America: A History of Racism or the History of Individualism?

February is Black History Month. It’s an interesting time, because two diametrically opposed views come to the fore. One view sees the history of Blacks in America as a failure of the American experiment. The opposite view sees the history of Blacks as an American success story—black liberation.

In “honor” of Black History Month, The Washington Post ran an op-ed by a historian and college professor titled Black history is U.S. history — but some of my students don’t want to hear it. It is written by Donald Earl Collins, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland University College. The article’s subtitle is “History class should be the last place where we stop talking about race.”

I agree: We should be talking about race—how America makes race irrelevant in life. That, however, is not Collins’s message, which is why I put the word honor in scare quotes. Collins gives us a mouthful. But this paragraph encapsulates the thrust of his theme:

American history is the history of modern racism. Native Americans numbered around 10 million to 15 million in what would become British North America at the time of the Jamestown settlement in 1607. Diseases, wars, starvation and constant encroachment would reduce this population by 90 percent. White migrants and West Africans were used as indentured servants and slaves to make the colonies profitable through tobacco, rice and indigo. Eventually the connection between African skin and slavery was codified into state laws and the U.S. Constitution. The profits and products of slavery made industrialization possible, and supplied the United States and Europe with the cotton that would create modern capitalism. It was this system, so contradictory to American ideals, that led to a civil war that killed and maimed 1.1 million soldiers, civilians and sailors.

This is only U.S. history until 1865. There’s also Indian removal, the stealing of land from Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Southern and Eastern European immigrants and the idea that Irish, Italian, and Polish newcomers weren’t white (scientific racism), Jim Crow, lynchings, race riots, black migration, Mexican migration, the assimilation of white ethnics, the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement. This list is hardly exhaustive, but its topics are the key ones in any U.S. history course. Race is critical to how and where Americans live, how Americans vote and why politicians continue in their attempts to gerrymander voting districts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Race is central to almost every aspect of American life. Yet for some students, I’m “anti-patriotic” for talking about it, as one white student hollered in one of my world history classes a few years ago.

A lot of truth—and falsehood. Is Collins describing America? Or are these horrors things that happened inside America’s borders despite America? I’ll give my analysis in my next post.