the twenty-first century.
Yet notwithstanding recent innovations in the study of the black past, African Americanist historians, with few exceptions, are not usually socialized to make their scholarship deliberately relevant to the present and, therefore, do not strive to write for lay audiences. Many, moreover, tend to criticize their postmillennial students’ and the general public’s lack of historical knowledge, yet little has been written on the messages that the American public receives about black history from outside the province of the community of African Americanist historians.
Not only have historians undervalued contemporary black history, but very few have explored the contemporary implications of the actual African American experience and how African American history has been brought into play, juggled, decoded, and represented in US politics and popular culture in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century. Addressing this contributes to contemporary black history while also shedding light on how black history has been interpreted outside of the “ivory tower.”
What we are told about African American history through Hollywood films, the mainstream media, Internet sites, entertainers, politicians, Black History Month commemorations, and museums can reveal a lot about how the general public thinks about black America and may conceptualize the black experience. For instance, one reason that many whites oppose race-based affirmative action and reparations has something to do with their inability to relate to black people’s collective memory and historical consciousness, which is the byproduct of a lack of knowledge of black history, particularly prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. We must be critical of how black history is portrayed in US popular culture and politics. Framed largely by those who are depicting and interpreting it, the implications and meanings of black history are numerous.
Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the Twenty-first Century seeks to explore how African American history has been regarded, depicted, and treated by a variety of spokespersons and public figures outside of the ranks of professionally trained historians—from politicians to comedians to filmmakers to hip-hop artists—and institutions (such as museums, mainstream Hollywood culture, and the US government) in the late twentieth century and the twenty-first century, the so-called pinnacle of “postracial” American society. This book underscores the ubiquitous nature of African American history in American thought and culture. Each of the following chapters focuses on unpacking and deciphering how black history has been represented, interpreted, and remembered by people and institutions that arguably have at least as much (if not more) influence on the general public’s impressions of black history than the vast majority of historians of the black past do.
How has black history been memorialized and, more specifically, packaged for publics and constituencies by an assortment of spokespersons in non-academic spaces? How might diverse historical message-bearers have shaped their depictions of the black past for their intended audiences? Though this book traverses many time periods, the “Age of Obama” is a common thread. How have developments in the twenty-first century and the years of Barack Obama’s presidency impacted the ways in which black history has been unraveled in US politics and popular culture? How have these twenty-first century portrayals of black history persuaded their sometimes-uninformed consumers’ views of African American culture?
I begin in chapter one by unpacking President Obama’s complex philosophy of black history as revealed in many of his speeches and symbolic gestures. Obama’s depictions of black history have foremost been influenced by his background and identity as well as inevitably by the particular context and the racial makeup of his audiences. Certain elements of his black history worldview have remained relatively constant, but Obama’s representations of African American history were consistently carefully calculated.
Today, Black History Month is an established American custom. Yet, since widely acclaimed actor Morgan Freeman called Black History Month “ridiculous” in a 2005 interview with Mike Wallace on the popular CBS newsmagazine television program 60 Minutes, debates about the purpose and relevance of Black History Month have increased. In chapter two, I explore the debates about the status of National African American History Month celebrations within a vast historical context. It becomes clear that the contemporary disagreements about the significance of Black History Month are not new.
During the new millennium, there has been an explosion of mainstream, commercially successful films that dramatize dimensions of black history. While most of these films have redemptive and educational qualities, all of them are problematic in their own ways. Chapter three unpacks how a collection of films released since The Help (2011) have interpreted and in many cases oversimplified and misinterpreted episodes and historical icons from the annals of black history.
Often employing the medium of films and digital shorts, black comedians and satirists have offered their renditions of black history. Many have skillfully incorporated clever, yet often inaccurate, discussions of slavery, racism, and past racial injustices in their stand-up performances, albums, and sketches. In chapter four, I analyze how a group of black comics, satirists, humorists, and (for lack of a better term) jokesters have used their craft and positions as public spokespersons to put forward commentaries, sometimes sparking controversy, on the black past.
In 2005, the US Senate approved Resolution 39, in which it apologized for its predecessors’ failure to enforce anti-lynching legislation. Four years later, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. Beginning in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, US politicians have apologized for a range of past atrocities committed against African American people while others have sought posthumous pardons for African American historical icons and the victims of legalized racial repression. Chapter five examines the implications and deeper meanings of US politicians’ and the US government’s revisiting of the past.
Opened in September 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the nation’s capital became the world’s largest African American history museum. In theory, the primary function of museums is to amass, display, protect, and exhibit historical materials and artifacts to the public for educational and entertainment purposes. In the “Afterword,” I offer a brief appraisal of how the recently opened and critically acclaimed National Museum of African American History and Culture functions in this manner and portrays African American history, while considering how this representation might shape the general public’s perceptions of the African American experience.
Reclaiming the Black Past is my contribution to understanding how African American history has been conceived, discussed, memorialized, and tinkered with by various groups and in different social spaces in US popular culture and politics.
“None of Our Hands Are Entirely Clean”
Obama and the Challenge of African American History
In what ways did Barack Obama conceptualize African American history during his presidential terms? How did he mull over black history in front of his different audiences and represent specific episodes in black history at key moments and in major speeches, such as his “A More Perfect Union” oration in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008? What types of code-switching did Obama engage in when discussing black history or policies, such as affirmative action, that have concrete historical antecedents? In what particular manners does his standing and approach as a black trailblazer / black “first” and leader compare with similar black luminaries from the past? How did Obama portray and make sense of hip-hop within the context of African American history and culture?
Such inquiries guide what I consider in this chapter. As a historian of black intellectual thought,
