"History is not the past, it is the stories we tell about the past" comes from Grace Lee Boggs's The Next American Revolution, written near the end of her century of struggle. For Boggs, history was never a fixed record handed down from above. It is a field of struggle, shaped by who tells the story and for what purpose. She argued that how we tell our stories, whether triumphantly or self-critically, rigidly or dialectically, shapes whether we advance or cut short our own growth as human beings.

Ruling classes have always understood the power of the past. Textbooks that erase slavery, colonization, and resistance, and national myths of progress and exceptionalism, are part of how a system wins the consent of the people it exploits, what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony. The movements of the oppressed have answered by telling their own stories. They do it through people's history, freedom schools, oral histories, archives kept by the communities themselves, and art that keeps alive the names and struggles that power would rather forget.

Boggs also warned against telling our own history as a simple tale of heroes and villains. She insisted that movements study their failures as well as their victories in order to grow. Telling the story of the past is a revolutionary act, because the way we understand where we come from shapes what we believe is possible now. This print is an invitation to reclaim history as a living tool and to tell the stories that help us build the world we need.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*