As we draw to the close of another full month of interest in all things black, another Black History Month over and done with until next year, behind the scenes, the struggle to correct our sins of the past goes on and on, from the powerful halls of justice to the crowded halls of our nations' classrooms.
Every day, millions of American and European students are still being seriously miseducated about Africa. In America particularly, African-American students are dreadfully unaware of their true ancestries. Most of us have no idea where in the vast African Continent our ancestors are from. Most of us have no idea that Africa is a continent instead of a country. Most of us could not name more than two countries on the continent.
Like everyone else here, we all accepted as truth the myths that we were taught to believe, that we are the descendants of slaves, that all of our ancestors arrived in Jamestown in 1609, that they were themselves descendants of subhuman, wild, undisciplined, non-Christian, tribal cannibalistic heathens who had been either purchased from warring tribes, or simply hunted down and snagged in huge nets.
With so little understanding of our true roots, many of us are absolutely lost and are completely baffled when confronted with the actual documented history, the way things really were before the 400-year scourge of captivity and slavery.
The deliberate systematic erasure of our heritage began immediately upon our captivity or sale to the Europeans, and the evidence of the damage done to millions of African-Americans as a direct result is still evident today in our race-based economy, in our segregated schools whose core curricula continue to perpetuate the myths, in the resegregation of our cities' housing development patterns.
Out of that confusion and diffusion grew a passionate urge in some to recreate the record, to fill in the blanks with whatever whims or fantasies they could sell to a people stripped bare of their real heritage. Of course, some pieces of our past survived the cruelty, but not much.
There is now underway in America a wave of new interest in discovering, preserving and presenting African and African-American history, as more and more of us -- black, white, red, yellow and brown people -- begin to awaken and realize that we are more alike than we are different.
The interest is being manifested at every level of government, from the White House to state capitals and city halls, from the North, even as far as Canada's Nova Scotia, where tens of thousands sought freedom from slavery, to the South, to those very places where elected governors stood staunchly barring doorways to integration, swearing, in the words of one, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
The desire to collect, preserve and present our ancestries is common in all peoples of every race, culture and creed, and certainly it is no different among African-Americans. Gerald Early is professor of English and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and is the author of "This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s." In a recent article he wrote for MSNBC, Early summarized the current controversy and interest, pointing to the obvious causes for conflict on the issue:
"The fact remains that African-Americans are the most written about, most studied and at times most defended ethnic group in America. In an odd way, blacks have been obsessed over as much as they have been neglected. The sheer number of volumes, monographs, reports and academic and polemical tomes about the Negro Family, Negro Slavery, Negro Religion, the Negro Character, the Negro Mind, Negro Education and the Negro Problem constitutes a curious and lengthy history by themselves. Coupled with the powerful African-American presence in American popular culture and the vigorously persistent nature of their political protest, this makes blacks the most visible 'invisible' people in the country. Black Americans have the dubious honor of being among the most famous of the persecuted peoples in the history of the planet. This contradiction has produced a peculiar self-consciousness in African-Americans, where not history but historical achievement has become a point of group honor, as a way to validate its humanity."
While the current dialogue might seem new to some, it has actually been going on for decades, if not centuries.
The DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago is the oldest independent institution of its kind in the country dedicated to the collection, preservation, interpretation and dissemination of the history and culture of Americans of African descent. Through exhibitions, archives and programs, the DuSable Museum emphasizes the experiences of Africans in America and throughout the Diaspora and their contributions to American and world history and culture.
The museum's permanent collection includes artifacts, books, slave documents, civil rights memorabilia, paintings, drawings and sculpture by such artists as Charles White, Archibald Motley, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Elizabeth Catlett, photograph collections, wood and ivory carvings, bronze castings, statues and masks from Africa, and archives of original documents, manuscripts, rare books, films, recordings and bibliographic files.
Boston's Museum of Afro American History (MAAH) is a not-for-profit history institution dedicated to preserving, conserving and accurately interpreting the contributions of African-Americans during the colonial period in New England. It features a walking tour encompassing the largest collection of historic sites in the country relating to the life of a free African-American community prior to the Civil War.
The history of these buildings and sites is national in scope and significance. The MAAH treasures its resources and reveals remarkable and vivid historical accounts of the lives of free African-Americans and white abolitionists whose efforts changed a nation.
Commenting on the U.S. Senate's recently authorized start-up of a national museum of African-American history and culture that would be part of the Smithsonian Institution and located on the Mall, Early points out:
"This seems a very good thing for our nation, although no one has mentioned that a separate museum might seem to replicate the very segregation that the museum is meant to decry. Wouldn't matters be better served in providing a 'true' picture of American history and in understanding African-American 'contributions' to American culture, as the official cant goes, if the story was fused with the main national narrative? One must remember that if African-Americans requested something like a separate museum or facility in 1915, as the supporters of this museum tell us, it was because all institutions at the time were segregated (blacks had their own separate exhibitions at various world fairs and expositions when they or their African cousins weren't being exhibited as the missing link), and it was utterly hopeless to ask for inclusion in the main museum. In other words, the fulfillment of the demand now may not be so much timely or progressive as decidedly retro."
Early and others stress the complexities of the movement to build monuments to our African-American presence in history. On the one hand, it seems contradictory to separate our contributions from the record. But, on the other hand, Early says:
"The museum movement among African-Americans reflects two impulses: first, there is the complicated matter of institution-building in African-American communities. Historically, because black institutions -- from black colleges to many of the current crop of local black museums, from the late Negro League baseball to black newspapers -- have been undercapitalized and often undersupported, they have never quite achieved their aim of empowering the community. The institutions often wound up struggling to survive, in large part due to the racism that made black institutions mere shadows of their white counterparts, serving a pariah population in a way that was meant to keep them a pariah population. That is, black institutions existed often as a form of convenience for white institutions. This simply reinforced among black people a sense of inadequacy, the sense of being a national charity case that the existence of the institutions was meant to erase. A national black museum is part of the dream of African-Americans to produce empowering, self-supporting institutions.
"The second impulse is the belief in the redemptive power of 'correct' historical knowledge. It is no surprise that a persecuted people whose historical past was so misrepresented would feel this way. This belief -- coupled with the babble about 'reconciliation' (borrowed from South Africa), 'healing' and the like surrounding this new museum -- places a psychotherapeutic weight upon the study and presentation of history that the subject itself seems quite unable to bear. Reducing history to psychotherapy is clearly dangerous and part of a tendency in our cultural life to make everything either 'good' or 'bad' for us. History becomes an ironic place in American society: a battleground for politics and a place to which one can appeal that transcends politics, the palimpsest that is an unalterable record of truth. Blacks feel this tension more acutely than most other Americans.
"The new national black museum shows two ways that blacks are very much American: first, our belief that we are exceptional as a people, that there is uniqueness to our experience. That is a belief shared by most Americans. Second is our idea that African-American history is, in the end, a triumphant history, as is American history itself. It may be true, as my daughter once said to me, that people are not as different as you think."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | February 24 2004 |