American History is not Black History; Black History is not America’s

Leonce GaiterAs taught in mainstream culture, American history propagates this nation as the womb of freedom, justice and liberty. There are American creation myths as exemplified by the “Founding Fathers.” There are founding documents as revered as biblical texts for their promise of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That is why the argument that “Black history is American history” is naïve to the point of insipidity. For most of this nation’s history, Blacks were not “Americans.” First, we were owned, and then we were barred from exercising the rights of citizenship. That’s why our history puts the lie to American history’s mainstream myths.

Almost half of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, some of whom wrote so eloquently of freedom, owned other men as slaves. For most of its history, this country profited immensely from forcibly denying us freedom and liberty, by keeping us in chains, and from our labor as sub-citizens. Our history puts the lie to America’s history as popularly told.

Do we want to continue to teach our children Black history through a White racial frame? That is the practical effect of stating, “Black history is American history.” It states that the majority veil should be placed on the history that we teach our children. It states that we should forego the right that every other culture assumes — the right to teach our history from our own point of view and to be the heroes of our own stories — and instead, subsume our history within the majority’s.

It states that we do not have the right to express our rage at the barbarities we endured, for those are histories that the majority has little willingness to accept and examine, and for good reason: they put the lie to treasured American myths.

To pronounce that “Black history is American history” says that every Black child should learn that after Vernon Dahmer’s home was firebombed in Mississippi and Dahmer died from his wounds, the outraged White community worked to rebuild the Dahmer home. It says that Black children needn’t learn that in Brookhaven, Mississippi, in 1955, Lamar Smith was shot dead on the courthouse lawn in broad daylight by a White man for the crime of organizing Blacks to vote, and that the known killer was never indicted because, per the Southern Poverty Law Center, “no one would admit they saw a white man shoot a black man.”

To say “Black history is American history” approves the endless repetition of a Martin Luther King quote like: