response to Sarah

In response to Sarah:

The notion of separating things – histories, genders, classes – for the sake of profit hadn’t occurred to me, either until I read your post. My first impulse is to reject such a practice as thoughtless commercialism, but after mulling it over, I think there might actually be something to be gained from telling Black history as separate from [White] history.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as White history in America because “White” is running in the background of whatever historical account is at hand. Until fairly recently, accounts of slavery, segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, etc., were all told from a White perspective (with the exception of the occasional Frederick Douglass figure). This, to me, is the equivalent of an attempt to tell White and Black history in conjunction. However, such attempts fail because a single perspective cannot be avoided. I suppose if a Black committee and a White committee were to sit down and write a history of the US together, it would be viewed as a genuinely biracial account. But what would be lost in the process of trying to make facts fit? And if it came down to an irresolvable disagreement, what would wind up in the book? I think the separation of Black and White histories, especially in countries heavily influenced by the enslavement of Blacks, is actually beneficial to a complete understanding of the unified history.