Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe

They crowded around the sculptures of the children in order to have their pictures taken with them. Who will stand in the midst of those children, and not denounce slavery? But what of its afterlives, its wake? This is, I think, what Michel-Rolph Trouillot points to as the inauthentic relation to The Past, when he writes: “What is obscene [here] is not a relation to The Past, but the dishonesty of that relation as it would happen in our present. The trivialization of slavery—and of the suffering it caused—inheres in that present. The ‘past’ fails to stay in the past.20 This is a past that is sectioned off from the present in which to “condemn slavery alone is the easy way out.” He continues, “What needs to be denounced here to restore authenticity is much less slavery than the racist present within which representations of slavery are produced.”21 The “past” fails to stay in the past.