Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Restoring Black History
Toyin Falola
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Restoring Black History
By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.
With the ringing of a bell and a speech from President Obama, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington is to officially open its extraordinary collection to the public on Saturday. But the museum can claim another, equally important achievement: helping resolve the protracted debate about the contributions of black people to American history and, indeed, about whether they had a history worth preserving at all. Those questions were at the heart of the nation’s original debate about whether, and how, black lives matter.
For years, the issue was whether black people were fit to be more than slaves. “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”
The connection between humanity and history was central to this debate, and in the estimation of some Enlightenment thinkers, blacks were without history and thus lacked humanity. The German philosopher Hegel argued that human beings are “human” in part because they have memory. History is written or collective memory. Written history is reliable, repeatable memory, and confers value. Without such texts, civilization cannot exist. “At this point we leave Africa,” he pontificated, “not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.”
Black people, of course, would fight back against these aspersions by writing histories about the African-American experience. In the 1880s, George Washington Williams, whom the historian John Hope Franklin called “the first serious historian of his race,” published the “History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880”; he confessed that part of his motivation was “to call the attention to the absurd charge that the Negro does not belong to the human family.”
About a decade later, W.E.B. Du Bois became the first black person to earn a Ph.D. (in history) at Harvard, followed by Carter G. Woodson, a founder of Negro History Week, who wanted to make history by writing it. “If a race has no history,” he wrote, “it stands in danger of being exterminated.” Arthur A. Schomburg, the famous bibliophile, posited a solution: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” History “must restore what slavery took away.”
This mandate to rewrite the status of the race by writing the history of its achievements was too broad to be contained only in books. Public history mattered, too. In 1915, Woodson and several of his friends established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, in part to popularize the study of black history. That same year, black leaders called for a memorial to honor black veterans. And a year later — exactly a century ago — Representative Leonidas C. Dyer, a Missouri Republican, introduced legislation to create a monument in their honor. After decades of resistance, that effort took a giant leap forward in 2003, when Congress passed bipartisan legislation to build the museum that was signed by President George W. Bush.
Some $540 million later, the first black president will open the museum’s doors, admirably directed by another historian, Lonnie G. Bunch III. When he does, the long battle to prove Jefferson, Hegel and so many others wrong will have been won. We can only imagine the triumph that the pioneers of black history would feel had they lived to see this occasion.
More than a museum, the building on the National Mall is a refutation of two and a half centuries of the misuse of history to reinforce a social order in which black people were enslaved, then systematically repressed and denied their rights when freed. It also repudiates the long and dismal tradition of objectifying black people in museums. We cannot forget the parading of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, at European freak shows in the 19th century, or the stuffed remains of an African man known only as the “Negro of Banyoles,” on display for almost for a century in the Darder Museum of Natural History in Spain.
Other ironies, more present to us, abound: Remember the misguided rush eight years ago to declare the birth of a “post-racial” America in the aftermath of President Obama’s first election? Now, at the end of his second term, that seems ages ago, given a recent poll showing that six out of 10 Americans think that race relations are worsening.
In contrast to the “post-racial” notion that history can or even should be waved away, the opening of the museum does something more vital. It reinscribes race at a symbolically central place in American culture, on the National Mall, where we celebrate our collective public histories, ensuring that a mountain of evidence about black contributions to America will be on permanent display. It does this on the same mall shared by those symbols of the founding fathers’ hypocritical slaveholding past, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, which the new museum, brilliantly designed by David Adjaye, complements and also deconstructs.
“History,” James Baldwin wrote, “is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
Kissi, Edward
I tend to view statements like Jefferson's and Hegel's not as utterances from great men of historical insight, but arrogantly ignorant claims of men who had limited knowledge of the diversity of human history. They spoke so arrogantly from the limited sphere of their knowledge. We have often made the mistake of celebrating their words as monuments of wisdom.
Glad that you found the piece useful.
