Unforgetting: A Promise Worth Keeping

• In Event: Critical and Embodied Literacies: Narrations of Unforgetting by Intergenerational Women of Color

Abstract

“I trust the lens through which you see us.” These are the words my late and effervescent sisterfriend *Lana told me once I began recruiting Black women for my dissertation study. Before I could even ask, she had volunteered to be among the Black women I broke bread with, laughed with, listened to, and learned more about as they shared the joys, triumphs, and challenges of working with Black youth and their families within and beyond academic contexts. We talked about freedom, self-determination, resistance, liberation, futures we dreamt of and hoped future generations would experience. We talked about what it meant to (re)turn to our communities to work with and for our people.
And though she is no longer with us, I (re)member *Lana. I (re)member her every time I teach my students about the shape of Black women’s impact (Gumbs, 2012) and why it is so imperative to employ lenses that make room for depth, dimension, and difference. I especially (re)member her now as I do not trust the lenses through which I am seen as a Black woman whose family is not native to the United States. Neither do I trust the lenses through which other historically marginalized groups are seen. Rather than privileging sight, as *Lana was also a staunch advocate for disability rights and justice, what I believe she is inviting us to consider, albeit in more nuanced ways, is what elicits that trust she is referring to – that being, one’s orientation and disposition towards the complexities that underlie another’s lived experiences and stories – particularly Black women.
Therefore, unforgetting is not only an act of resistance, but it is also a deliberate act of refusal. Unforgetting is the fulfillment of my promise to those who are no longer with us and to those whose dreams I now live. As a Black woman educator navigating the tumultuous and highly politicized terrain that is higher education, I intentionally unforget *Lana and the countless other Black women who were/are with me in the struggle for education for liberation. It is from them and with them that I instruct my own students to don lenses that (re)center the humanity of those with whom they will eventually teach, nurture, and send off into uncertain futures equipped as agents of change.

Author

• Camilla J. Bell-Ferdinand, Colgate University