“Memory” — or “rememory,” in the Toni Morrison sense — are pleasing and convenient fictions when marshaled by leftist academics. They are a hamfisted and remarkably sophistic way of justifying contemporary emotionalism by granting it the patina of historical relevance.

When... https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1287737122477223947

...leftist academics speak of memory, they intentionally bastardize the concept. Memory is not genetic, save for maybe in Monarch butterflies; it is the product of living through experiences.

What leftists try to convince you is memory is actually just received narratives ...

... they’ve learned and subsequently repeat. They no more “remember” slavery than they do reconstruction or the 1903 World’s Fair.

The object is part of the project to define race as a social construct, with the authenticity of that race determined by acquiescence to a vetted..

...cultural narrative.

The problem is, though it tries to skirt earlier notions of race as being blood-determined, it winds up, through its own highbrow academic circuitousness, arriving at the same point: that “race” is essentialist.

Today, as more and more “progressives”..

...adopt this faux-epistemic paradigm, some will openly accept that racial essentialism, which is a poisonous and scientifically invalid misuse of population or hereditary genetics; indeed, many on the right engage in such reductionism.

But here’s the truth: to believe...

...that you have the “memory” of something you’ve never experienced as a means to claim some sort of singular ownership over an historical set of events, is merely academically-sanctioned historical theft.

The upshot is opportunistic and cynical. It leads to demands for, say..

...reparations, or public apologias from people who, like those demanding them, are not in any but the most insignificant ways — often, eg, merely their birth color or sex — responsible for historical ills that as a nation, we’ve long tried to remedy.

You live now. Refuse...

...these historically and intellectually incoherent calls to surrender your agency to those who demand you tether that agency to people you never knew, and deeds you never did — and who justify this demand by insisting both you and they are responsible for memories neither...

...of you have. Those “memories” are simply of *learning history* — and as the 1619 Project both knows and understands, compelling you to learn and accept historically faulty narratives is a way to keep you forever on the defensive *now and into the future.*

It’s a grift...

...dressed up as scholarship. And it’s mechanisms are easy enough to learn and identify, should you work through them methodically.

Here's how it works: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=55952 

The 1619 Project is post-structuralist propaganda. It is merely the offspring of the Howard Zinn project.

-- Which Howard Zinn didn't even believe. And as we're now seeing with the way its author is spinning the 1619 Project...

...she doesn't believe it, either.