Nell Painter, author of the encyclopedic Creating Black Americans, is a retired (73) Afro American historian. She has a doctorate from Harvard and taught at Princeton. Painter is not only a good scholar, she is a wise scholar of great breadth and brilliance. She has also written the classic book on The History of White People.
A few excerpts from Creating Black Americans:
Chapter 1 Africa and Black Americans
"African cultures may not have survived whole in the New World, but they have left a deep imprint, . . . Confronting racial oppression has been as much [or more] a part of African American experience as the legacy of an African past." There is the hope that "a proud past might offset a humiliating present," but only in part, I am afraid.
Chapter 2 Captives Transported
"Over more than 200 years, the Atlantic slave trade brought more people to the Americas than immigration from Europe and Asia." "Over the course of the 17th century, racial slavery took shape in laws and judicial decisions that by 1680 were defining enslavement in Virginia." A staggering number of slaves were transported---at least 10 million.
Chapter 3 A Diasporic People
"a people scattered far from home and settled among strangers" who oppressed them, stole their lives and labor. "terrors of being oppressed." By 1800, "religion became a crucial fact of African American identity." Christianity offered an alternative to hopelessness. John Wesley in Georgia: the first two persons he baptized were slave women.
Chapter 4 Those Who Were Free
"But the democratic and scientific ideals of the Enlightenment fostered both helpful egalitarianism and the hurtful science (scientific racism) that decreed races as inherently superior and inferior."
"The United States Constitution approached the institution of slavery indirectly by avoiding the words 'slave' or 'slavery' or any racial terminology. The issue was so divisive that dealing with it explicitly risked dooming the union to failure." But the slavery sand in the foundations of America soon led to a destructive Civil War that came close to destroying the nation. Better to have faced the issue at our founding. Most free blacks lived in the North, largely in segregated conditions. In many ways the North was a racist as the South.
Chapter 5 Those Who Were Enslaved
"American slavery was a truly American institution, for the enslaved worked from Maine to Texas."
"Slave supplied the foundation of the American economy in three ways: as a basic commodity in the New-England-West Indies trade, as the workers producing agricultural commodities for the market, and as property. The Atlantic slave trade made many an American fortune."
"Harriet Jacobs, herself the sexual prey of her middle-aged master when she was less than fourteen, summed up slavery's costs to white families: 'I was twenty-one years in that cage of obscene birds. I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation"
Makes me think I could never trust any ethical statement an American white person would make unless there is whole-hearted repentance; I have seen little of that.
"Yet slaves were so fundamental a part of the American economy, especially the Southern economy, that it took armed conflict to set them legally free."
Chapter 6 Civil War and Emancipation
"The Civil War began with a limited objective: to restore the Union. That war could not be won. Only after the United States, . . . attacked slavery and allowed African Americans into the fight did the United States prevail. Only then did slavery end. But black Americans had to struggle to join the war." But as freed blacks walked off the plantation, they immediately were homeless, foodless and landless; freedom, but no justice.
Chapter 7 The Larger Reconstruction
"Black achievement in the South during the era of Reconstruction was enormous. But every success occurred against a backdrop of intimidation and actual bloodshed. . . . For black people, democracy proved limited and fleeting." "After Reconstruction, the Southern states ran according to the mandates of the elite and championed white supremacy as an excellent means of keeping the poor divided along racial lines."
Epilogue A Snapshot of African Americans in the Early Twenty-First Century
"The clearest gauge of overall well-being is socioeconomic status, although cultural life remains extremely important. The 1990s hear much of the emergence of a black middle class. . . . While more black people than ever before are in the middle class according to income, their family wealth is extremely. The relative lack of family wealth means that African American's middle class stats remains tenuous."
Noble's 2016 update
How precarious that middle class status was was made clear in the 2008 Recession when predatory mortgages hit the black community with devastating impact pushing large numbers into the lower class again. When whites are experiencing a normal economy, the black community experiences a recession due to systems of oppression. When the white community is in a recession, the black community experiences a depression.
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