Higher Ground: Erasing History and the Importance of Art During Trying Times
I’m late for my February edition, so March it is, and I’m sliding in to your inbox like a late fool. These past eight weeks have been hectic with school work and this month in particular has been very busy. But here we go.
First, I’d like to acknowledge a few things that happened in February on the newsletter and link to them in case you missed them.
My Teen Journal, Part 1. I shared some snippets from my teenage journal, when I was fifteen, and included some grown up notes for clarity and context, and to hopefully show growth. I plan to add more, if I can. It’ll depend on what I feel can be shared and how much of my journals I can find. I went through several notebooks in my teens.
Poetry has arrived to the newsletter and library. I finally added a poem to the growing collection of free and downloadable short fiction pieces. Which means I had to rename the Short Stories page. Currently I’m calling it Weaver’s Library but I am open to suggestions. The first poem is by author and poet E.A. Noble and is in honor of Black History Month.
Nat’s Letter of February is free. By way of a snafu on my part, I sent out the paid letter to everyone, so I just made it free. In February’s letter, I take a deep dive into the context of one of my teen journal entries. It’s called #NotAllChristians™️.
In this newsletter I’m gonna talk a bit about Black History Month and artistry. It’s March now, so technically Black History Month has ended, but that’s the thing — Black History in America is infinite and an intricate part of our nation’s fabric. We can’t ignore it and we certainly shouldn’t erase it, like the current administration and Republican party wants to. If you’re not sure what that looks like, to have Black History erased, let me demonstrate it for you based on my own experience of being educated primarily through a conservative Christian homeschooling program.
Pictured above is the burning of Greenwood, Black Wall Street. Photo By United States Library of Congress - https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95517018/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27952587.
Erasure of Black History.
I was homeschooled and it was not a great experience for me. We primarily worked out of Christian-based educational packets that covered four topics: Math, Science, Social Studies, and English. I was mostly left to my own devices and had to just work through these packets on my own. A lot of self-discipline is involved in that way of learning and as a young boy, I primarily worked on the Social Studies packets. I found English, Math, and Science frustrating and so I would fly through the Social Studies packets. Eventually, my mom would check in on my progress and find I hadn’t been working on the other three topics, and scold me. I would then play catch up on those, and then stop and go back to Social Studies until she would randomly check in and scold me again. Rinse, repeat. Arguably, the best education I got as a kid was through the Rolla Public Library, as my mom would routinely take us there. After I aged out of children’s books, I didn’t find the older books to my liking — they seemed too mature for me. This was in the 1990s and the Middle Grade and YA genres weren’t as fleshed out as they are now. For a while, I struggled finding things to read. After I found out about our Cherokee ancestry on my dad’s side, I went into the history section and sought out all the books I could find on Native Americans. I wanted to learn about the indigenous peoples of America, but it was abysmal and depressing. All of the books I went through were framed as an exploration of westward expansion of the United States with the theme “How the West Was Won.” That meant they were all about slaughter, genocide, peace treaties, and breaking peace treaties. No books were helping me learn about the people, just how they were thrashed by white settlers and young America. Frustrated, I eventually moved away from those books and began to explore other history books, I remember reading several books on film history, which were fascinated.
So, that gives you a brief picture of what my education as a young lad looked like. It wasn’t until I went into the public school system as a Freshman that my education took a better shape. But those early years, and all of that Christian-based Social Studies packets didn’t teach me much about Black History. I remember learning a brief amount about American slavery, but it was brief and not very detailed. And since the packets were geared towards a very white patriotic narrative, it was pretty light reading — so to speak.
I grew up in Missouri and I occasionally went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, as we had cousins there that we were close to. All those trips to Tulsa and guess what I never learned about? The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. I learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre from Antonio French of St. Louis during Black History Month of 2015. I had begun following French on Twitter the summer before in the aftermath of Mike Brown’s killing by an officer of Ferguson, Missouri. We had moved to the St. Louis area a few months before Brown was killed. French wrote a detailed thread on Twitter about the Tulsa Race Massacre and I was shocked at the time that I had never heard of it. I’m not shocked now. I get it now. I was raised on White History which chooses to erase as much of Black History as possible. I learned a lot of Black History that month in 2015 from Twitter. I tried to absorb as much of it as possible, and no it wasn’t all on Twitter, I would learn about something, and then go out and research and read up. I’ve been going back to school and I’m in my final year of my English degree and when I first started back I made a commitment to try to pack my academic schedule with as much classes that would help fill gaps in my education from my youth. I took a course on American Slavery, it was superb and thorough. Many of my Literature courses have covered women, black, Latino, queer, gay, and other authors that aren’t white, heterosexual dudes — I got that already; I’m glaring at you, Shakespeare. And I’ve learned a lot of things I wasn’t taught growing up, because it was erased from my Christian-based educational packets. I also learned that there were a lot of things being said and written about that I was taught people back then just didn’t understand. No, they weren’t listening. Not to black leaders or feminist authors who were shouting it to the heavens. Not to Quakers who were anti-slavery and pushed back against the institution. No, they knew better, but they chose not to be better.
But the sad part is that in order to get this better-rounded education, I’ve had to pay out my ass because college is expensive. Meaning, this information was not very accessible to me all these years. And that’s another way we can erase Black History — removing it from public libraries, public schools, private schools, homeschooling packets, and more. When what is freely accessible becomes tainted or condensed into a political agenda that erases entire people from the history books and bans their books, it gets paywalled behind higher education institutions and academic journals. And then we end up having to learn about the horrible thing white people did in Tulsa from someone on social media. And that’s not cool, that’s backwards.
This is me at 17 years old as a melodrama villain named Pinkham Mudstone, III.
But what about artistry?
Make it. And don’t stop making it. These are hard times for sure and it’s easy to grow weary, but as an artist myself I have to remind myself that it’s important to keep making art.
Art is resistance. Art is strength, courage, power. Art is love. Art is distraction from the horrid, mundane, and unbearable. Art is necessary. Keep at it despite the world and in spite of it — and because of it. Do it for you and do it for the world.
Some art is on the nose. Some is nonfiction, some fiction. Some is comedy. During dark times, we need comedy. All the comedy. Comedy is an important art form for distracting people from torment and bringing a smile to their face.
When I was a young actor, 17 to be precise, I played a melodrama villain in a play, and before each performance we’d sit in the green room and the director, Deborah DeWitt, would take us through a series of relaxation exercises, and then give us a pep talk. One night she informed us her sister was in the audience, and that she almost didn’t come because her little girl had just been killed by a drunk driver. She was in the throes of grief unlike any other. She told Dewitt she couldn’t come, but DeWitt told her that was the very reason she had to come. She needed to be distracted for two hours from the horror she was going through. So DeWitt told us that on that night we were only performing for one woman, a grieving mother, and it was our goal to make her laugh. To make her forget about her grief for those two hours. I remember thinking to myself that was the hardest thing I’d ever been asked to do. We acted the hell out of that performance that night, and later we learned we were successful. She laughed and had a blast. And told DeWitt she was right, it was what she needed.
So yes, make art. Serious art, pointed art. But also make silly, over-the-top, mustache-having villain art — because that’s important too.
“Higher Ground” by Stevie Wonder.
I’m gonna hand it off to Stevie Wonder. Click play and let the man cook…
