I wouldn't have imagined that the Enlightenment was not beneficial to African American people. Truthfully, I never wondered about it (my white privilege showing through). But because the Enlightenment created "an urge toward the systematization of all human knowledge," (1896) African American people were assigned a lower rating than white people, especially the educated western elite European and American.
I think it's not so much where the non-whites were placed as that the discussion even ensued. There were certainly examples of slaves and former slaves who were educated and achieved academic success. How did the white people reconcile this fact to their notion that non-whites were biologically different and therefore lacked the capacity to participate in learning, reason, and art?
The Enlightenment philosophers lent their voices to the argument by claiming that race was defined by complexion, character, and intellectual capacity, thereby depriving non-whites of any claim to "civilization." Henry Louis Gates, in Writing, Race, and the Difference It Makes, is quick to point out that Anglo-Africans wrote many kinds of works in response to these claims. However, "Black people, we know, have not been 'liberated' from racism by their writings, and they accepted a false premise by assuming that racism would be destroyed once white racists became convinced that we were human, too." (1901)
Fascinating. What if every writer had to first prove his or her worthiness, character, and intellectual capacity before being allowed to write?
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The white race has a track record of using the idea of education in hypocritical fashion - along with the examples Gates gives of educated "young African slaves" (1895), many Native American tribes (the Cherokee, for instance) adopted the cultural and religious structures of the whites and found themselves (still find themselves) treated as outsiders in a land they occupied for a long time BEFORE they were "discovered."
ReplyDeleteI suspect that there would be far fewer books--and possibly fewer grad students as well. Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, but the quirk and kink in that will always be who sets the standards for "worthiness"?
ReplyDeleteI think our views of rhetoric and style would be greatly amplified. Not a bad thing at all!
ReplyDeleteWASP still carries a powerful sting. This month the All Pueblo Reads event "which took on a Hispanic literature/cultural theme" according to the front page article in today's "The Pueblo Chieftain", recounted how a group of middle school students were bused to the library from the East side so they might meet author Sandra Cisneros. Bhabha observed "the fullness of the sterotype-its image as identity-is always threatened by lack (299). Maybe I'm comparing apples and oranges but after reading "The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse" I was troubled by the tone of the Chieftain article. Bordieu is still in my head with Bhabha bringing in reinforcements. Am I off base?
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