What Are You About?
Memory is not nostalgia. It is the ground beneath our feet.
I’ve been sitting with this profile from Widen The Circle.
Not because it is about me, but because it carries a question Dennis Banks asked me when I was young:
What are you about?
That question has never really left me.
Widen The Circle does something I deeply respect. It doesn’t treat memory as nostalgia or performance. It treats memory, like culture as civic infrastructure.
That matters.
Not because Germany has the only unique claim on history or harm. It doesn’t. Those of us shaped by Black and indigenous life in America do not need to leave home to understand racial terror, resistance, erasure, or unfinished repair.
But Germany does offer something tangible: a public landscape where remembrance is argued over, funded, walked through, taught, contested, and made visible in everyday civic life.
That is not a model to copy whole cloth.
It is a mirror. A provocation. A reminder that memory work is not the past calling us backward. It is the ground beneath our feet when fear tries to make us smaller, tired, or alone.
So I’ll leave you with the question I’m still carrying: What are you about?
Grateful to Widen The Circle for the fellowship, the relationships, and this profile.
Keep widening the circle.
Read the profile here.