How Should We Reckon With Difficult History and Collective Trauma?

We must look at it. Directly. Without flinching. Without the comfort of narrative redemption that lets us off easy. This is what I attempted in my novels—to force readers into the presence of historical atrocity and keep them there long enough to understand that sanitized versions of history are lies that perpetuate damage.

Too much contemporary reckoning is performative. People want acknowledgment without transformation. They want to say the right words, attend the right events, post the right things, and then return to their lives unchanged. Reckoning is not that comfortable. It demands that you fundamentally alter how you understand your place in the world and your complicity in systems of oppression.

Collective trauma—the kind that gets encoded in the body, in how we love, in how we raise children, in what we believe we deserve—cannot be solved through a single gesture or even a single generation. It's inherited. It moves through families and communities like a persistent wound that keeps reopening. You cannot overcome what you refuse to name. And you cannot heal what you haven't thoroughly examined.

What concerns me is the rush to resolution. People want to move past racism, past the legacy of slavery, past ongoing violence against Black bodies. But moving past without going through is just another form of erasure. The work requires us to stay in the difficult space, to let it transform us, to build something different from that transformed understanding.

For Black people, this means claiming our narratives fully—not just the triumphant ones, but the ones that show our complexity, our pain, our survival mechanisms, our humanity. For everyone, it means understanding that historical reckoning is not about guilt—it's about truth. And truth-telling is the only foundation for genuine change. We must make reckoning so rigorous, so unflinching, that it becomes impossible to return to comfortable lies.