Veterans are fierce, persistent against all odds, and amazing leaders. Sure, not all veterans are the same, but a majority of vets are exceptional with whatever they pour their energy into, whether it’s fixing diesel engines or running a Fortune 100 company. A vision for the future of the Division of Veterans Affairs has to be equally bold. When I think “bold,” I think of Bobby Kennedy’s powerful declaration:
“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
‘Why not?’ is like a mental palate cleanser, one that will suit us well. I’d invite you, for a moment, to forget everything you think you know about how things work in state government and even what you may believe about veterans – and let’s start with a clean slate.
- This is the 2nd part of a three-part series on veteran’s affairs in RI.
First, let’s think about the people of the RI Division of Veterans Affairs, or the VetAffairs team as I’ll call them. The division has to be a lean team with some of the most dynamic, engaging, and creative Rhode Islanders around. They’d be beyond committed to veterans and their families and have a deep appreciation for everyone in the National Guard, Reserves, and Active Duty force who live in our state. You’d hear their enthusiasm and commitment in the tone of their voice, a warmth and sincerity as they talk about why they joined the VetAffairs team.
The organization would become agile, responsive, and super connected to every town and city in the state. If you’re a veteran, you’d know someone on the team or at least follow them on Twitter (yes, I said Twitter, @RIVeterans does exist). Above all else, the team would be facilitators, connectors, and community builders.
Second, services provided by the division need to match the pressing issues of our time. The Division can no longer be a resource hub; it must become a platform for human capital development. Its core competency will be taking the unique assets each veteran brings back to the state and leveraging this talent in the local economy to foster small businesses, cutting edge research, and new jobs. The veterans will do the heavy lifting, while the VetAffairs team will empower them by accelerating their transition to civilian life (see Part Three in the series, next week!).
The RI Department of Labor & Training and local non-profits in the state must realize a real-time, fluid collaboration with the VetAffairs team to synchronize veteran’s aspirations with mentors, leaders in business, technology, education, and healthcare. Veterans who graduate from Rhode Island universities will stay here, infusing local industry with a powerful combination of millennial entrepreneurship and veteran tenacity.
Embracing Rhode Island’s size, each one of the 72,000+ veterans of our state have to be brought to the table, to become solution designers and collaborators. Our focus is sometimes so strained on those who need assistance, the homeless or unemployed veteran, that we forget there are tens of thousands of veterans who are doing well in our state. For every veteran who is homeless in Rhode Island, there are 266 veterans with a place to call home. And for every veteran who’s unemployed, there are 16 that have a job. We need a charismatic team of expert communicators who can inspire a powerful veteran network of connectors and mentors. But why stop there? The success of a veteran’s transition can be multiplied by the success of the community around them. Remember the other 93.4% of Rhode Islanders who aren’t veterans. That’s a lot of personal and professional capital to jumpstart educational dreams, seed funding for startups, and long-term career planning for every vet who comes home to the Ocean State.
Why should we be so focused on accelerating a veterans’ transition from active duty? Over the next decade, millennials (post 9/11 veterans) will become 75 percent of the total workforce. Our success in harnessing their talent and leadership will directly impact the growth and health of our state’s economy as well as the long-term welfare of our veterans and their families. It’s also the quintessential preventive measure, nipping in the bud the negative consequences of a poor transition– negating many of the problems that typically consume media attention around veterans: strained mental health, unemployment, homelessness, etc. The Division of Veterans Affairs has the most crucial role to play in this preventative strategy, one that sets our veterans up for success and saves us all the costs of inaction or poor execution.
While there ought to be vigorous engagement with new veterans, older veterans are making a different, but hugely important transition too: retirement. Having worked as a psychologist with many veterans crossing this bridge, the significance and challenges of retirement cannot be underestimated. Most of these veterans can expect a complete reconfiguration of their lives, their identities, and changing health needs. Our primary responsibility to these veterans is assuring that those who are eligible and wish to receive their healthcare from the Providence VA Medical Center, get it reasonably quickly. The Providence VA has some of the most dedicated clinicians providing the highest quality care. The VetAffairs team must support a seamless enrollment process so vets can get that fantastic care. It starts by maintaining a strong, active collaboration with those who deliver healthcare to our veterans (Dr. MacKenzie, the Medical Center Director, and her entire staff).
