John McWhorter: What History Actually Teaches Us About Race
[John McWhorter is a frequent contributor to The Root.]
I just finished reading a new race book that came over the transom. It was the kind in which someone is worried about how younger blacks don't know the history of the civil rights movement. To be sure, the number of blacks who can give a capsule summary of the history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or tell you why Shirley Sherrod's husband was important dwindles away. But the book got me to thinking about how black America thinks about even more recent history.
For all we hear about how we should Know Our History, we fall into a certain ahistoricity regarding the here and now. We often act as if there is only a present, rather than considering how what we are saying now will look -- and what purpose it will serve -- in the future. We end up performing instead of planning. What do I mean? We could all benefit from a brush-up on the life and work of Bayard Rustin or Ida B. Wells. But more recent history teaches us some other things:
Black Conservative Thought Does Not Harm the Black Community
People like Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams and, yes, yours truly (even though I am a moderate) have been told forever that our writing is a threat to black well-being. Supposedly we distract whites from the fact that they are "on the hook" and we encourage bigotry. That is a reasonable proposition in itself, but history now allows us to test it. It fails. Over the past four decades, during which right-of-center black writers have been regularly tarred as "race traitors" or, more politely, as suspiciously "controversial"...
Read entire article at The Root
I just finished reading a new race book that came over the transom. It was the kind in which someone is worried about how younger blacks don't know the history of the civil rights movement. To be sure, the number of blacks who can give a capsule summary of the history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or tell you why Shirley Sherrod's husband was important dwindles away. But the book got me to thinking about how black America thinks about even more recent history.
For all we hear about how we should Know Our History, we fall into a certain ahistoricity regarding the here and now. We often act as if there is only a present, rather than considering how what we are saying now will look -- and what purpose it will serve -- in the future. We end up performing instead of planning. What do I mean? We could all benefit from a brush-up on the life and work of Bayard Rustin or Ida B. Wells. But more recent history teaches us some other things:
Black Conservative Thought Does Not Harm the Black Community
People like Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams and, yes, yours truly (even though I am a moderate) have been told forever that our writing is a threat to black well-being. Supposedly we distract whites from the fact that they are "on the hook" and we encourage bigotry. That is a reasonable proposition in itself, but history now allows us to test it. It fails. Over the past four decades, during which right-of-center black writers have been regularly tarred as "race traitors" or, more politely, as suspiciously "controversial"...