Willful Forgetting…

If the quote above sounds like it could apply to the erasure and rewriting of history that is going on today, you’re right.

But the words above were written over 500 years ago, in the opening lines of the 1598 Edict of Nantes, a decree that was meant to heal divisions between Protestants and Catholics, in a France that had been wracked by war and atrocities for the previous 40 years.

The new king, Henri IV, concluded that the only way to heal the kingdom was to forget the wars had ever happened.

The memory of everything that has taken place on both sides…shall remain extinct and dormant, as of a thing that never happened.

And just like that, everyone was ordered to forget.

King Henri’s policy was known as oubliance, and it ordered a kind of legal, national amnesia. Erasing the past, Henry IV believed, was a form of progress. Oubliance would move a kingdom mired in trauma into the future.1

The king could issue a decree, but it was up to the people to obey.

As you can imagine, oubliance didn’t work. Any therapist today could tell you why.

Oubliance didn’t work because the people refused to forget.

…And Willful Remembering

Long before King Henri’s decree, the pieces had already been put into place to preserve the stories of victims and to cultivate a kind of collective memory. As early as the 1540s, the French protestant Jean Crespin - a lawyer and printer - had begun to collect stores about Protestant victims of Catholic persecution. Crespin assembled trial proceedings and testimony, court hearings, first-hand accounts, and letters written to victims before they were executed, all sewn together with bits and pieces about the victims themselves. What their names were, where they had lived. Who their families were. And most importantly, why they held so tenaciously to their faith.

When Crespin published his collection in the 1550s, he called it the Book of Martyrs. It is also known as the History of Martyrs. To me, it’s an example of active remembering.

Crespin made use of a new technology: the printing press. Copies of his book were disseminated via secret networks that evaded Catholic censors and eventually found their way into the hands of eager readers.

That book, a single, simple object of paper and ink, helped forge a vast network among French Protestants. 16th-century culture was an oral culture. At night, by candlelight, or among congregations who met illicitly, the stories were read out loud. Clergy read them to parishioners. Parents read them to children, neighbors to each other. The stories stitched themselves into the minds of those who read and those who listened, shaping a sense of Protestant unity. The stories helped form an ethos: a collective sense of identity and purpose.

And through this kind of collective storytelling, the collection and transmission of memories, French Protestants endured and survived the worst of the Wars of Religion.

And they continued to refuse to forget, despite what the Edict of Nantes decreed.

That was then. This is now.

Keith Porter was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE officer, on New Year’s Eve, in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles.

I vaguely remember seeing something about Porter’s death soon after he was shot, but just as quickly as news about it appeared, it seemed to disappear. Only after the death of Renee Good and Alex Pretti has Porter’s name resurfaced. And only because of the tireless work of activists who are reminding others, over and over, that Keith Porter must be remembered. That his death is no different than Good’s or Pretti’s.

And still, Porter’s name continues to be excluded. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song, “The Streets of Minneapolis,” and named Good and Pretti, but not Porter. It’s easy to understand why - Porter didn’t die in Minneapolis.

The same reasoning explains, perhaps, why the Dutch artist De Strandharker is including Good and Pretti in his tribute, but not Porter.

Still, this troubles me.

Why did Porter’s name not become national news when he was shot? Perhaps it was because he was one of the first, and no one could yet see a pattern.

Then again, certain circumstances of the shooting made Porter an inconvenient first victim for legacy media. The details of the shooting were murky. We know Porter was shot, and we know by whom. But the why remains unclear. There was no recording, no body cam, no iPhone footage. It seems there were witnesses, but maybe not witnesses who were willing to speak at length, or at all. The officer was off-duty when he shot Porter. Where did he fit, then? Was this ICE or not ICE?

And Porter had a gun, which he was firing jubilantly in the air to celebrate the New Year. It is illegal to fire a gun in this way.

And then there is the question of Porter’s race. He was a Black man who had lived in Compton and was living in Northridge.

Like I said: for the media, Porter was an inconvenient first victim. In a world of abbreviated reporting and clickbait, complexity just doesn’t appeal.

I’m sure Porter would have been sorry that his story was too complicated for the media. But this didn’t mean he deserved to be forgotten.

Why do we do this? Why do we look away as if to willfully forget? Why do we hang on to the easy and refuse to grapple with the complex?

Sometimes we commit injustice even in our efforts to remember.

As I was researching this piece, reading through the slim archive of articles we have on Porter, I couldn’t help but notice a strange phenomenon.

The LA Times reported the killing the day after it happened. But every other piece of reporting that I read filtered Porter’s death through the lens of Renée Good. As if Keith Porter could only be understood through Renée Good. As if readers can only care about Porter if they care about Renee Good.

I get it. Renee Good established a pattern. She allowed us to name what we are seeing. Even so, something about the way Porter only seems to be remembered through the optic of Renee Good feels strange.

It just feels wrong.

So, in the spirit of willful remembering, here is what I’ve read about Keith Porter:

Keith Porter was 43 years old and a “girl dad” who adored his two daughters, aged 10 and 20.

A sports fan, he’d loved basketball as a teen, but the San Francisco 49’ers occupied a special place in his heart. But he must have been a baseball fan too. In a film he made with a friend, he wore a Dodgers jersey.

Keith was an unrepentant people person. A friend said he was “hilarious…the life of the party,” while others said he was a natural performer. We all know the type. My guess is that Keith lit up a room. The party didn’t start until he arrived.

He liked quiet activities too. He liked to fish and would often fish with his uncles. He was a helper and a carer, with “a big heart.” He worked as an aid to children with disabilities and helped out his friend Adrian, who became a foster parent to teen boys and found the job demanding. Porter “was …my go-to-guy to assist me in caretaking,” Adrian told the papers. “He was always there to help people.”

Porter had had a rough childhood, but his mother worked hard to give him a better life. He called her every morning to tell her he loved her. And wanted to be a good father. “I got two beautiful young girls and I’m going to raise them the way I’m supposed to,” he said.

He had many jobs. His life could be unstable. He struggled. But he was strong.

“I pray,” Porter said. “I talk to God. I talk to family. Because at the end of the day, that’s all I really got. But I feel rich…It’s gonna be hard to break me, because I have a strong spirit and I grew up with a whole lot of love.”2

This is what I was able to piece together about Keith Porter. I’ve assembled it here, putting the thinnest of threads out there, alongside others who are doing the same. Without the evidence of a video, all we have are the words Porter left us and the testimony of his family and friends who chose to remember him this way. We have words that describe the man Keith Porter wanted to be.

Maybe the road to healing isn’t willful forgetting. Maybe the road to healing is remembering, the active collection of innumerable memories and stories over months and years.

So what will we do to remember? Write a newsletter? Post on social media? Talk to a friend? Make a video?

All of it matters; all of it is necessary; all of it is a form of action.

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