WOW! Thank you, Cristina Breshears! This is so excellent, so deeply important, so incredibly relevant to the collective tragic and violent patterns that we see playing out on repeat over and over again! That is, if we are courageous enough and care enough to see.
I deeply appreciate and respect Cristina’s courageous journey of inquiry and bravely and wisely following the threads wherever they may lead. This process is what I believe and experience is one of breaking our hearts open and leading us ever more deeply into fierce love and caring for all of life.
May we all be inspired to look and learn and love and care more deeply about all of our sisters and brothers everywhere. — Molly
What Story Do These Fragments
Tell Together?
For the past several years, I have spent hundreds of hours following my grandfathers through four centuries of American history. I’ve not been looking for villains, but I am finding patterns.
One deed meant very little by itself. Or one sermon or military record or newspaper clipping or family story. None of them individually explained a life much less my family. But eventually the documents began speaking to one another. Small repetitions became larger currents. What first appeared to be isolated incidents slowly revealed an inheritance.
I think we all know that patterns become habit. On average, it takes about sixty-six repetitions to build a habit (this is why I fail at my New Year’s Resolutions). Habit becomes tradition. And tradition becomes culture, it becomes etched into our national story.
My grandfather James probably never woke in the morning asking himself how he might uphold white supremacy. By the time he was born, much of it had become ordinary. His own father, my great-grandfather Joshua, had belonged to a generation that helped build that racial order through war, racialized terror, Jim Crow, and the mythology of the Lost Cause.
But Grandpa James inherited something different, something quieter and easier to overlook. He inherited its normalcy. White supremacy was already baked into Oklahoma law. It was writ large across political campaigns throughout the 1920s-1970s. And I remember the segregated hours at the swimming pool in that Oklahoma sundown town -- in 1972. I remember discovering the Anadarko lynching postcard tucked deep inside our family Bible.
None of these things announced themselves as extraordinary to the people living among them. They were simply the atmosphere. Accumulated dust particles that could lead to a dust storm.
That is how cultures perpetuate themselves. Not only through explicit hatred, but through an accumulation of inherited assumptions, familiar symbols, and habits so commonplace they become almost invisible.
Perhaps that is why certain images have unsettled me this year. Pantone's Cloud Dancer (I wrote about that earlier this year). A Target Halloween costume reminiscent of a minstrel performer. The Sydney Sweeney "Good Jeans/Good Genes" campaign. And now Converse advertisements whose imagery has prompted many people to see echoes of nooses, Klan hoods, or chilling photographs from America's long history of racial terror.
[Re the Converse print advertisement and commercial: the print ad is a composite of different historical traumas. It is a stark, high-contrast silhouette composed of a geometry of hate and empty shoes. The specific framing in the commercial with dangling jewelry and hands reaching upward closely mimics horrific historical photographs from the American South such as infamous Mississippi lynchings. Westerns and southern gothic films frequently use this exact framing to build tension right before a hanging like in the classic films like The Ox-Bow Incident, or dark thrillers where a character reaches up to a makeshift noose in a moment of despair.]
I don't know what any designer intended. No one does. So yes, some of these associations may be accidental and my own overactive mind being saturated with the acts of my great-grandfathers.
The images that are conjured may arise from simply careless choices on the part of the marketing team. But none of these examples passed through only one set of hands. A lot of time and a lot of attention from many, many people went into these choices.
The truth is, individual examples can almost always be explained away in isolation. But after spending years tracing my own family's inheritance, I have learned that history rarely repeats as a single event. It repeats as a pattern. And patterns deserve our attention.
Cultures often reveal what they have not fully examined through the symbols they continue to reproduce. That doesn't mean every image is secretly communicating hate. It means symbols carry memory whether we intend them to or not.
A noose is never just a rope in America. A hood is never simply a hood. "Strange Fruit" is never merely a song. ((There have been no fewer than ten incidents of “Strange Fruit” in this country this year.)) History leaves emotional fingerprints on ordinary objects. These are part of our cultural memory whether advertisers intend them to be or not.
When the same visual motifs keep appearing, especially at a time when our public discourse is increasingly comfortable with dehumanizing language and our institutions are under strain, dismissing every concern as "people are just looking for racism" misses something important. Cultural meaning isn't created only by artists or advertisers. It's created by history and by the people who have lived through it.
Intent matters. But impact, I think, matters more. My father taught me this without ever realizing it.
After he died, he left behind a box of maps, courthouse records, yellow sticky notes, penciled arrows, photocopies from archives scattered across the country. For years I thought he had simply collected boring genealogical facts. Now I think what he was really leaving me was a way of paying attention.
One arrow on a map means very little. But ten arrows begin pointing somewhere. One family story can be dismissed. A hundred years of repeating stories become inheritance. And four hundred years of perpetuating these patterns (even unconsciously) become who we are.
I think my father was trying to understand our family in the years before his death. In leaving me with his genealogical archive, he unknowingly taught me how to read history differently.
History leaves breadcrumbs. Years spent tracing my grandfathers have changed how I see the world. I no longer dismiss recurring symbols simply because each one can be explained away in isolation. I have learned to ask a different question: What story do these fragments tell together?
Standing on the shore, the ocean appears calm. Each wave looks separate from the last. Orderly. But beneath the surface, powerful currents move in directions we cannot see. They gather strength not because of one wave, but because of thousands moving together.
History feels much the same. One advertisement is probably just an advertisement. One slogan is probably just a slogan. One image may be coincidence. But when the same motifs return again and again, when they echo our deepest national wounds, when they stir memories we have not yet fully confronted and reckoned with, it is worth asking what current we are drifting into.
The opposite of forgetting is not remembrance. It is attention. And the work of history is not simply to remember what happened, it is to recognize when old currents begin moving beneath new waters.
Because undercurrents are easiest to escape before they become strong enough to pull us under. We do not honor history by memorizing it or by performing patriotism . We honor it by recognizing its patterns before they become our habits. It is a civic responsibility.
"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." ~ Maya Angelou
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