In September, one of my cousins got married. He’s (a very tanned) Puerto Rican and his wife is white. They were married on a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, right along a river bend, beside a remodeled barn that was once central to the labor an enslaved population performed there. Huge oak trees framed the ceremony, their branches heavy with Spanish moss that danced when the wind blew.
The wedding included several nods to Puerto Rico: small flags lining the buffet table, a plena performance, and a DJ set that was primarily Bad Bunny. As with many weddings, this one had a small memorial table with photos of those who could not attend because they had passed. Among the photos was one of my paternal grandfather, a Black Puerto Rican whose grandparents on both sides had once been enslaved.
A wooden cross carved by his grandfather—who took up carpentry after the emancipation of Puerto Rico’s enslaved population—is now part of our hometown museum’s holdings in Gurabo. Throughout the night (and even now, months later), I struggled with what it meant for my grandfather’s photo to sit on that table, on a plantation.
No doubt he would have approved. He was a proponent of mejorar la raza and himself married lighter. All three of his children began with Black or Brown spouses and eventually partnered—through second marriages, or in my uncle’s case, a fourth—with someone white. Internalized racism is one of colonialism’s most efficient afterlives and that approval, itself, is part of the machinery. “Mejorar la raza” isn’t a contradiction to plantation weddings: it’s their psychic scaffolding.
In light of the Trump administration’s ongoing terror, my cousin’s wife recently posted about how much of what we see online is manufactured to make us turn on one another, to believe we hate each other, and to distract us from the real work of holding those in power accountable. I should mention that she and her family are Republicans and Trump supporters, so much so that despite growing up in Washington State, one of her brothers attended the wedding in cowboy cosplay and, during his toast, mentioned how much he loved the Second Amendment—apropos of nothing in particular.
Calls for unity like hers depend on the oppressed’s willingness to forget—history, power, and to also forget who has always been asked to absorb the cost. But forgetting doesn’t erase violence; it metabolizes it. It turns history into little more than mood lighting and then asks the descendants of the brutalized to relax into it. Thinking of my grandfather’s photo, I felt haunted by the collision of symbols that for that night, we allowed ourselves to be anesthetized by: plena beside slave cabins, Bad Bunny echoing across land worked by enslaved people, my grandfather’s face placed gently on a remembrance table. We were asked for the night to treat the context as if it were neutral, as if memory were additive rather than corrosive, and as if honoring the dead doesn’t also risk conscripting them into narratives they never consented to.
Usually, I’m bored by white supremacy. Even as I understand it to be fueling the lion’s share of the world’s violence, directly or indirectly, it strikes me as an uninteresting lie: the gluttons of the world convincing us their greed is something to aspire to. I regard it with mild contempt. Okay, you think white people—with their oily hair and sunburns—are the superior race, but baby, they’re not even optimized to survive the climate crisis they’ve created. White supremacy is a logic sustained by repetition rather than coherence. And yet, we know too well boring doesn’t mean harmless but rather normalized. This normalization is key to how plantations become romantic venues, how “love each other” becomes a moral alibi, how power hides behind a call for civility while continuing to extract and pillage, and how history is stripped of its teeth and sold back as vibes.
In her calls for love against violence, my cousin’s wife’s plea reminded me of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Though I liked it, I haven’t been the biggest fan of the film. I’ve argued to anyone who would listen that its messages around race feel convoluted. Still, her claim had all the contours of what the character, Remmick, calls for in that movie. His appeal is not to justice, but to harmony: a harmony that requires forgetting who benefits from silence and who pays for it. The insistence that we are being manipulated into hatred becomes a way to delegitimize anger itself, particularly when that anger is historically and materially justified. In Sinners, Remmick’s appeal is seductive precisely because it frames violence as misunderstanding and power as abstraction.
A hand painted sign at their wedding proclaimed, “Love actually is all around,” and the red lettering seemed to drip from the canvas like blood. What is radical love that asks nothing of power? On the walk from the wedding’s manicured lawn to the parking lot, a sign indicated that if one followed the marsh, you would arrive at the former “slave cabins.”
That night, I dreamed my cousin was going to be cannibalized and we had to prepare to save his life from a bloodthirsty cabal. Only hours earlier, we had been drinking champagne and eating cake beneath Spanish moss and twinkling string lighting. In that warm glow, some of the shadows cast by the mossy tree branches looked like bodies swaying in the wind.
There is a cost to so much delicious forgetting.
subvert and worship 
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