A Reflection: What is Blackness? What is Black Identity?

From a Jamaican studying in Trinidad and Tobago 

Sparked from the work of Herskovits in general, and the tribute article of Sidney Mintz in particular (Mintz 1964) I was intrigued by ethnicity and it’s resulting impact on identity - even as I am forming daily my opinions, insights and identity as a young adult. In the article, Mintz discusses seminal works on black identity in the aftermath of the upheaval and exploitation of slavery and Herskovits’s work put up for discussion among names such as Dubois, Johnson, as the thinker who came to stir up the debate which had seemed all but totally shelved by American and the English Caribbean as an issue still present and influential in the dynamics of society.

A lot of activists within the realm of racial and ethnic divisions and equality claim influence by the works of Herskovits and his presentation of the retentions and innovations of culture and practices that were taken with the enslaved blacks to the new world. Startling to me however, were those who questioned the right of Herskovits, a Jew settled in America, to be presenting the African presence to these the descendants and inheritors of the legacy, and how it is that it took ‘him’ in order for the subject matter to have gained prominence and validity in “mainstream Academia.” It is a view which later had affected students under him (PBS.org 2010). Reading and watching these actions and the sentiments/ reactions of those affected interest me as a student of the social sciences, but they resonate with me in many ways because of the society within which I exist and am shaped.

Key to my understanding (or lack thereof) of the reactions of those onlookers and students who were ascribed status as the inheritors of the displaced Africans was my own experience here in the Caribbean. To be black in my country is to be the ethnic majority; it means seeing myself, and any manifestation of a life choice I may make reflected in society. I see myself as my nation’s leader, the holder of high offices, and the trained professional, even as I see myself as the delinquent and the disciplinarian. And yet, it was through looking at the response to their identity from the lens of black as minority that I became open to perceiving class struggles and conflict through a new lens. And yet, Herskovits did not seek to present the “…Political position of these peoples” (Mintz 1964). The Myth of the Negro Past was to present a challenge to the notion that the displaced peoples had no past – that they had carried little with them from the continent of origin and what they carried was lost to the deculturization process that was chattel slavery. His work highlighted the resilience of culture and cultural practices, and their rebirth and relevance to subsequent generations.

It is interesting to note that the widely held belief in American Sociological thought may have been that the displaced Africans did not come with any culture, when in my own country there are laws (some of which, like the 1898 Obeah law, are still on the books) that were specifically created as a response to culture’s pervasive and versatile nature.  

This was no really “new” phenomena in my home country, indeed we were taught about the suppression of culture as well as race based oppression and dehumanisation, but I think a lot of us failed to grasp what it meant. And even as I read the article and did my own research on sentiments/ reactions to both the work of (and reception of) Herskovits on Africana (that word in itself causes me some disquiet though I have not yet unboxed why), I am grateful and arrested that this man sought to legitimise his standing in academia through his presentation of ethno-cultural realities and retentions of a race that was not his own. How does one begin to address this feeling?

Nevertheless, the term I leave this article having been moved by is Africanisms, which I understand to mean those elements of language, attitudes, modes of expression – those components of a cultural identity – which are deemed to be African in origin.

Works Cited

Mintz, Sidney. 1964. "Melville J Herskovitz and Caribbean Studies: A retrospective tribute." Caribbean Studies, vol. 4, No 2 4 (2): 42 - 51.

PBS.org. 2010. Independent Lens: Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. January. Accessed September 25, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8m8VSdKRu4.