WordRustler

Susan Sontag

But why is there not already, in the nation’s capital, which happens to be a city whose population  is overwhelmingly  Africa-American, a Museum of the History of Slavery?  Indeed, there is no Museum of the History of Slavery—the whole story, starting with the slave trade in Africa itself, not just selected parts, such as the Underground Railroad—anywhere in the United States.  This, it seems, is a memory judged too dangerous to social stability to activate and to create.  The Holocaust Memorial Museum and the future Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial are about what didn’t happen in America, so the memory-work doesn’t risk arousing an embittered domestic population against authority.  To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here.  Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States—a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history—is exempt.  That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful, belief in American exceptionalism.  The national consensus on American history as a history of progress […] focuses our attention on wrongs, both here and elsewhere, for which America sees itself as the solution or cure.