The Great Divide--Thoughts Upon the King Holiday (Part 2 of 2)

[selah_1977]

(continuation from the previous)



Black America in 2002 is criticized on many fronts.  The broken 
homes.  The blighted communities.  The music that some see 
as "racist" and "reactionary".  Yet what many
Americans don't 
understand (as most of us fail to realize in the current Middle 
Eastern situation) is that history is a cycle of causes and 
subsequent effects.  It didn't just get this way out of the
blue.It 
is not because people of color have less integrity and discipline, 
or are inherently more stupid, or more immoral, or more violent than 
people of European descent.

"Slavery was nearly a century and a half ago" is the
unconscious 
message our community seems to be constantly receiving.  "Get
over it."  Yet according to my grandparents, my great-aunts and
uncles, and other elders around here, the most definitive period in 
recent African-American history wasn't slavery—it was the
century
that followed it, 1865-1965, when attempt after attempt was made to 
overcome the effects of slavery time and time again.  By the time 
King came around, it was too late.  The decade of civil rights was 
also the decade of race riots and white flight.  

We don't talk about it around here, much.  We talk about slavery
and we talk about civil rights, but there's a huge vacuum in
between.
My grandfather spoke freely of it, but sanitized a lot of what 
happened because he was a Christian and supposed to forgive those who 
lynched his father and burned what should have been his inheritance 
to the ground.  My grandmother doesn't like talking about her 
childhood, only that "those were terrible times, but my father
kept us out of it" and "Florida wasn't as bad as
Mississippi
and some other places I heard about."

Whenever I get to this point in a conversation about race, and I am 
in mixed company, it seems that this is the point where we play 
the "Whose Group Has Suffered the Most?" game.  It usually
goes something like, "Well, such-and-such-horrible-thing happened
to
us in Country X, and we came over here as immigrants, worked our 
butts off and assimilated."  Then when I express admiration for
this, but then say "Yes, well, we weren't really given that
option" and talk about 1865-1965, I usually get stares, stony 
silence, puzzled looks and even labeled as an Angry Resentful Black 
Woman.  (An Afro-British Oxford student did the latter this summer.  
This was after an Indian girl from Long Island had just said 
that "most people consider blacks to be a sh*t race, you
know."  I 
just looked at him and smiled.  That was an interesting conversation 
indeed.)

Sociologist and National Book Award winner James W. Loewen has this 
to say about the phenomenon of selective, collective historical 
amnesia:

"It is always useful to think badly about people one has
exploited or 
plans to exploit.  Modifying one's opinions to bring them into
line 
with one's actions or planned actions is the most common outcome
of 
the process known as cognitive dissonance, according to the social 
psychologist Leon Festinger.  No one likes to think of himself or 
herself as a bad person.  To treat badly another person whom we 
consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and 
attitude that demands resolution.  We cannot erase what we have done, 
and to alter future behavior may not be in our interest.  To change 
our attitude is easier."

The quote is from the book that won the National Book Award, *Lies My
Teacher Told Me:  Everything Your American History Textbook Got 
Wrong*.  Loewen says that he wrote the book because he and other 
social science/history faculty in universities were increasingly
shocked by how much undergraduates didn't know about their own 
country's history.  He began surveying high school texts from all 
over the country and was shocked by the omissions, the half-truths, 
and the lies.  And he posits that the reason why Americans hate their 
own history, the reason why they say it is boring, is because half of 
it has been skillfully and artfully omitted.  I highly recommend
it—-some of it (about not only race, but about *everything* in 
American history--great figures, antiracism, laborers, American 
Indians, Asians, women, etc.) may shock you.

Very little in that book was new to me.  My great-uncle is a retired 
cop and an armchair historian who has traveled all over the world, 
and I must have been around 12 when I told him about what I'd
learned in my history class about "Manifest Destiny", which
history
texts present as a Very Good Thing.  That's when he started
giving me 
photocopies of primary source documents and books that told me much 
of I've quoted.  So by the time I had high school history, I knew 
about a lot of the gaps and omissions.  I also got lower grades in
high school and freshman college history courses because I made the 
mistake of correcting both teacher and text in my essays and in class 
discussions.

