I pulled my coat tighter around my body as I stepped onto this sacred ground, as if it were just the cold wind making me shiver. A few steps into The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, I stood before a monument naming those who’d been murdered in my grandmother’s small Mississippi county. A shutter pulsed through me, my eyes prickling. Walking somberly and slowing my breathing, I took in more and more names of Black people who’d been lynched by white mobs. Between 1877 and 1950, over 6,500 Black Americans were killed in sweeping racial terrorism. Their names and the dates of their lives were stamped through rusted metal coffin-shaped boxes, each hanging by posts from the ceiling, listing those murdered in county after county. The ground below the memorial spirals downward, and soon the coffins were hanging above me. I could barely breathe with the weight of these atrocities.

It’s tempting to turn away, pushing such horrifying experiences out of our minds, and sometimes we need to do just that. The news is overwhelmingly painful, especially as we careen right back into a new period of state-sponsored terrorism. It’s crucial that we pace ourselves, find emotional resources and take time for joy, restoration and especially connection. But we must also continue to return to these painful truths and stretch our capacity to know what’s happening.