What About When Knowing is Too Much?
Two weeks ago my partner and I took a long weekend trip to visit with friends on the coast of Maine. On our way, we stopped to visit the Maine Maritime Museum, drawn to an exhibit called Re|Sounding.
In the world of boats at sea, sounding refers to measuring the depth of the water under a boat. It’s part of how boat crews know how to navigate forward. The Re|Sounding exhibit exists to measure the depth of Maine maritime history through the lens of Wabanaki and Black experience and culture, to – in the words of the exhibit website – “imagine futures founded on equity and freedom.”
I’ve long understood, in broad strokes, the exclusion and misrepresentation of people of color in history, and I knew some about that history in Maine. But there were details in the exhibit I hadn’t known: the depths and deceit of white Mainers’ complicity in the slave trade long after it was illegal. The eviction of a Black and mixed-race community on Malaga Island, along with many Wabanaki communities along the coast. That laws were crafted precisely to empty the stunning coast of Maine to preserve it for the use of white tourists.
And I was one of them, on my way to a beautiful spot in a community built for the likes of me on the backs of Black and Wabanaki people. Standing in that fact I felt an almost physical, sharpened understanding of my inherited complicity.
I have felt that way before, and I will again. Right behind that sharper understanding comes a wave of emotion. Shame, anger, and deepest sadness. Helplessness, confusion, and despair.
I know what I need to do when this happens, and on most days, I can do it: Take a lot of deep breaths. Steady my curiosity and my spirit so I can keep learning. Acknowledge what I’m feeling, offer myself compassion.
Then I know I need to step out of my own suffering to focus on what I now see more clearly, and tend to accountability: what can I do differently, with the life I have, to make some right in the wake of these wrongs? What can I repair?
I’m still working on answers to those questions after experiencing Re|Sounding. That’s not what I want to write about here.
What I want to say is this: witnessing injustice that benefits me in some way, both in history and now, is often wrenching. It’s certainly never comfortable or easy. Part of me wants to turn away, unsee what I saw, go on with my life, deny my responsibilities. I’m able to move past all that, I think, thanks to wise teachers and friends who’ve helped me learn how, and also because I’ve been privileged with emotional resilience.
I grew up loved and safe. Friends have held me to account with grace and love. Teachers and counselors and mentors have steadied me. My educational and professional background has taught me to take in ideas and perspectives of writers and thinkers that challenge my own.
It’s a profound understatement, I think, to say: not everyone gets all that. Not every life journey yields the capacity for the emotional gymnastics required to take in devastating histories, to confront one’s own benefit from those histories, and to transcend profound discomfort and inner conflict in order to do something about it.
That’s part of why people ban books, I think. Why curriculum gets outlawed, and museums get shut down. That’s not the only reason, of course; the powerful know well the ways to pull apart freedom and justice. They know that knowing the truth is key to disrupting their power and building a better future.
But what of the people who aren’t committed to bigotry, who would even say of course everyone ought to be able to thrive, but who genuinely are not able to take in the knowing and do anything about it?
What if all the ways I’ve tried in my lifetime, and others have too, to great effect – like education, dialog, advocacy, and organizing – cannot reach past that vulnerability of being human? Do I write whole swaths of people off as incapable of change?
I don’t think so. In fact, I can’t accept that; there’s way too much at stake, not least, in this case, the lives of Wabanaki and Black people in Maine living with the consequences of history.
I have to believe there are other ways to invite people into change, and to undermine the structures and people that perpetuate injustice. If not, there’s little hope for a humanizing future in a world full of complex and deeply different humans.
Plenty of people are working out those other paths. I can offer practice: intentional, daily, systems-changing behavior. It won’t necessarily get everyone on the same page, but it can make people less afraid; it can lead to more resilience; it has already made real differences for people whose lives today remain profoundly, unjustly limited by the past.
But it requires seeing, really seeing, and accepting some genuine vulnerabilities of being human. Not excusing inaction, just letting go of insisting people transcend those vulnerabilities when they honestly can’t, and inviting them into action in another way.
Lucinda J. Garthwaite
Founding Executive Director
References & Resources
Burkeman, Oliver (October 23, 2015). "Review: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro". The Guardian.
Caro, Robert.(1974) The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Rise and Fall of New York. Knopf.
Farrow, Anne, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank. Complicity: How The North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery.
Timm, Sarah and Luke Gates-Milardo, eds. (2026) Maine Maritime Museum. Down East Books.