Teaching African American history is challenging. The difficulties arise from four central problems. First, students have very little knowledge about the African-American experience. Second, they have been bombarded with misinformation and disinformation. Third, they are indoctrinated to combine the interests of the US state and the interests of black people. Therefore, students seek to impose the interpretive frameworks they have learned in US history onto the African American sociohistorical experience.
My main challenge is to get rid of simplistic notions like “black history is American history” and get students to consider WEB Du Bois’s Afrocentric axiom. Writing in 1947, Du Bois casually observed: “We will naturally proceed from the point of view of the black people where we live and work, to the rest of the world.” In other words, to understand African American history, you need to center the lived experiences, thoughts, and actions of people of African descent in narrative and analysis.
Such an approach seems natural. However, the common sense of Du Bois’s Afrocentric approach belies its complexities and difficulties. Take for example the participation of African Americans in the American War of Independence.
On the one hand, black history told from the contributionist school emphasizes blacks who acted in the interest of American society. Crispus Attucks and Salem Poor are two of the most famous blacks. Attucks was probably the first person killed during the Boston Massacre and Poor was recognized for his heroism during the Battle of Bunker Hill. They were among the 5,000 or more blacks who fought on the side of the insurgents. While essential, the stories of Attucks and Poor also prompt my recollection of Bob Marley’s remark: “All that glitters is not gold, half the story has never been told.”
The other “half” of this story is much more than 50 percent. It tells the story of 20,000 self-emancipated blacks who accepted the British offer of freedom expressed in Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation.
The difference in the number of black people who fought for white Americans and those who fought with the British upends students’ simple notions of American patriotism. Students are programmed to think of Attucks and Poor and those like them as patriots. It is more difficult for them to locate the second, much larger group.
Some see them as British loyalists. After difficult dialogue, most come to see them as neither American patriots nor British loyalists. Now they see them as human agents acting in their own interest, as patriots in the cause of black freedom.
Seeing that African Americans have interests that are not always aligned with those of the American empire is revealing. Tears the veil on which Du Bois wrote so elegantly. It begins a process of not “seeing yourself through the eyes of others” but through our own eyes. This is the power of black history.
The most important thing to help students discover in an African American history class is the integrity of the black experience. It is of paramount importance that students learn to interrogate the black experience on their own terms. To address what Du Bois called the “grim and shattering realities.”
And from the bowels of those realities, extract and make coherent the conscience and culture of our people as they change over time. The reality of the African American experience is that for most of our time here we have lived apart, perhaps not because of our choice, but apart nonetheless. For 400 years, we have been subject to a different set of laws, rules or practices. We have had a different experience, and by circumstance and effort we have molded ourselves into a different people.
That is the simple truth of the black experience.
We are a different people. And from our distinctive experiences we have created a distinct consciousness and culture. More importantly, our distinction places us at odds with the dominant historical experience, master narrative, and ethos of white Americans. Coming to the US, for most of European descent, was a move from exploitation, oppression, and poverty to greater freedom and opportunity. For African Americans, dragged in chains to the US, our transition from Africa to the US was a step from freedom to various forms of unfreedom.
Our different experience means that we must generate different concepts, theories, paradigms, and periodization schemes to explain African-American experiences. In US history, the Gilded Age refers to a historical period from 1877 to 1900. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner defined it as a time shaped by greedy “robber barons” who obtained and displayed opulent wealth through fraud and deceit, and outright theft. His machinations accelerated inequality. Twain and Dudley’s framework of that historical period has merit.
A Darwinian racial struggle of the fittest informed US domestic politics, and imperialist expansion made racial oppression central to the spirit of the “Golden Age.” For African Americans, the period was characterized not only by labor exploitation and economic inequality, but by the brutal revocation of newly won civil rights and intense racial terrorism.
To account for the distinctiveness of the black experience, Rayford Logan replaced the concept of “Golden Age” with the nadir. A nadir connotes “the place or time of greatest depression or degradation.”
We must duplicate Logan’s example. We must replace puzzling concepts, theories, paradigms, and periodization schemes with interpretive frameworks that more accurately explain the distinctive African-American experience.
Sundiata Cha-Jua is a professor of African American studies and history at the University of Illinois and a member of the North End Breakfast Club. Her email is schajua@gmail.com.