Lastly, by 2017, the division will have an amazing home to offer nearly 200 older veterans. The new and improved Rhode Island Veterans Home promises to be one of the best assisted-living facilities for veterans in the nation. Yet, we need to go beyond offering veterans a state of the art residence. We need to offer the Rhode Island community a new cultural center.
I grew up on Roosevelt Drive in Bristol, a street that runs beside the Veterans Home. And even so, when I think of ‘veterans’ I don’t picture the Veterans Home. Instead, I think of the vets marching in formation or sitting on the back of slick, classic corvettes during the Bristol 4th of July Parade. After investing $94 million into the home’s revitalization, part of it should be a gathering place where our state’s rich military history is not only told with engraved stones and markers, but by the people who actually lived it. Let’s create a convening space where our World War II, Korea, and Vietnam veterans are invited to share their stories and maintain a vibrant connection to the life of the Bristol community and broader state. Let’s showcase our deep naval roots and sea faring heritage. Let’s not, as a WWII resident at the Veterans Home recently cautioned, lose all of that history.
Some will read this article and think it unrealistic. There’s plenty of cynicism to go around these days, especially about what government can do – and the Division of Veterans Affairs is part of state government. But I’ve never bought into the cynicism. If there is any part of government that has the potential to deserve your trust and confidence, it is the VetAffairs team – comprised of veterans empowering veterans, a rock solid recipe for efficiency, accountability, and tremendous social impact. Rhode Island is positioned to lead the nation in fast tracking its veterans’ success. Let’s get it done.
This is part two of a three part series.
Next week we will explore some little known challenges that the state will face implementing this plan, and how to overcome them.
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Rhode Island has had 11 constitutional conventions since becoming a state, according to State House Historian Tom Evans. But it wasn’t until the 1973 “concon” that holding one became a once-a-decade decision for voters.
“Prior to that, the General Assembly would call for it,” Evans said.
Following the 1973 convention, voters approved a referendum question “to require that a ballot question calling for a convention to amend or revise the Rhode Island Constitution be placed on the ballot at least every ten (10) years,” Evans wrote in this document. “If the General Assembly fails to place the question on the ballot at some time during any period of ten years, then the Secretary of State must place the question on the ballot at the next general election after the expiration of the ten-year period.”
And so, question 3 on this November’s ballot will ask Rhode Islanders if we’d like to have a 12th constitutional convention, a process by which we can amend the state constitution.
If approved, delegates will run for one of 75 seats at the convention. There would probably be a special election next year. Then, in a public debate akin to a legislative session, vote on questions to put before a vote of the people. Ideas have ranged from a line-item veto for the governor to a codified constitutional right to an equal education.
Advocates of a so-called concon in Rhode Island this year tend to be conservative, and tout it as an opportunity to reform government. Skeptics, including many influential progressive organizations like the ACLU and AFL-CIO, say a concon can be easily influenced by anonymous outside money. Many Democrats fear abortion rights would be vulnerable.
No state has held a constitutional convention since Rhode Island did in 1986, according to the Washington Post. The ’86 concon has been well-documented here, here and Common Cause RI has a page here. Voters have since rejected the idea twice. In 2004 it failed 48 to 52 percent, and in 1994 it failed 41 to 59 percent.
READ COMMON CAUSE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR JOHN MARION’s CONCON POST.
History
The first constitutional convention in Rhode Island occurred in 1824, when Rhode Island was still governed by a charter from the king of England. The Ocean State adopted its first official constitution 18 years – and four such concons – later, according to Evans. “Bowing to increasing unrest,” he writes, the General Assembly called for a convention following the Dorr Rebellion.