"No, Ebony, Columbus' men did *not* sever the hands of Tainos and 
Arawaks and leave them to bleed to death."

"No, Ebony, Arabs and Africans did *not* have proven contact with
pre-Columbian America."

"No, Ebony, Abraham Lincoln did *not* say that."

And then I'd give citations, and was brushed off:

"Well, Columbus had enemies, who wrote lies about him."

"Well, there are other explanations for that style of Olmeca
art..."

"Well, Lincoln had to appeal to a certain votership."

And of course:

"You must learn to use historical distance, Ebony."

I wanted to take this opportunity to just share some things that I am 
thinking about today, on the special occasion of the King holiday.  
Very little attention is paid to the end of his life... by 1968
he'd grown disillusioned with his original integrationist vision,
and 
was on the verge of becoming much more radical.  He'd met with
Malcolm X and other more militant black leaders, and his philosophy 
changed.  He protested the Vietnam War, among other things.  If he 
had lived, he would have become a lot different in the eyes of 
mainstream society.

You know, I doubt he would have had a holiday if he had lived.

Now, I don't believe in African-centered history--I think that
all of humanity ought to be the center of history.  That's why I 
always wondered why my so-called "world history" texts had
next to
nothing to say about Asia, Africa, or the Americas prior to European 
contact.  I wanted to know about everybody.   "Surely," I
asked my ninth grade world history teacher, "four-fifths of the
world
wasn't sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the 
Europeans to come save them?"  "But my uncle says that the
Dark Ages 
were pretty much restricted to Europe... in Mesoamerica, empires were 
flourishing, there was a university in sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabs 
preserved classical civilization, and the Chinese has cities that 
were cleaner and ran better than any up until modern times.  Why 
doesn't the book say that?"

I was an obnoxious kid then.  Ten years later, I'm a teacher,
still obnoxious, and I still don't trust textbooks unless they
provide
full citations.  I tell my students that they have to be sharp, they 
have to investigate, because what is written in most of our books was 
not necessarily printed so that they'd have all the facts.  The
unstated purpose of social studies and "civic" education in
this
country is to make good citizens.  In the case of my students,
it's to
"know their place" as 18th century slave poet Phillis
Wheatley did:

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither fought now knew,
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refined, and join the angelic train."

That's in our ninth grade reader.  It is also in every American 
literature textbook I've ever seen.  I am a Christian and it
makes me 
squirm.  It makes class after class of black students squirm, too, 
and it makes extra work for me, because then I have to go and dig 
through my files and copy the information I have for them about the 
Christian and Islamic presence in Africa, and what those 
horrible "pagan, animist" religions were really like.

Yet the implication of the poem's inclusion--and I am serious, I
have been told this openly by a few whites, who I thank heartily for 
being honest about their feelings--is that we ought to thank (the 
European) God for being rescued from swinging from trees and 
cannibalism and God-knows-what-else in the Dark Continent of Africa.  

The most ironic--and sad!--thing is that the above poem was not 
Phillis' most popular during her lifetime.  Her contemporaries 
praised her "To the University of Cambridge in New England" and
"To the King's Most Excellent Majesty".  Some of her writings were
also more militant, criticizing her society's treatment of her
people-
-which means that they don't fit high school curricula,
obviously. 
  
The recent Education Act is frightening because the Bush 
administration is providing states with social studies funding only 
if they teach history *his* way.  I've read a summary of the
bill, and it's sad.  More attention to WASPs in general and Great
Men
of History in particular.  Less attention to women and minorities and 
common laborers/the labor movement.  Why does one have to come at the 
negation of the other? 

"When textbooks make racism invisible in American (and world) 
history," Loewen says, "they obstruct our already poor
ability to see it in the present.  The closest they come to analysis 
is to present a vague feeling of optimism:  in race relations, as in 
everything, our society is constantly getting better.  We used to 
have slavery; now we don't.  We used to have lynchings; now we
don't.
(A/N—I differ with Loewen on this point, but I'll let it go. 
:))  
Baseball used to be all white; now it isn't.

