Author/educator examines ‘Are there really 40 million ways to be black?’

For years leading up to the election of Donald Trump, African-American historians and scholars argued that the United States was in an era of “post-blackness.”

“’If there are 40 million black Americans, then there are 40 million ways to be black,’” said Deborah Gray White ’71, LHD ’14, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, quoting the famous line attributed to Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

It’s a notion White called into question at the 12th Annual Shriber Lecture, held at the Admissions Center on March 28. The talk, sponsored by the History Department and endowed by local philanthropists Harvey and Elizabeth Prior Shriber, brings nationally renowned historians to campus.

White invoked Gates’ question as the guiding question, and title, of her talk: “Are There Really 40 Million Ways to be Black?” The quote comes from a conversation between Gates and the author cited in the first chapter of Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now.

She wondered whether scholars were right to claim that, post-slavery, black people in America no longer had a common experience – and by extension, a common interest.

“I thoroughly believe that black women and men experience blackness differently. That straights and LGBTQs experience blackness differently. As do native-born blacks, African-born blacks, Caribbean-born blacks,” she said. “Still, there is something about this current period that makes me wonder if there really are 40 million ways to be black.”

Throughout their history, black Americans have always considered themselves a community, or a “nation within a nation,” White said. For the 250 years of slavery and the Jim Crow Era that followed, American “one-drop” laws categorized people with any black ancestry as unilaterally black – which sanctioned a common black experience.

“These all created a uniquely different kind of citizenship for African-Americans – forced to live and play together and forge a meaningful existence,” White said. “Behind what W.E.B. DuBois euphemistically called ‘the veil,’ Black America formed its own institutions and neighborhoods. Its own music and culture. Its own style, aesthetic, food.”

The idea of a singular black community emerged in the early 20th century. In 1897, DuBois called for unity behind a singular flag, “placed there by black hands, fashioned by black heads and hallowed by the travail of 200 million black hearts beating in one glad song of jubilee.”

White pointed out DuBois’s phrasing was in contrast with Gates’ – urging “one glad song of jubilee, not 40 million songs of jubilee,” she said. Black unity was emerging where the community most needed to defend itself. The Ku Klux Klan, disenfranchisement and Jim Crow segregation threatened the 20th-century black experience.

Even where black people differed in their daily lives, “when it came to race pride as a weapon of self-defense, they were on the same page,” White said. “So were all the people who developed all the black sororities and fraternities, the black church, black colleges and universities, black professional organizations. So were the people who created jazz and gospel music.”

White herself is no stranger to 20th-century discrimination. The granddaughter of southern sharecroppers, she was one of a handful of black people at Binghamton University, where she was admitted and attended on scholarship in 1967. Leigh Ann Wheeler, professor of history at Binghamton University, introduced White’s talk by noting the latter’s mixed feelings about that.

“[Binghamton] had been a refuge of sorts and [White] referred to it affectionately as ‘Camp Harpur,’” Wheeler said. “She appreciated Affirmative Action for opening the door to Binghamton, but she resented that, despite her standing qualifications, Affirmative Action was necessary for her to gain admission.”

It would be the first of many glass ceilings White would bump up against in her career. Wheeler lauded White’s tenacity in getting her first monograph, the “now-classic” ‘Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, published in 1985. This monograph is one of the first detailing the history of African-American women.

“She has been my idol and role model since 1990,” Wheeler said, choking up. “Graduate students and tenure-track faculty who feel like they cannot face an additional single obstacle – they need to read about our speaker’s journey through academia. She shows that you can face and tackle any obstacle.”

Obstacles, White would expand upon in her talk, that were both unique to her as an individual and common to her race. But what people who chose to exclude black people didn’t take into account were the solidifying effects of segregation on the black community.

“When they cordoned off black people, when they said, ‘you can’t go here or there, or study here or there, or worship here or there,’ America gave us a chance, indeed America made it imperative, for us to develop a range of distinctive institutions that we controlled,” White said. “Our oneness was born of our exclusion.”

The difference is, White argued, that even though black people have always fought to be individuals, in the past, they have always done it communally. In what she called the “existential contradiction,” black people must fight for the unity of their people in order to defend their right to be individuals. The two are inevitably tied, she said, and for a while, that was understood.

But this understanding started to change toward the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. In 2001, the Studio Museum of Harlem displayed a “Freestyle Exhibit,” showcasing art described as “post-black.” Soon, the black community was inundated with this term, and preoccupied with figuring out what it meant.

Many black writers and thinkers weighed in. In 2008, scholar Charles S. Johnson claimed: “A new century calls for new stories, grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences.” A year before, columnist Eugene Robinson claimed “black America” is an “increasingly meaningless concept.”

The writers were calling upon the black community to stop claiming a single experience and embrace its diversity in a way it hadn’t before. White said that while this optimism is easily understood in the early 2000s, in the current political climate, it might not actually serve the black community at all.

“I get it,” she said. “We are not imagining diversity. We are diverse. My question, though, is: What about self-defense? Will this diversity protect us?”

White warned against the fracturing of the black community. Despite class, gender, religion, sexuality differences and more, history connects the black community together.

“You cannot forsake your history. You can learn from it, you can grow from it, you can add to it. But forget about the history of slavery?” White said.

“I would argue, like any good historian should, that we need to know our history. Particularly, our history of self-defense. Why? Because the police shoot first and ask questions after that. Because Dylann Roof, the white nationalist who shot up a Charleston church and killed nine after he prayed with them, did not care about our diversity.”

While there are 40 million ways to be black in America, White said, there is only one way forward.

“The past is prologue. We have to continue to apply pressure. African-Americans have to continue to vote,” White said. “The other day I was thinking about when black men came back from war, and they went to vote, and they just got shot down in the street – the courage that it took to go to register to vote in Mississippi in the 1960s – people have got to show that kind of courage again.”