Kissi
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2016 10:42:12 AM
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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Restoring Black History
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Segun Ogungbemi
I used to respect Hegel and Toynbee until when we were made to read certain portions of their works. I was a graduate student at Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas USA then. So I went to the main Library which used to close at 2 a.m to get the works of the two great scholars. I was delighted to get the assigned works. As I settled to read each one and their comments on Black people, I closed the books and never to read them again. I was so disturbed by their denigration of Black race.
I wish African leaders should read them because it could be a turning point in their lives.
Yes both scholars were ignorant, racially bias and stupid. They don't deserve any celebration in my view.
Prof. Segun Ogungbemi.
Sent from my iPhone
Kissi, Edward
I must admit that I was startled, this morning, when I saw in your post, a statement I had made in a short email to a faculty colleague who teaches our undergraduate courses on "Introduction to the Black Experience", here at USF. I had forwarded to her Henry Louis Gates' piece which I had received from the Dialogue. She sent me an email acknowledging receipt and thanking me for sharing the article with her. It was in response to her email that I offered my thoughts on Jefferson and Hegel which included the statement you quoted as a prelude to your post. I thought I had sent my thoughts, privately, to a colleague, but they actually went elsewhere. I am comforted that I did not write something outrageous and share it in the public square.
A good lesson to all to pause, look again, read over, cross-check the recipient before hitting SEND. We live in a new age!
Edward Kissi
Still on a long Sabbatical from the Dialogue. I shall return!!!
Kenneth Harrow
We all face this dilemma of confronting artists with prejudices and biases, but who might have produced great films or music or art.
When I read your comment I thought you were throwing out the baby with the bath water, as it were.
And when it came to African people, in the 19th century who really knew anything? All they had were reports that were extravagant and ridiculous; later, in the 20th century, you had colonialists who were the ones most in contact, so they knew colonialist ways of thinking and speaking. A few perhaps could overcome the racism, but how many? And the values of racist thinking have marked most Europeans/whites down until this day.
I am not sure I could overcome my distaste for virulent racists, like Naipaul for one. But others, like Conrad, I can still read.
Maybe it is a test of us, not that…how tolerant we can be of others who are intolerant?
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
har...@msu.edu
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
M Buba
Malami
Alh Malami Buba
Department of English Language & Linguistics
Sokoto State University
PMB 2134, Birnin-Kebbi Rd,
Sokoto, NIGERIA
Segun Ogungbemi
It may look so but in my tradition, if you give me a delicious food and just about for me to taste it and you insult my father and abuse my mother, honestly I will give your food back to you. The hunger and thirst will be gone right away.
Those guys have no monopoly of knowledge. What if they did not exist the world will not miss them. Since they had gone is the world stagnant of ideas? No Ken. You are a reference point in our intellectual discourses at conferences, classrooms and this platform.
Let the people of like mind racists know that knowledge without respect for humanity is harmful and dangerous. They are intellectually worse than ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and other similar terrorists or insurgents.
You need to consider the psychological trauma I went through that night Ken. I was furious and could hardly sleep.
Sent from my iPhone
Kenneth Harrow
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
Michigan State University
619 Red Cedar Rd
East Lansing, MI 48824
517-803-8839
har...@msu.edu
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Kenneth Harrow
I am sympathetic to segun’s cry of paid. Let’s accept it.
I agree, however, with toyin here. A small example: perhaps the most important postcolonial theorist alive now (ok, one of the most important) is spivak. Her latest magisterial tome on the topic, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, focuses in part one on whom? Guess who. Hegel.
Maybe before junking hegel we should ask what spivak does with him. Like him or not.
Anyway, just an example of toyin’s point.
I should add that there are also African authors of renown whose politics I find unacceptable; yet I’d teach them.
And for this list, if I mention the name abani there would be a universal shout of disapprobation. But as a writer, in fact, he is really major, talented, important….
What can you do?
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
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Kenneth Harrow
I would have to add that marx was no ideal re race either.
Without marx, no fanon. Without fanon, no liberation from colonialism, etc etc
k
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
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