"The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of
black-white 
relations, implying that race relations have somehow improved on 
their own.  This cheery optimism only compounds the problem because 
hites can infer that racism is over.  `The U.S. has done more
than 
any other nation in history to provide equal rights for all,'
*The 
American Tradition* (textbook) assures us.  Of course, its authors 
have not seriously considered the levels of human rights in the 
Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in 1800s Choctaw society, 
because they don't mean their declaration as a serious statement
of composite history--it is just ethnocentric misleading.

"High school students have a gloomy view of the state of race 
relations in America today, according to a recent nationwide poll.  
Students of all racial backgrounds brood about the subject.  Another 
poll reveals that for the first time in (the 20th) century, young 
white adults have less tolerant attitudes toward black Americans than 
those over thirty.  One reason is that `the under-30 generation
is pathetically ignorant of recent American history.'  Too young
to
have experienced or watched the civil rights movement as it happened, 
these young people have no understanding of the present or past 
workings of racism in American society."

W.E.B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP and longtime editor of *The 
Crisis* journal, 1901:  "The problem of the twentieth century is 
the problem of the color line."

Authors of *Understanding American History Through Fiction* Warren 
Beck and Myles Clowers:  "More Americans have learned the story
of the South during the years of the Civil War and Reconstruction 
from Margaret Mitchell's *Gone With The Wind* than from all the
learned volumes on this period."

Loewen:  "Perhaps the most pervasive unstated theme of American 
history is the domination of black America by white America.  Race is 
the sharpest and deepest division in American life."

And a personal hero of mine, anthropologist Ivan Van Sertima.  His 
lifework has been to answer the question I asked my ninth grade world 
history teacher:  "What *was* everyone else doing before 
colonialism?  Did China have contact with sub-Saharan Africa?  Did 
the New World have contact with anyone else besides the Vikings?"
He is nowhere near an "African revisionist historian"—-he
isn't
even African!--he just has this very embarrassing habit of turning up 
evidence of African influence in places where conventional wisdom 
says it doesn't belong.  So he's routinely attacked by others
in his field—a typical Van Sertima book is anywhere from 1/3 to
1/2 
bibliography and citations, because he knows he's got to back
whatever he says up... if there are any holes he'll be attacked
by his colleagues.

He came to Florida A&M to speak during my freshman year of college.  
Afterwards, as a student government official, I was invited to the 
reception.  After most of the other students left, I had a chance to 
talk one-on-one with him, one of the most controversial scholars of 
our time.

I told him about my great-uncle, and asked him why history was 
reported the way that it was.  He reminded me that what is happening 
today is nothing new, that one ancient example was the way Egyptian 
pharaohs attempted to obliviate the deeds of Hatshepshut because she 
had been a woman.

And then I asked him another question.

"Mr. Van Sertima, would you consider yourself Afrocentric?"

He laughed then, and patted my shoulder before getting up.  Then he 
shook his head and said one more thing before leaving... a quote that 
I had on my bedroom wall for years.

"I am neither Afrocentric nor Eurocentric.  I am
truth-centric."

My closing thoughts upon this King holiday that my students don't 
really care much about can be summed up in the words of Harlem 
Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, excerpt, "From The Dark
Tower":

"So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds."

--Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, 1/21/02, 2:57 p.m.


Appendix:  Recommended King Holiday Reading

White Privilege:  Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
http://www.spokanehumanrights.org//ccrr/packet/article.htm
(Peggy McIntosh is associate director of the Wellesley College Center 
for Research on Women.  Her article is part of a larger collection of 
thoughts about gender and race in 1990.)

White Privilege Shapes the U.S.
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/whiteprivilege.htm
(Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas.  
His widely-read article first appeared in the Baltimore Sun in 1998.)

Virtual Whiteness and Narrative Diversity
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~ucurrent/uc4/4-lockard.html
(By Joe Lockhard.  This is one of the topic I planned to explore in 
my graduate research using the fanfiction realm.)

Affirmative Action Works!
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/pkivel.html
(Paul Kivel is a California author.  I don't agree with
everything he 
says, but I do feel as if his article is a good summary of the
"pro-af act" side of the debate.)

What Color is the Net?
http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/97/11/index2a.html
(Interesting article about youth culture online and what today's
kids think about race in virtual environments.)

Quiz on Prejudices
http://www.eburg.com/~cole/Quiz.html
(Eye-opening quiz about recognizing the stereotypes that we all hold.)