Black
history must be remembered all year long.
As the rest of the nation celebrates Black History Month this February, I’m taking a graduate level course I call “Dead White Men.”
It’s actually a classic theory class that covers a number of
influential thinkers, like free market theorist Adam Smith and the famous
French observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville.
It’s a good class. But the thinkers we’re studying are all dead
white men.
In fact, they weren’t just white and male. They were all members
of an elite that was rich and formally educated.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that: They were all great
thinkers, and their contributions to human knowledge are indisputable. But
their views of the world were developed based on their unique positions in
society. As a result, they had some easy-to-recognize blind spots.
What’s missing in the canon of classic literature taught in the
United States are the views of everyone else who built our nation: African
Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and so on.
How would the theories we use to understand our economy,
government, and society differ if we’d recorded the thoughts of marginalized
people along the way?
For example, in The Wealth of Nations — the
seminal book that defines capitalism — Adam Smith asserts that the poor factory
workers living in England during the Industrial Revolution had better lives
under capitalism than even a wealthy African prince.
Those factory workers, however, were living in squalor, in utter misery. From his vantage point, not experiencing it himself, Smith didn’t seem to think it was that bad.
Smith goes on to describe how individuals each act in their own
self-interest. Without any mastermind in control, that lets the free market
work as though it were steered by an “invisible hand.”
The role of government
in aiding the capitalist economy, according to Smith, is minimal.
Here, he misses the enormous role of the British Empire.
During the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain exported wheat
from its colony India even during famines, causing millions of Indians to
starve to death. Cotton came from the United States and sugar from colonies in
the Caribbean, nearly all of it produced by enslaved Africans and their
descendants.
Not to mention that the original inhabitants of the New World that
produced this bounty were largely driven off their land by colonial
governments.
Some “invisible hand.”
That doesn’t necessarily nullify the conclusions Smith made, but
it shows a hole in his theory that’s never accounted for. We tend to accept
Smith’s ideas as they are, without noting this flaw or analyzing how it might
make his ideas inaccurate in any way.
What if instead, the United States elevated the perspectives of
the non-white peoples who were marginalized, enslaved, and exploited to the
same prestige enjoyed by white writers like Smith?
Wouldn’t we all better
understand how the world works — and how to make it work better?
To some extent, of course, this is impossible. Many black and
Native American contemporaries of Smith, or even poor whites, were illiterate,
and they’re now long dead. But surely we can begin to recognize and correct our
mistakes now.
Relegating black history to just one month of the year — and
treating it as if it’s something separate from American history more broadly —
does a disservice to us all. It reinforces the wrongheaded idea that we’re a
white nation, and that the history of other people is only a part of our own
insomuch as it affects whites.
It’s great to have a month highlighting black history and the
achievements of African Americans. But if any of us, regardless of race, wish
to fully understand our own history as a people, then black history must be
included on a level playing field with white history — all year long.
OtherWords
columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to
Fix It. OtherWords.org.