2014 read #124: Creating Black Americans by Nell Irvin Painter.

Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present by Nell Irvin Painter
366 pages
Published 2006
Read from December 26 to December 31
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

The phrase "white guilt" is commonly used to mock social progressives by the more regressive elements of society. It is also employed by activists of color to deflate the self-aggrandizing tendencies of white "allies" who mouth progressive phrases but crowd black (or Native, or Latino, or Asian) commentators out of the spotlight. Yet on a more basic level, "white guilt" describes something that all white Americans should seek out, an antidote (however limited and feeble) to our entitled ignorance and privileged worldview.

This book isn't perfect. It's written as an undergraduate textbook (or possibly even high school textbook, if high schools bothered with such things as actual history), presenting easily digestible facts and figures, repeating them as necessary, and summing up key points at the conclusion of each chapter, as if coaching the reader for a multiple choice midterm. The sardonic humor and understatement of Painter's The History of White People is sadly lacking here, though it peeps through in one or two spots. The broad scope of Painter's history here necessitates a greatest-hits approach, barely skimming the broad motions of any given era; deeper understanding, inevitably, means seeking out more detailed and specific works, with Creating Black Americans as only the starting point. But this is a necessary book. The general story of African American history we absorb in this country -- captive Africans made into a slave labor force, the horrors of plantation life, Lincoln setting everyone free, then total invisibility until Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King fixed everything in the 1960s -- is as glib as it is inaccurate and incomplete. The fuller story told here fills in important gaps in American history: the brief, precocious rise of black civil rights during Reconstruction, including a black senator and six black congressmen; the white terrorism that defeated Reconstruction and essentially re-enslaved the Southern black population; the anger and violence of the 1970s; the endless ways the white power structure undercut black opportunity, from poll taxes to discriminatory lending practices, and how these contributed to the decay of black urban centers and prefigured the more ubiquitous financial inequalities of the present day. These are essential parts of American history, the vital context that makes the current racial tensions and abuses of (white) power part of an ongoing (and sadly obvious) story.

This book joins The History of White People, Chang's The Chinese in America, and Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in my embryonic (but growing) "white guilt" reading list. It would be easy to say something like, "The people who really need to read these books are the white regressives who think 'white guilt' is a derogatory term." But that would be denying my own ignorance and privilege. Every American should learn this generally forgotten or ignored history. Goodness knows I'm still ignorant as hell, and need ever more histories from non-white and non-privileged perspectives going forward.