In December of 1841, Thomas Dorr put forward what Evans calls an “extralegal … People’s Constitution” that was approved by voters 13,944 to 52 – and Evans writes that almost 9,000 votes were deemed ineligible. Earlier that year the so-called “Landholder’s Constitution” was rejected by voters 8,698 to 8,013. The first constitution was approved by the voters on November 21, 22 and 23 of 1842 by a near unanimous vote of 7,032 to 59, reports Evans.
Then constitutional conventions fell out favor with Rhode Islanders. There wouldn’t be another one for 102 years. Voters rejected a call for conventions in 1853 and 1882, Evans writes. And in 1883, the state Supreme Court issued an opinion that the state constitution can’t be amended via a convention.
In 1944, Rhode Islanders voted 15,683 to 524 to have a “limited” constitutional convention to address “voting rights for members of the armed forces and merchant marine,” Evans wrote.
During the 1950’s there were three conventions conventions. In both 1951 and 1955, delegates put forward pay raises for legislators and lifetime appointments for judges. Rhode Island voters rejected both measures both times. In 1951, a poll tax was repealed and “Home Rule Charter for Cities and Towns” was approved. Voters approved increasing the “Borrowing Power of the State” in 1951 and “Redevelopment for Off-street Parking” in 1955, according to Evans.
Former governor and Providence mayor Dennis J. Roberts would chair a constitutional convention that would begin in 1964 and not end until 1969. It put forward “approving a revised Constitution on December 4, 1967,” Evans wrote, which was then “overwhelmingly rejected by a vote of 17,615 yeas to 69,110 nays” in April, 1968.”
]]>Today is the 150th anniversary of Seth Luther’s death. Since last year’s post, records have been found locating Luther possible final resting place in Brattleboro, Vermont. A WIKI page is in formation, and other plans to follow. Here is a great link to a 1974 essay by on Luther by Carl Gersuny called “Seth Luther – The Road From Chepachet.”
In the week we celebrate the signing of the marriage equality bill, let us remember this great organizer and agitator with what he said so many years ago:
“It is the first duty of an American citizen to hate injustice in all its forms.”
Original Post April 29, 2012:
Today is the anniversary of the death of Seth Luther. He died on April 29, 1863.
Who?
Seth Luther*: Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame inductee; Union Organizer; leader of the Dorr Rebellion and radical of the worst sort. On the weekend that we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence it also seems appropriate to look a little farther back to our roots here in Rhode Island. As the saying goes, the most radical idea in America today is a long memory.
Luther was an itinerant organizer and agitator whose father fought in the American Revolution. He spent time on what was then the American Frontier and Deep South before coming home to try and establish roots and a career as a carpenter. His passion for justice and the rights of the oppressed led him to join the nascent labor movement as a speech maker and organizer.
In a speech he delivered in Boston in 1834, Luther said:
“It is true, a Rhode Island Nabob said, in a public document, ‘The poor must work or starve, and the rich will take care of themselves.’ But I venture to assert, that the rich never did take care of themselves or their property, in peace or war. It is protected by the laboring, the producing class. It is created by the laborer, drawn out of his hands by the means of bad laws and then forsooth he must protect it at the expense of his health, oftentimes of his life, for the benefit of those, who will have nothing to do with the creation of wealth or its protection after it’s created.”
Luther could just as easily be describing the conditions working people face today. In another parallel to the conditions organizers face, then and now. When Luther died, by then a broken man, this was the commentary The Providence Journal added to the notice of his death:
“He was natural radical, dissatisfied with all existing institutions about him, and labored under the not uncommon delusion that it was his special mission to set things right…His ideal of a pure democracy seemed to be that blessed state wherein the idle, the thriftless, and the profligate should enjoy all the fruits of the labor of the industrious, the frugal, and the virtuous. The possessors of property everywhere he looked upon as banded robbers, who he hated as born enemies of the human race. He had considerable talent for both writing and speaking; but he was too violent, willful, and headstrong to accomplish any good. Soon after the troubles of ’42, he became insane, and was sent to the Dexter Asylum, where he remained until 1848, when the Butler Hospital was opened for patients. He was then removed to that institution by the city, where he remained for ten years; thence to Brattleboro where he has just closed his worse than useless life.”
Would you expect anything less?
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Woody Guthrie may be best known for rambling the ribbon of highway between the wheat fields and the Redwood forests but on February 23, 1940 he was on the New York island, and he penned the greatest ever American anthem.
- “The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me”
The “Oklahoma Cowboy” (as he was known as at the time) had just recently arrived in the big city and staying at the Hanover House, one of the many cheap hostels in the city. (Please check out this amazingly cool interactive history of the Hanover House here) It was on 6th and 43rd, just a block from Times Square and, somewhat ironically, across the street from where the Bank of America and the Wall Street Journal buildings are today.
Throughout the 30’s Guthrie had hoboed around with Dust Bowl migrant workers and was coming from California where he was not only an aspiring folk star, he also worked as a columnist for a leftist newspaper. These lyrics were written at the Hanover House, but were too radical to make the original recording released in 1945.
- “One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering
if God blessed America for you and me”
And
- “Was a high wall there that tried to stop me.
A sign was painted said: Private Property, - But on the back side it didn’t say nothing —
- God blessed America for me.”
The first version didn’t even contain the final phrase for which the song is famous for. Guthrie wrote it as a counter balance to Irving Berlin’s jingoistic “God Bless America” which was being revived as a pre-World War 2 battle cry. Equality and opportunity are what set our society apart from the Nazis, he reasoned. Blind allegiance and belief in dogma, that’s what we have in common.
NPR did a great story on how the song has evolved over the years.
Bruce Springsteen, Guthrie’s heir apparent as the people’s poet, once called it “the greatest song ever written about America.”
It gets right to the heart of the promise of what our country was supposed to be all about. If you talk to some of the unemployed steel workers from East LA or Pittsburgh or Gary there are a lot of people out there whose jobs are disappearing and I don’t know if they feel this song is true anymore and I’m not sure that it is but I know that it ought to be.
That was in 1985. Bank of America was still a regional operation and Rupert Murdoch didn’t own the Wall Street Journal. Almost 30 years later – and 73 years after Woodie Guthrie first wrote America’s most famous song, we have less reason than ever to believe this land was made for you and me.
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Roger Williams, the godfather of church/state separation and the founder of Rhode Island, arrives in the New World on this day in 1631. Sometimes called the world’s first abolitionist, the Ocean State inventor is world famous for pretty much inventing the concept of secular government.
He was just 29 when he arrived in Boston and he had already concluded that the Church of England was corrupt. A year later he wrote that England was effectively stealing land from the indigenous people. By 1636 he left Massachusetts to start his own utopia and called it Providence … meaning to make provisions for the future.
Completely unrelated, Connecticut requires cattle be branded today in 1644.
First time a plane is ever shot down out of mid-air, today in 1918.
Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World publishes headline: “Pop Stars & Drugs — Facts that Will Shock You” today in 1967.
Happy birthday Hank Aaron, born today in 1934.
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A “lively experiment” indeed.
Rhode Island’s colonial charter, which celebrates its 350 anniversary this June, “holds a unique place in the evolution of human rights in the modern world,” says Rhode Island College emeritus professor Dr. Stanley Lemons.
“When King Charles II approved the Charter in July 1663,” Lemons writes, “it marked the first time in modern history that a monarch signed a charter guaranteeing that individuals within a society were free to practice the religion of their choice without any interference from the government.”
Pieter Rods, of the Newport Restoration Society, calls our colonial charter, “the first document anywhere in the history of the English empire that guarantees freedom of religion as a matter of law. Religious freedom and separation of church and state both things that we think of as being very important american values and here they are first set forth in a Rhode Island document.”
Both historians share their thoughts on our world-changing charter as Governor Chafee sets to unveil the state’s plans to honor its birthday today at the State House. Hat tip to Andy Cutler for posting this video to Facebook yesterday.
According to a press release:
The activities to be announced include creating a new exhibit space in the State House, a State House gala, a series of educational events, as well as plans for the conservation and preservation of the Charter. Color guards, colonial militia, and an actor playing the role of Roger Williams will also be on hand for tomorrow’s event.
The press release about the announcement notes the charter is the “source of the phrase ‘lively experiment.'” Chafee uses this phrase often when combating the Christian dogma that often invades modern Rhode Island’s political debate.
The announcement also comes one day after two RI Future correspondents (read them here and here) took issue with a GoLocal piece that said Roger Williams would be a Republican.
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Whatever. Four workers were cut down in the street. You can still see the bullet holes in the gravestones from the high powered guns used against the strikers and each labor day some of us gather to remind the powers that be that we are not all dead and buried. This year Maureen Martin, Secretary-Treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO will deliver the address at the memorial to the martyrs created by the Rhode Island Labor History Society to memorialize what is known as The Battle of the Gravestones.
The monument is located in Moshassuck Cemetery, 978 Lonsdale Avenue in Central Falls.
All are invited to a ceremony honoring the event and those who lost their lives.
You can register for the event on Facebook.
If you like, you can see actual newsreel video of the street battle here.
CIVIL WAR AT SAYLESVILLE
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conditions necessary for TF Green’s “Bloodless” Revolution, and the death of Wilma Schesler, martyred in 1974 on a picket line for public sector workers.
Tonight the Society honors its founder, Professor Scott Molloy. A hero for our times, no strike or rally is complete without a harangue against the injustices of our modern world and the economic royalists and all of their accumulated power from Brother Molloy. As the invitation from the society reads:
University of Rhode Island Professor Scott Molloy will be honored by the Rhode Island Labor History Society during its 25th annual awards banquet, Aug. 23.
The event, “A Celebration of Labor Day in Rhode Island,” will be held at the Roger Williams Park Casino in Providence. Festivities begin at 5 p.m. Donation is $25 for individuals or $250 for a table of 10.
Molloy is founder of the Rhode Island Labor History Society and was a bus driver, shop steward and business agent for the Transit Union from 1973 to 1984. He has been a URI professor in its Schmidt Labor Research Center since 1986, and he has been education director for the Rhode Island Irish Famine Memorial since 1996. He is the author of Trolley Wars; Irish Titan, Irish Toilers; and All Aboard.
The West Kingston resident, known for his colorful and fiery lectures at URI and before civic and labor groups around the region, was awarded the URI Foundation Teaching Excellence Award in 1995.
In 2004, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education chose the West Kingston resident as its Rhode Island Professor of the Year.
Presenters at the event will be:
• Cathy O’Reilly Collette, president of the Rhode Island Labor History Society, retired director of the Women’s Rights Department of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Washington, D.C. and former president of the World Women’s Committee of Public Services International, Geneva;
• Tom Cute, bus driver with the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority and vice president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, Division 618;
• Donald Deignan, president of the Rhode Island Irish Famine Memorial;
• Eve Stern, associate professor of history at URI, author of Ballots and Bibles; and
• Patrick T. Conley, retired professor of history at Providence College and president of the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame.
For further information, call Cathy Collette, 315-0535.
“…and agreement is sacred.”
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Whenever I want to take a break from reality, I go and read a column by RI “Young” Republican Chairman Travis Rowley.
Now, if you’ve managed to avoid the writings of this Brown graduate, I applaud you. But to give you the idea of his writing, it’s just the right balance of out-of-touch, denigrating, arrogant, and elitist opinion that Brown has a reputation for producing (yes, Brown produces it on the left as well as on the right; their centrists are the same as well).
In Mr. Rowley’s mind, Democrats are socialists. No. Wait. They’re Republicans. Obama’s election? A “far-left takeover of Washington“.
It’s not hard to see why Republicans have been marginalized in this state, only electable in traditional strongholds and where Democrats are failing. With Rowley attempting to channel Glenn Beck, their now-former leader in the House being twice arrested for drug use, their former party chairman lying to them about the state of the party’s coffers, and their candidates for national office flubbing interviews, it’s no wonder few Rhode Islanders trust the Republicans to handle the state’s affairs any better than Democrats have. What are they offering?
