Gato_Solo
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July 31 — African-Americans occupy a contradictory place in American life. They feel they have been denied their history and in good measure, this is certainly true. What might be more accurate is that in the past, whites have used history as a way of denigrating blacks by saying they had no history that anyone was bound to respect.
IT MIGHT be said that whites abused blacks psychologically by saying they had achieved nothing as a people, in the past. Yet 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 make 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. The U.S. Senate recently authorized the 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. (It is likely to pass the House after its summer recess, but isn’t expected to be a reality until 2011.) 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.
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. Finally, of course, Jews have their Holocaust museum, so why shouldn’t blacks have theirs? Wasn’t slavery an even more horrible holocaust than the Jewish extermination of the 1940s? But the African-American experience is not best understood as being in any way analogous to the Jewish experience. The slave trade may have been a holocaust but, alas, the American South was not Auschwitz. (It was Stanley M. Elkins in his 1959 book, “Slavery,” who first suggested a link between concentration camps and plantation slavery, a thesis that most black intellectuals at the time found unpersuasive. It remains so.) If the South had been Auschwitz, the relationship of black people to this country would be so much simpler and their self-understanding less troubled. Black life in the South, even during slavery and segregation, was not one long line of atrocities. One has only to read William Wells Brown’s “My Southern Home” or Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” to pick two black books casually, to know that blacks themselves, living during the time of slavery and segregation, did not see their experience as atrocity or just an unrelieved progression of pogroms. Black life was something infinitely more and less than that, something far more complex, as was our relationship with whites far more than mere brutality and abuse, although abuse and brutality were abundant, to be sure. Southern whites and blacks are more deeply joined as a people than either separately is joined to anyone else.
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 a 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.
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