Cancel/erase
This idea that we are erasing something, that history is being erased if a tiny clock figurine is moved on the edge of a small rural town...
It is not history that is being erased or threatened. It is a false blanket of phony security; an identity constructed around the idea that Britain is Great! The idea that everything we have ever done as a country is fantastic, is what is under threat.
There is a terror of what might be revealed if we start to look honestly both at the past and the present. What if black people want revenge? What if they want to do the same to us as we’ve done to them? What if we have to be honest and admit that we did something wrong? What if we have to feel shame? That we aren’t as wonderful and blameless as we pretend we are? What if we have to actually admit that this identity is fragile - it means almost nothing - that in fact our lives are hard, our society doesn’t support us properly, many of us have missed out on the education that we deserve, but we are multiply excluded from many realms of the supposed wonderful British identity, that we can only truly access symbolically, through parades and flags and gestures.
If you have experienced multiple times and traumas, and your coping mechanism to deal with that is to identify with your oppressor, the possible discovery of this cover-up is indeed a terrifying prospect.
There may be a collapse. There may be required a reassessment of the meaning of your life, you may have to re-assess everything you’ve built yourself around - rebuild yourself from almost scratch.
However, what you might like to remember is that underneath all the harm and all the wrongdoing and buried under all those false blankets, is an actual real person, whose pain is valid and whose wrongs must be acknowledged and addressed. Restoration is indeed possible, and on the other side of the collapse into self-doubt, self hatred and all those other horrible consequences of realising what is truly wrong in your life and others, is the possibility of belonging.
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What is being erased for you? What is under threat? Can you contemplate the possibility of the loss, and envision what's next?