Indeed, what are they offering that Democrats can’t also provide? There are Democrats who are just as conservative as any Republican. Social conservatives in Rhode Island are quite happy to vote Democrat; especially given the state’s Catholic nature. Rhode Island’s Democratic Party, largely thanks to its willing embrace of immigrant and Catholic communities during the 19th Century, managed to combine social conservatism and economic interventionism and marry it to pro-interventionist social liberals. When it wants to, the Party embraces free-market principles as well, such as implementing the flat tax.
Republicans paint themselves further into a corner when they lob attacks at the cities. However mismanaged they may be, referring to the metro area where the largest swathes of Rhode Islanders live and work as a “black hole” isn’t a way to make oneself beloved to the voting public. Republicans increasingly portray themselves as the party of country elites (as they long have been). Outflanked by Democrats from the left and right, Republicans have further removed themselves right, a strategy tailor-made to increase their already dangerously poor irrelevance.
Another problem is that they’ve begun mistaking Democrats losing for Republicans winning. John Robataille came in a close second in 2010 when Frank Caprio managed to piss off not only the progressive wing of his own party, but also loyal Democratic partisans with his now infamous “Obama can take his endorsement and shove it.” If there’s one thing Rhode Islanders hate, it’s bad national publicity about our state, and we punish those who bring it on us; alternatively, bring us good publicity, and we reward you. Brendan Doherty, who has revealed himself as a currently-inept candidate, is up in the polls only because U.S. Congressman David Cicilline is so poorly regarded in Congressional District 1.
I think largely this type of thinking is because Republicans in Rhode Island look at the national party and say “we must follow their lead.” But Rhode Island despises the national Republican Party. If Lincoln Chafee had not had an “R” next to his name like a scarlet letter, he would still be a senator in Washington, D.C. today. Tea Party politics may have energized the Republican base in 2010, while the Democratic base was depressed by two-year shellacking during the healthcare debate that failed to win anything beyond a Heritage Foundation-inspired healthcare system, previously supported by Republicans. This was a one-time opportunity for the Republicans. They picked up four seats in Rhode Island’s House and four in the Senate while losing the Governor’s office. The strategy simply doesn’t work.
It would be mean of me to lay out the problems without suggesting up solutions, and I aim to do as much. Simply put, the best way to win is to outflank the Democrats. Ironically, two of the Republican-elected officials pointed out the way to do this, albeit inadvertently. Sen. Bethany Moura (R-Cumberland) and Rep. Dan Gordon (Libertarian-Portsmouth)* blasted Attorney General Peter Kilmartin for joining the robo-signing settlement (although Mr. Gordon made a mistake which undermined the central point). Did anyone take the lawmakers seriously? No. But plenty of progressives have been criticizing this settlement since its inception. Maybe this part of a new Republican strategy to penalize the banks and win populist support. Pat Robertson seems to be getting liberal with age, suggesting bankers should’ve been arrested. In which case, that would be an outflanking of the Democratic Party.
Republicans have abandoned their pedigree in favor of a conservatism that’s radically new. Let’s not forget, the Republican Party freed the slaves, joined in fusion with the Populist Party in some states, gave birth to a the Progressive Movement and even some socialist ones. Republicans busted trusts and warned us of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Their northern wing joined northern Democrats in passing the Civil Rights Act. Even Mr. Conservative himself, Barry Goldwater, has an award named after him for his pro-choice policies.
Republicans in Rhode Island should be drawing on these legacies. Instead of insulting the electorate as “anti-American” whenever it votes against them (saying it doesn’t make it true), Republicans need to embrace an all-Rhode Island strategy. This does not mean throwing aside their libertarian and conservative wings, but rather running candidates to the left of Democrats in districts where that’s feasible. This means, yes, running candidates who will oppose their dogma on immigration policy. Those who will oppose them on tax policy.
