This course will survey African American intellectual history, out of Africa and through the early twentieth century. It will examine that history by focusing upon one central issue: What is the best strategy for combatting racism? The two major strategies have been: 1) integrationism, using moral suasion, that is, non-violent appeals to the consciences of white people, and 2) separatism, that is, strategies, often militant, that aim to preserve and promote Black identity and culture.
What is the best strategy for combatting anti-Black racism? That is the question that has dominated African American intellectual history. In pre-revolution America, African peoples, both free and slave, sought to develop personal relations both among themselves and with white people. The Revolution and Thomas Jefferson’s famous rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence brought hope to Black Americans: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” African Americans imagined that if they simply appealed persistently to that document and its principles, along with the principles of Christian love, which white people professed, white people’s consciences would eventually move them to see the immorality of the slave system and the racism underlying it. After about 50 years of unsuccessful efforts in moral suasion, around 1830, many African Americans reached the conclusions that white Americans never truly believed in their own rhetoric about equality and universal human liberty, but merely used such language only for their own parochial interest; that white Americans were not true Christians; and that White Americans, for the most part, lacked consciences to which African Americans might appeal. Hence was born “racial realism,” the belief that race and racism are, for all practical purposes, permanent features of U.S. society, and therefore some other strategies for dealing with that racism, besides moral suasion, are necessary, which include separation from the mainstream, white society and possible use of violence. Much of African American intellectual history, to this day, revolves around that debate, as illustrated by the disagreements between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
What is the best strategy for combatting anti-Black racism? That is the question that has dominated African American intellectual history. In pre-revolution America, African peoples, both free and slave, sought to develop personal relations both among themselves and with white people. The Revolution and Thomas Jefferson’s famous rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence brought hope to Black Americans: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” African Americans imagined that if they simply appealed persistently to that document and its principles, along with the principles of Christian love, which white people professed, white people’s consciences would eventually move them to see the immorality of the slave system and the racism underlying it. After about 50 years of unsuccessful efforts in moral suasion, around 1830, many African Americans reached the conclusions that white Americans never truly believed in their own rhetoric about equality and universal human liberty, but merely used such language only for their own parochial interest; that white Americans were not true Christians; and that White Americans, for the most part, lacked consciences to which African Americans might appeal. Hence was born “racial realism,” the belief that race and racism are, for all practical purposes, permanent features of U.S. society, and therefore some other strategies for dealing with that racism, besides moral suasion, are necessary, which include separation from the mainstream, white society and possible use of violence. Much of African American intellectual history, to this day, revolves around that debate, as illustrated by the disagreements between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
- Wykładowca: Kenneth Stikkers