Historical Illiteracy

by Dennis Green

After his first year in office, President Ronald Reagan’s approval rating was far below where Obama’s is now, still hovering just under 50%. Unemployment was higher then, at 12%, and interest rates rose to 16% before the end of Reagan’s first term.

And as for blackness, and Harry Reid, liberals and conservatives alike forget that no one has explored race in America like the director Spike Lee, who, in his 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, created quite a stir when he revealed that among blacks, “the darker the better” is a common theme. So much for political correctness — on either side.

Lee also pointed out in Jungle Fever, 1991, that black women tend to look with some scorn upon black men who date only white women, especially blondes. Hear that, Tiger?

Last year, in a PBS documentary called “Black American Lives,” Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. interviewed a number of black celebrities, and arranged for them to have their DNA analyzed. Several were shocked to discover that, despite their darker complexions, they tested 40% white.

Why? Because the history of slavery in America includes the fact that many black women were raped by their white slave masters, and that there was also a certain degree of “peepin’ and a’hidin’” on the part of both genders mixing with the whites. Almost no African-American is 100% black.

But then too, very few Anglo-Saxon Caucasians test 100% white either. Hence the recognition that skin tone varies even among one particular nationality. “Black Irish” anyone?

Malcolm X had very light skin and red hair and freckles, and as a young man his nickname was “Red.” I once worked in a gas station in the flats of Berkeley with a light-skinned black man with freckles and red hair whose nickname was “Red,” and who gave me a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And yet, no one did more in America to change the civil rights debate to Black Power than Malcolm X.

So the debate about race goes on. In the beginning, among many black Americans, Obama wasn’t “black enough.” And only later in his campaign did he prove that he could resonate with the preacher cadences of the voice heard commonly in black churches and on the streets in the ghettos.

And yet, many Americans display the most appalling historical illiteracy, even some graduates of very fine universities. They forget the very long struggle on the part of black Americans to be free, and a Civil War fought in part at least to advance that struggle.

Their ignorance is compounded by a kind of amnesia of contemporary events, so that Trent Lott’s praise of segregationist Strom Thurmond is somehow convoluted as equivalent to Reid’s choice of words. Even Joe Biden’s comments about how “clean” Obama is are forgotten in the melee.

So as usual, this tempest in a teapot dome is the nonsense of the news cycle, nothing to be taken seriously. But it does give us an opportunity to refresh our memories, to discuss race openly and candidly, and to get on with the business of being a United States of America.

©2010 Dennis Green