This means running on a platform of pro-people values. Radical Randian Objectivism only inspires the greedy. The argument should be that the Republican Party can allow people to transcend their current circumstances. But if the argument is that the poor are leeches and the rich are fleeing the state, well, it’s clear why that argument dooms Republicans to irrelevance. Rowley-style bile isn’t what people respond to. We respond to values we want to associate ourselves with. Republicans can’t win running as the anti-Democrats. They have to stand for values Rhode Islanders want to associate with.
______________________
*Dan Gordon’s political affiliation varies from source to source.
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History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is also a compass that people use to find themselves on the map of human geography. History tells a people where they’ve been and what they’ve been; where they are and what they are. History tells a people where they still must go and what they still must be. The relationship of history to the people is the same as the relationship of a mother to her child.
~ Dr. John Henrik Clarke
Conscious memory is the prerequisite for human behavior.
~ Professor Greg Carr
As we sit in the middle of Black History Month I confess that I’ve spent the entirety of it thinking about the possibilities of how we might enter into a more progressive conversation on the topic of Black History. But please realize this month is not merely about the recognition of the achievements of African Americans, or a perfunctory gesture to insert Black faces in as missing chapters of American history. To be clear, most people, African Americans and people of non-color alike, tend to engage the month at equal levels of indifference. That said, for many, Black history in a US context, typically begins with the usual slavery narrative:
- Once upon a time Black people were slaves…
- Civil War, blah-blah…
- Civil Rights, blah-blah…
- Now we finally have a Black president.
- The End.
My claim is a small one: the moment you initiate a conversation on Black history with chattel slavery as the port of origin you are always already affirming a short range historical position which ensures that you will (re)fabricate a limiting (and limited) scope from which to view Black (African) history and future. I can best liken it to walking into a football game after halftime and thinking the third quarter kickoff was the beginning of the game.
Professor Greg Carr stresses three critical indexes rendered in the work of Dr. Theophile Obenga which assert that in order to exist with agency in the world a people must be skilled practitioners of their own history, historiography and historicity.
– History: meaning memory; how do you remember your identity as an individual and as a part of a group.
– Historiography: how do you write that memory; how do you construct it and pass it on from generation to generation.
– Historicity: a sense of yourself in time and space; what’s your vision for the future.
If we, as people of African ancestry, only remember ourselves as former slaves and never recall ourselves as the first constructors of highly advanced civilizations with great centers of learning (philosophy, science, mathematics, agriculture and medicine), then we are condemned to remain a people who are only free due to the so-called benevolence of an American president.
Hubert Harrison, a brilliant early twentieth century West Indian writer whose political work influenced figures such as Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph, penned these words in an article from December of 1920…
When white people today talk of civilizing Africa and assert that the Africans are uncivilized [they] awaken in the minds of well-informed Africans a doubt as to whether white people know what is meant by the term. For, no matter how it may be defined, it is clear to the instructed that various “civilizations” not only have existed in Africa, but do exist there today, independently of that particular brand which white people are taking there in exchange for the untold millions of dollars which they are taking from there.
If by civilization we mean a stable society which supports itself and maintains a system of government and laws, industry and commerce, then the Hausas and Mandingoes, the people of the Ashanti and Dahomey, and the Yorubas of the Gold Coast had and have all these, and they are consequently civilized.”
What America means to an individual depends in large part on the historical perspective from which it has been introduced to them. And perhaps by now you’ve heard it mentioned in various mainstream media sources and talked about in numerous context, that is, Arizona’s new education law banning Ethnic Studies which went into effect this January, but will apparently be enforced as of 1 February. In this case, we see the deployment of a political, legal, and economic structure controlled by white political elites. But the fact that it is controlled by this political cohort should be subordinated to the fact that it exist and is maintained by thought norms which are American exceptionalist — that is to say, they are ideas which imagine the nation in a particularly narrow and ahistorical conception. The danger of this perception is not that it is reductionist, for clearly it is, but that it rebuffs attempts at expanding a democratic ethos. No proper understanding of our contemporary moment as a nation can be had unless we are willing to dig through the archives unafraid of what we shall find.
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