Out in the UK this month, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Steven Speilberg's Lincoln has energized interest in a period of American history defined by race. Rather than make our own critiques or slap downs, we present these books to fill the gaps left by Hollywood.
We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentlemen, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man? ... Yes, gentleman, we are free like you, and it is only by your avarice and our ignorance that anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither see nor find the right that you pretend to have over us ... We are your equals then, by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colours within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black nor an advantage to be white.
This excerpt is from a letter written in July 1792 by the leaders of the revolution of Haitian slaves. The letter has been republished in the collection of writings of the black leader Toussaint L'Overture, The Haitian Revolution, which includes also the correspondence between him and Napoleon Bonaparte. In the late eighteenth century, Toussaint L'Overture and his supporters established the first black republic in the world.
In the United Kingdom, October is Black History Month. The celebration was originally introduced in 1926 on the initiative of Carter G. Woodson, the editor of the Journal of Negro History. In 2007, no fewer than 6,000 events were held in the UK as part of its programme. Here are some key Verso titles past and present that are relevant to the study and celebration of African and Caribbean history.
In an interview with Democracy Now! Dr. Cornel West accuses Obama of "looking for the wrong Lincoln." The greatness of Lincoln, he argues, lies instead in the way he repsonded to the demands of social movements led by the likes of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. These movements were not responding to some professed American value, but rather fighting against the construction of race and racism though the ideas, policies and institutions that reproduced its fundamental logic. This is the argument David Roediger advances in How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. A reviewer in The Journal of American History praises the book as "a compact survey of race in U.S. History."
Viewing race as part of a series of dialectical formations, the author unravels a number of paradoxes at the heart of American history, explaining, for example, how the democratization of white citizenship was accompanied by a dramatic expansion in black bondage and the dispossession of native lands, how a capitalist system that was only supposed to see profit (and labor as an abstraction) organized some of the most racially stratified workforces on the planet, how a "color-blind" liberalism gave rise to deeply entrenched racial inequalities in the postwar period, and why race will likely survive the election of a black president.