them, on them. When it comes to race, that’s not a lesson that most whites learn at the age of two or ever. Historically, white Americans have always felt the right to define black and brown folks’ realities for them: insisting that enslaved persons were happy on the plantation and felt just like family, or that indigenous persons were the uncivilized ones, while those who would seek to conquer and destroy them were the practitioners of enlightenment.
At the level of labels, racism has long operated to impose white reality onto others. Whites found the assertion of blackness (and especially as a positive, even “beautiful” thing in the 1960s and 1970s) threatening because it was an internally derived title unlike “colored,” or “Negro,” terms which had been foisted upon black bodies by the white and European tradition. Likewise, many whites today react hostilely to the use of the term “African American” because it came from within the black community, and as such, stands as a challenge to white linguistic authority.
When whites tell black folks, as we often do, that they should “just be Americans,” and “drop the whole hyphen thing,” we’re forgetting that it’s hard to just be an American when you’ve rarely been treated like a full and equal member of the family. More to the point, it isn’t our hyphen to drop. But it’s always hard to explain such matters to those who have taken for granted, because we could, that we had the right to set the parameters of national identity, or to tell other people’s stories as if they were our own. It’s been that way for a while and explains much about the way we misteach history.
So at roughly the same time as I was being instructed by my mother on the finer points of linguistic self-determination, I was also beginning to read. I read my first book without help on May 5, 1971, at the age of two years, seven months, and one day. That’s the good and reasonably impressive (if still somewhat freakish) news. The bad news is that the book was Meet Andrew Jackson, an eighty seven-page tribute to the nation’s seventh president, intended to make children proud of the nation in which they live, and of this, one of that nation’s early leaders. Given that my mother had been quick to prohibit books like Little Black Sambo from coming into our home because of the racial stereotypes in which the story trafficked, it was somewhat surprising that she would indulge such a volume as this one, but she did, and I consumed it voraciously.
Therein, I learned that Jackson’s mom had admonished him never to lie or “take what is not your own” (an instruction he felt free to ignore as he got older, at least as it applied to indigenous peoples or the Africans whom he took as property), and that when Jackson headed West as a young man, he encountered Indians who “did not want white people in their hunting grounds,” and “often killed white travelers.” This part was true of course, if a bit incomplete: people whose land has been invaded and is in the process of being stolen often become agitated and sometimes even kill those who are trying to destroy them. Imagine.
On page 46, I read that although “some people in the North were saying it was not right to own slaves . . . Jackson felt the way most other Southerners did. He felt it was right to own slaves. He called his slaves his ‘family.”’ Well then, who are we to question his definition of that term? Ten pages later, I learned that Jackson fought the Creek Indians to preserve America and save innocent lives, though oddly there was no mention that in order to get an accurate count of the dead they slaughtered at Horseshoe Bend, soldiers in Jackson’s command cut off the tips of Creek noses and sliced strips of flesh from their bodies for use as bridal reins for their horses—surely an accidental editorial oversight.
At the end of the book, after recounting Jackson’s rise to the presidency, Meet Andrew Jackson concludes by noting that when Jackson died, his slaves cried and “sang a sad old song.” To insert such a flourish as this, though it probably struck me as touching at the time, is utterly vulgar, and suggests as well as anything what is wrong with the way children in the United States learn our nation’s history. There is no scholarly record of sad songs being sung by slaves as Jackson lay dying. This kind of detail, even were it true—and it almost certainly is not—has no probative value when it comes to letting us know who Andrew Jackson was. It exists for the same reason the old fairy tale about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree and telling his dad because he “couldn’t tell a lie,” exists—because no fabrication is too extreme in the service of national self-love. Anything that makes us feel proud can be said, facts notwithstanding. Anything that reminds us of the not-sonoble pursuits of our forefathers or national heroes, on the other hand, gets dumped down the memory hole. And if you bring those kinds of things up, you’ll be accused of hating America.
The way in which we place rogues like Andrew Jackson on a pedestal, while telling people of color to “get over it” (meaning the past) whenever slavery or Indian genocide is brought up, has always struck me as the most precious of ironies. We want folks of color to move past the past, even as we very much seek to dwell in that place a while. We dwell there every July 4, every Columbus Day, every time a child is given a book like Meet Andrew Jackson to read. We love the past so long as it venerates us. We want to be stuck there, and many would even like to return. Some say as much, as with the Tea Party folks who not only announce that they “want their country back,” but even dress up in tricorn hats, Revolutionary War costumes, and powdered wigs for their rallies. It is only when those who were the targets for destruction challenge the dominant narrative that the past becomes conveniently irrelevant, a trifle not worth dwelling upon.
GOOD OR BAD, the past is a fact, and it often holds the keys to who we are in the present, and who we’re likely to become in the future. This was certainly the case for me.
By 1971, it was time for me to begin preschool. Although I’m certain there were any number of programs in Green Hills or thereabouts in which I could have been enrolled, my mother made the decision (very much against the objections of certain friends and family) that I should attend the early childhood program at Tennessee State University (TSU), which is Nashville’s historically black land-grant college. Her reasons for the decision were mixed. On the one hand, she knew that upon beginning school I would be in an integrated environment—something she had never had the benefit of experiencing—and she wanted me to know what it was like to occasionally find myself in a space where I might not be the taken-for-granted norm. On the other hand, I’ve long suspected that it was also something she did to tweak her family and mark her own independence from the much more provincial life she had led growing up.
TSU, the name of which had recently been changed from Tennessee A&I, is located in North Nashville, just off the foot of Jefferson Street—the epicenter of Nashville’s black community. Although the Jefferson Street corridor had been recently devastated by the construction of Interstate 40 right through the middle of it—a part of “urban renewal” that occurred nationwide and contributed to the destruction of up to one-fifth of all black housing in the country by 1969—the city’s black residents were rightly proud of the area and constantly fought to return it to its former glory. My grandfather had grown up on Jefferson Street as a teen, since the black community was one of the few places Jews could live unless they were of substantial means. Of course, he hadn’t gone to school there. During the days of segregation, he would be sent to the white school downtown, Hume-Fogg, even though his neighborhood school was Pearl, one of the academic jewels among southern black high schools at the time.
Not to romanticize the days of segregation of course, but under conditions of formal oppression, black business districts like Jefferson Street had often managed to carve out a thriving subculture of black success. Forced to turn inward, African Americans across the nation spent their money with black businesses, and the children in the schools knew that the teachers and administrators loved them—they were, after all, their neighbors. While integration was clearly necessary to open up the opportunity structure that had previously been closed off, it also led to the firing of thousands of black teachers across the South, who were no longer wanted in the newly consolidated schools into
