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Fish Out of Water, or the Oxygen in the Room: History Isn’t Safe — And That’s Exactly Why They Want [1]
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Date: 2025-06-25
This essay originally appeared on Medium. Republished here with permission of the author.
When books are banned and history is erased, it’s not about “balance” — it’s about power. Here’s what it feels like to keep teaching, writing, and remembering when the air itself is running out.
There are seasons when America pretends it is ready for a conversation. After tragedy — after the murder, after the trial, after the marches — suddenly race is on every headline and in every classroom. For a while, the doors open: publishers seek out new voices, universities declare their commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” There are panels and public statements, and for a fleeting moment it feels as if the country might finally face itself.
But I’ve lived through too many cycles not to recognize the pattern. The backlash is never quiet or accidental. DEI, Critical Race Theory, affirmative action — these weren’t retired or “debated in good faith.” They were hunted. They were attacked in court, massacred in legislatures, strangled by executive order and public campaign. This wasn’t drift; it was a coordinated assault. And after the public outcry is over, the silence is enforced with a purpose. The air isn’t just stale — it’s being choked out of the room.
This is not the slow fade of a social fad; it’s the violence of white supremacy, emboldened and increasingly open. And the truth is, the extreme right is winning battles — state by state, district by district, court by court. In some places, they no longer even bother with the dog whistles. Supremacy is once again exactly what it says on the label.
And for those who think the Nazi comparison is too harsh, I ask you to look harder. When books are banned and memory is policed, when entire communities are targeted for erasure, and when history itself is rewritten to suit the powerful — these are not random echoes. In Germany, the Nazi regime began by burning books, purging classrooms, and criminalizing “un-German” ideas. Memory was suffocated before people were. We are watching, in real time, the American version of memory on trial: the outlawing of honest history, the erasure of dissent, the transformation of truth into contraband.
People comfort themselves with the thought that “at least this time it’s not as bad, not as violent.” They forget that spectacle and silence are both tools of repression. There might not be a George Floyd, gasping his last breath on the evening news every week. But the violence is still here — it has simply retreated into the shadows, woven into the everyday policies that shape the lives of 47 million Black people. That’s fourteen percent of the population — forty-seven million stories, hopes, and futures, now relegated to background static in a country of over 330 million. But what does it mean when the numbers don’t add up — when those stories barely register, when we’re background static instead of citizens? When we aren’t visible as victims or martyrs, we’re written out as if we are simply not there at all.
It’s not that Black people, or Black struggle, have become obsolete. We’ve become wallpaper — unacknowledged, omnipresent, ignored unless needed as a symbol or a scapegoat. The public conversation is transfixed by immigration, by the border, by the next spectacle of crisis. ICE raids, mass deportations, new walls: these are powerful and real. They affect millions of lives, and the cruelty is impossible to ignore. But make no mistake — when America has exhausted its rage and anxiety on the immigrant population, when the dust settles from the latest round of insuppressible “reform,” the cycle will return to its oldest scapegoat. Black people will once again be America’s unfinished business.
This isn’t just a prediction — it’s history. Whenever there is a threat, a crisis, or a need for distraction, the country’s gaze eventually swings back to the descendants of those it enslaved. That’s the cycle: erasure, distraction, scapegoating, silence, then a return to the old target. We are told we are “out of season,” that race is “yesterday’s problem.” But what’s actually happening is a reloading, a waiting game.
If you are feeling suffocated, it’s because you are meant to. The hope is that you will get tired, give up, move on. But we are not fish out of water. We are the oxygen in the room. We are the memory keepers, the witnesses, the teachers, and the survivors. The cycle does not end us — it reminds us why our refusal to forget, to go silent, is a radical act.
History isn’t safe. It isn’t supposed to be. That’s why they want it gone. The stories and records we fight to preserve are more than curriculum or scholarship — they are the living, breathing evidence that the lie never quite holds. And in time, when the cycle swings back, when the next moment arrives and the country remembers it needs its memory, what survives will be what we kept alive — against all odds, in the spaces where the air was running out.
But maybe what is most dangerous in this era is not simply the bans, or the purges, or the erasures. It is the making of fear into a virtue. The collective willingness to turn away, to numb out, to accept ignorance in exchange for peace and quiet. I have heard all the warnings before — about my work, about the work of others who refuse to write for easy consumption. “It’s too dense.” “It’s too much.” “No one will read it.” As if the story of Black America could ever be simple, as if the truth of this nation could be reduced to sound bites, as if a history centuries in the making could — or should — be flattened to fit the attention span of the comfortable.
But the reality is this: history has never belonged to the comfortable. The work of memory is hard because it has to be. It is the labor of breathing underwater, of holding onto the record when everyone else is pretending not to see. My pages are full for a reason. They carry the stories of my ancestors, the weight of lives that were never meant to survive. If the work is dense, it is because the world made it that way. Every silenced voice, every redacted page, every law designed to make us invisible is another layer we have to peel back just to tell the truth.
And if there are those who cannot — or will not — read it, the failure is not in the record but in the refusal to confront what it asks of them. The silence that follows is not emptiness; it is cowardice. What’s at stake here is not just the survival of memory, but the survival of the possibility of truth itself.
This is our moment of truth — not some distant day, not a headline-driven outcry, but the quiet, daily confrontation with the question: Will we choose comfort or conscience? Will we read, or will we let others decide what is worth knowing? Will we keep breathing life into the stories that remain, or let them suffocate in silence?
People say the work is too hard. That it’s too painful, too demanding, too dense to sit with. But that’s the point. What kind of nation survives by only telling itself easy stories? What kind of freedom is purchased by forgetting? History isn’t safe, and it shouldn’t be. The danger comes not from those who remember too much, but from those who remember nothing at all.
So yes, keep writing, even if it feels like shouting into a void. Even if it feels like spitting into the wind, with every word blowing back in your face. Keep teaching, even if the syllabus gets shorter every year. Keep remembering, even if your words feel heavy as stone. Because the air you protect — the oxygen of memory and truth — is the only thing that can keep us alive through the silence. And when the cycle turns, when the next moment of truth arrives, the country will need what you preserved.
I have a voice. Let them say the work is too dense. Let them say it’s too much. Because I am Black in America, and America never lets me forget — that I’m not a regular American. I’m an African American — and that’s different. So, when the air is thin and the stories are gone, what will be left is what you refused to let go.
And in my world, my message is still urgent. It still breathes with oxygen.
My history is not background static. History itself is the pulse of who we are, and who we have the courage to become. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
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