AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES: A TUTORIAL PART FOUR

[The next few paragraphs are excerpted from chapter two of Autobiography of an Ex-White Man]

Freedom is the theme of the story told by these historians surveying the American experience. Their central analytical idea is Exceptionalism, an idea first given expression by Alexis de Tocqueville. Exceptionalism has served as the guiding thread of both scholarly explications and patriotic invocations for more than a century and a half. America, it is said, is the exception to the generalizations of historians, political scientists, and sociologists, to the time-tested laws of historical evolution defining and constraining men and women and nations in the Old World. America is unique. There has never been anywhere like America, and there never will be again.

Unlike all other nations that have ever existed, according to this story, America is founded upon an idea, the Idea of Freedom. There is no Idea that Great Britain embodies, even though the British, in Magna Carta, in their Common Law, and in their Parliament, have created traditions of liberty. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité was the great war cry of the French Revolution, but France itself was not founded on these ideals. Rome, Russia, China, Italy -- none is the actual embodiment of an Idea consciously embraced by a noble band of Founding Fathers. Even ancient Greece, celebrated among Western intellectuals as the birthplace of democracy, loses its origins in the mists of legend. Only America, or so the story goes, actually embodies an Idea.

Thus, everything that happens in America is to be measured and understood in relation to that Idea. When we Americans succeed in making actual some degree of liberty, then we are fulfilling our founding Idea. When we fail for a time to accord that liberty to everyone, then we must understand ourselves as having not yet completely realized our Idea. Because an Idea lies at the heart of the American Experiment, America promises what no other nation can -- the achievement of an ideal society that can serve as a model and a hope for all humanity. It is in this vein that John Winthrop wrote in 1630, while still on the Atlantic aboard the Arabella: For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

America is the Great Exception in other ways as well, the historians tell us. Alone among all the great nations of the world, America was established in an empty land, a land without the constrictions and constraints of immemorial custom. Save for those few savages so easily displaced or eliminated, the New World stood waiting for the Colonists exactly as God had created it. For just this one time in human history, a community of men and women found themselves in a true state of nature, able to build a republic of liberty and equality that bid fair to realize their cherished ideals. Thanks to the bountifulness of Providence and the vast emptiness of the North American continent, this availability of untouched land continued to define the American experience well into the nineteenth century. First the fertile Atlantic coastline, then the forests inland, then the great Western plains, and finally the lush valleys beyond the Rocky Mountains stood waiting for brave, adventuresome settlers ready to build a nation by the sweat of their brows.

And finally, because America was "started from scratch," as Bailey says, it had no hereditary rulers, no class system, no lords and peasants, no First, Second, and Third Estates. From the outset, American society has been a society of equals, free of the inherited resentments and badges of inferiority that divided the nations of the Old World. No American has been forced to bend his knee or doff his cap to the lord of the manor. Any American, no matter how modest his background or poor his beginnings, can aspire to land, to wealth, and to independence if he is willing to work hard, to save, and to seize the opportunities offered by the New World.

This celebratory self-congratulation is not merely the stuff of political speeches and Fourth of July oratory. It was, until very recently, the considered judgment of serious scholars, honored in the Academy and inscribed in the professional monographs on which generations of secondary and college textbooks drew for their account of the American story. But heart-warming as this story is, at least if you have not the misfortune to be a Native American or the descendant of a slave, it is simply not true.

Let me be clear about what I am asserting, because the truly revolutionary thrust of Afro-American Studies can be lost through misunderstanding. The traditional story is partial, to be sure, in its slighting of the doings of women, of working-class people, of Native Americans, and of people of color. But that failing can easily be rectified, if one is willing to add some pages to one's narrative. A quick look at the most recent edition of Bailey's text is suggestive. The franchise is now managed by two extremely distinguished professional historians: Lizabeth Cohen, the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies at Harvard and David M. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford. In an effort to be unimpeachably inclusive, these authors have expanded the text to 1248 pages. The book [which surely no student is actually expected to read all the way through] begins not with the arrival of the pilgrims or even with Columbus' voyage of exploration, but with a chapter entitled "New World Beginnings: 33,000 B.C.E. - 1769 C.E." Everyone, including the mastodons now extinct, will get at least a passing mention!

If lack of inclusiveness were the central problem, then in an age more sensitive to the feelings of subaltern populations [as it has now become fashionable to say] the difficulty could be rectified by textbook chapters, courses, or entire programs devoted to the Black experience, the Native American experience, the Latino/a experience, the Woman's experience, the Asian-American experience, the LGBT experience, and even the German-American, Polish-American, Italian-American, Swedish-American, and Hmong-American experience. If budgetary constraints preclude the creation of a separate administrative unit devoted to the study of each of these fractions of the American experience, then as a compromise a Department of Ethnic Studies can be brought into existence, with care taken not to recreate in Academia the experience of ghettoization.

But the story told by our historians upon a hill is not incomplete. It is wrong, through and through. America is not exceptional. It was not founded to be the embodiment of an Idea. And it is not Liberty but a complex, dare I say dialectical, relationship between bound labor and free labor that has defined America's nature from the seventeenth century to the present day. These are provocative claims, to be sure, and they will require a good deal of explanation and defense. The mission of Afro-American Studies, since it burst upon the academic scene in the nineteen-sixties, has been to expose these myths and set the record straight. That is why, during its entire half century career, it has been a site of struggle within the Academy, in a way that Diasporic Studies, Cultural Studies, and Africana Studies have not been.

Tomorrow, we shall begin to explore these claims.