The Lie of Mainstreaming Black History
To teach and study Black history is a double edged sword. One edge cuts inward to slice away parasites of self-hatred that oppresses the minds of an oppressed people. Such parasites drain away their precious strength by making them doubt they even deserve to be free. The other edge cuts outward, to hack at the oppressor’s lies and propaganda, the stories the oppressor always tells about the oppressed. This edge cuts wildly yet with persistence, fired by the conviction that if only the oppressing masses knew the truth about those they were oppressing, those oppressing masses would rise up against the injustice in whose cause they’d been enlisted.
One manifestation of this inner edge is Black history as taught to Black people, in Black spaces, by Black people, for Black purposes. It is the act and effort of a people reminding themselves who they are, have been and can be. It is the act of banishing the oppressor from their minds, putting down his warped and dirty mirror to pick up a new one through which they can see themselves clearly and for themselves.
This inward edge is what Carter G. Woodson pursued in his masterwork “The Miseducation of the Negro.” Woodson’s most famous quote is about the inner edge, and how if you can convince a man that he is inferior, you need not bother directing him to the backdoor of every building he encounters or to a lesser position in the counsel of nations; he will constantly pursue a lower place, much as water seeks a valley, because he has been taught he deserves no more, and no better, and ought to be grateful his natural superiors allow him even that much space.
It’s often difficult to separate the outer edge from the inner edge, because research to demonstrate to Black folk that the White man’s lies are lies can do no good if merely swapped back and forth secretly, it must be publicized as widely as possible, for we are a vast and spread out people even within the bounds of the United States. And if one seeks to reach our people wherever they are on the earth, the expanse of global Africa is vaster still.
You can teach little to a captive nation of millions that will remain hidden from its captors. And besides, why should we go through the effort of hiding reality from our imprisoners? Is it shameful to speak truth loudly into the ears of our captors? Certainly not.
Consequently, in uncovering the truth of our history we have always taught it to Whites. We have always, despite our vulnerability in the hands of a bloodthirsty European hoard, called them to account for blanketing the world with lies. Though this wing of the truth went abroad, it was nonetheless part of the inner edge, because lies told by 100 million can drown out truth told by 10 million. The White man floods the world with ink and airwaves, and there are many among our people who will believe the lies of their tormentors over truth told by their own flesh and blood. So whensoever we could, it made a certain sense to invite as many Whites as possible behind the veil of reality, so that maybe the number of lying White voices would be slightly lessened and our burden in truth telling made slightly lighter.
But as they always do, things have changed. The dazzling success of the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights movement has held out what to many is a tantalizing prospect: peaceful co-existence, even fusion, with our ancient tormentors. The very premise of the non-violent methodologies so brilliantly employed by Dr. King and others was that civil disobedience could dramatize injustices and arouse the collective conscience of the nation. The main problem with this method isn’t that it was ineffective, but that it depended on a particular dynamic: That those whose consciences were being appealed to and those who directly committed the injustices were different groups. If the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been forced to appeal to the conscience of White Southerners, I’m convinced they could’ve appealed until time itself had run out with nothing to show for it but their own dead bodies.
Large portions of the White majority outside the South, however, unlike Whites in the South’s majority Black counties where the most violent resistance was met, could be convinced that racial segregation was unnecessary and even harmful, largely, because they lived in majority White cities, towns and neighborhoods and managed to control their Black minority population without recourse to “Whites only” signs, poll taxes and literacy tests. It was therefore possible, which isn’t to say easy, to convince them that the time had come for other people in another region to change their accustomed way of living.
When the movement turned to the work of convincing the rest of White America that its time had come to tear down a system of segregation and subjugation far more widespread, resilient and subtle than the Southern one, they resisted mightily and, for the most part, five decades of work have failed to overwhelm their resistance.
What has all this to do with the teaching, study and presentation of Black history? I’m convinced that even here, to draw on Brother Malcolm, we’ve been had, took, led astray and run amok. There has grown up this idea that pushing Black historical consciousness into the “mainstream” will create a less White supremacist society. More than simply showing that Black history is full of accomplishment and the art of perseverance, there has crept in the idea that a full accounting of our atrocities, once present in the White majority’s collective mind, will lead them to see the judiciousness of our ongoing calls for justice.
This view fails to take into account that history is not a messenger, it is a tool. The reason to study history is not to gather the lessons it might teach, for history teaches nothing in and of itself. History is like a spyglass allowing those who wield it to look afar off, to see and know the lands they seek to conquer. History is not simply a series of mistakes to avoid repeating, it is the sum total of human understanding. You cannot control what you lack a practical mastery of. The future is only theoretical, the present slips from your grasp into history as quickly as it arrives. Only history offers the storehouse of knowledge required to be anything more than a confused child toddling haphazardly through the world.
And so, just as different riders can ride the same horse in different directions depending on their chosen destinations, different individuals and different classes of people can wield the same history to plot different paths.
We must therefore be aware that while we look at our own history as a parade of horrors never to be repeated, Whites may look at this same history and see what a horror it is to be a minority in the clutches of a majority. They may conclude that wherever a majority is, the minority will suffer, and resolve to never be in the minority nationwide, or, that if ever they do fall below 51%, to ensure they hold onto power firmly; for our history shows that the only thing worse than to be a minority is to be a powerless one. No scale or depth of true American history can contradict this conclusion, all that can contradict it is a sense of moral force that treats all humans with equal dignity. We’ve never yet seen such moral force among White Americans and we’d be fools to stake our collective future on it.