
Repercussions reverberate around the world. We had just learned that the UN top court ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza but had stopped short of a cease-fire. “The ruling amounted to an overwhelming rebuke of Israel’s wartime conduct,” wrote the AP, “and added to the mounting international pressure to halt the nearly 4-month-old offensive that has killed more than 26,000 Palestinians, decimated vast swaths of Gaza, and driven nearly 80% of its 2.3 million from their homes.” Allowing the ruling to stand stung many, given how the Jewish state was founded in response to the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II.
I remember recently, just a week before October 7, going to visit Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Resource Center, which provides access to a variety of resources exploring the history of the Holocaust and significant events that occurred during the Holocaust. It struck me as somehow both logical and illogical that, after one had walked through the harrowing maze, taking you through the days leading up to Hitler’s rise, the declaration of WWII, and the unimaginable atrocities of the “Final Solution,” as one exists the exhibition, many images are showing how the refugees from Eastern Europe found a safe harbor in what was then called Palestine but what they called Eretz Yisrael. I spent some time there, as the museum ended its tour, considering how the early luminaries in Jewish thought during the rise of Israel—Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz—voiced concern as to how a Jewish State rather than a multicultural one such as what we have in the United States would be the answer to the tragic and cycical problem of European racism.
To get a feel for the educational aspect of this museum, one could visit its website: I recently found myself riveted by its page on The Trial of Adolf Eichman: https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/eichmann-trial/about.html.
Eichman was considered to be the mastermind of the Final Solution, “which consisted of all aspects of the persecution of millions of Jews, including their arrest and imprisonment in concentration camps, their deportation to extermination camps.” The Trial riveted the world. “This was the first time that the Holocaust was presented to a competent judicial body in full detail. I recommend you watch some of the documentation of this trial, which I posted here: .
My friend, an African American gay man, and I did not know how to speak of today’s incongruities without perhaps having an argument or entirely agreeing; we had not yet traversed that rubicon of our complex feelings about Israel/Gaza/oppression. We knew enough, however, to stay in our feelings. Nothing would be gained by arguing over content. We stayed in our process. This emphasis of PROCESS over CONTENT made us therpaists — and friends.
But we could agree about the importance of knowing one’s history and never NOT fighting for justice, Never Forgetting. We did a bit of research as to how Black History Month evolved. We discovered the work of a particular Black historian, Carter G. Woodsen. With his encouragement, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1926 announced the second week of February as “Negro History Week.” This is because Feb 12 was the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, and February 14 was the birthday of Frederick Douglas. The Black communities have celebrated both holidays since the 19th century.
Woodsen worked tirelessly to make the intellectual survival of Black people an essential part of its uplift, writing. He viewed the Jewish people as a model for recording their history, struggles, crises, and psychological suffering. Without history, a people cannot thrive, even if that history feels to be a concoction of needs, wishes, facts, stories, myths, and any number of historical pressures and biases:
“If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. The American Indians left no continuous record. He needed to appreciate the value of tradition, and where is he today? The Hebrews keenly appreciated the value of tradition, as is attested by the Bible itself. Despite worldwide persecution, therefore, he is a significant factor in our civilization.”
Throughout the 1930s, Negro History Week fought against the prevailing myth of the White South, that the civil war was not about slavery–that the slaves had been well-taken care of–but was instead the aggression of the North on the South. By 1970, Black educators and students at Kent State first proposed Black History Month. Many criticized the notion of Black History Month as racist, criticizing the failure to honor Black History for the rest of the year. “I don’t want a Black History Month,” noted actor Morgan Freeman. “Black history is American history.”
My friend and I spoke of the Harlem Renaissance—and how so much of it involved same-sex loving persons. An area we have studied for many years before even knowing each other. I told him I was close with Steven Corbin and had even been his lover once. He was a Black gay author who died from AIDS, like too many Black gay luminaries. He wrote a book, “No Easy Place to Be,” which recreates life in Harlem in the 1920s.
We were familiar with the book, “Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance,” written by Christa Schwarz focus. It explores the Harlem Renaissance as a literary phenomenon fundamentally shaped by same-sex, interested men. Christa Schwarz focuses on Countée Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Bruce Nugent. She explores these writers' sexually dissident or gay literary voices. We also considered important Black Lesbians, such as June Jordan and Audre Lorde. The figures of the Second Harlem Renaissance, Marlon Riggs, Assotto Saint, and Essex Hemphill, all died from AIDS.
My friend commented that, very often, when we think of Black History Month, we tend to think of our ancestors, but what about Black creators today.
Through a search, we found: Danez Smith is a Black, Queer Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN, who is the author of a collection of poetry called Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020) and Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Their first collection, [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.
Here is a lovely poem by Danez Smith:
Speaking of history, I just learned, in the online Jewish blog, Kveller.com, of Holocaust scholar Alex Dancyg, who is being held hostage in Gaza, and spent his life traveling between Poland and Israel, teaching each people how to speak of their shared history. He worked at the Polish desk at Yad Vashem. He is alive and still teaches the other hostages about their history. We learned this from Nili Margalit, a nurse helping captives in Gaza, who witnessed his lessons often.