The turn of the year has had me thinking a lot about the past. The long list of issues we've discussed on the blog, from the #BlackLivesMatter movement to the still-recent debates about the Confederate flag, share a common bond. Our understanding of everything from affirmative action to the right to vote is shaped by how we understand the history of race in America.
I was reminded of this when I read Drew Gilpin Faust’s quite useful appreciation of the work of historian John Hope Franklin. In this late 2015 NY Review of Books essay that celebrates the centenary of Franklin’s birth (brief bio here), Faust points us to Franklin as an example of a scholar who both sought to catalog and analyze the history of racism against African Americans as well as to show how an understanding of this history ought to matter to create, in Franklin’s words, “a better present and future.”
Franklin is one of the most important historians and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. His prolific work on the history of Africans in America is a cornerstone of modern academic scholarship regarding the black/white racial divides in the United States. Franklin’s rigorous historiography shed light on formerly invisible insights about slavery and segregation. His work challenged the conventional narratives academics and the public cherish. Because Franklin forced America to confront facts it wished to forget, his scholarship is revisionist in the most useful sense of the word.
Franklin also set an example as a scholar and as an activist. He not only researched history, he applied his understanding of African American history to law and public policy—most notably as part of the legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education. As Faust points out, Franklin’s legacy as a public intellectual is now being paralleled by the advocacy of Bryan Stevenson and the journalism of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
(I had an all too brief opportunity years ago to talk to Dr. Franklin about his work. He turned the conversation on me and asked me what I was doing as a scholar to address the dilemmas of our past. He encouraged my own work, and that moment continues to inspire me.)
And finally, as Faust argues in her essay, a grounded, conscious awareness of the history of racism is the beginning to dismantling the inequality we face today. She writes:
Only if we understand and acknowledge this past can we grapple with the conflicts of the present and the promise of the future. [] “To confront our past and see it for what it is.” Franklin’s words. The past “is.” Not the past was. The past lives on. What would it mean to confront it, to see it clearly?
The past is. Now. This isn't to say that the present hasn't evolved, but it is to say that our debates are animated by dilemmas we have not yet overcome. And the only way through is to realize and confront this fact. The challenge is that the past is, but it exists in ways that are invisible yet salient.
There are those who certainly don’t want to have this conversation at all. They own their version of the past, and it gives them power and comfort. And even those who want to have this conversation are content to see the individual bad acts and to name those acts alone as the past being present.
I don’t disagree–open, aggressive ideologies are to be fought. Indeed, open ideology is an easy thing to fight.
The harder task, the task that certain versions of history teach us to avoid, is observing the evolution of invisible ideologies. which might be comfortable, which channel our very own decisions without us being aware. It is these structures that have their genesis in segregation and discrimination, that have the effect of objectifying and marginalizing (even though they are neutral on their face), that protect bad actors and force difficult outcomes. This structural racism can only be understood clearly through the patterns of history-as-present.
Franklin's work and the work of scholars like him can begin to build the awareness. Such history can aid us to imagine ourselves as very similar to the actors in history who were trapped by beliefs constructed to maintain a status quo. This kind of inquiry can help us engage in deeper awareness, which can then open needed honest dialogue.