Black History Has Always Been Contraband

The title of this review is an adjusted version of the book's title which is Our History Has Always Been Contraband.  Yours truly, the owner of this blog, is a white woman.  It is not my intention to otherize black people, but to tell it like it is.  

 I didn't learn black history in school.  There were no black people in the schools that I attended from kindergarten through high school, but black history is part of American history.  It should be treated as such.  People should be learning the history of blacks in classes about American history.  

I was given a copy of this book for review by someone unknown.  I can't find the e-mail among my saved messages.  It's a bit of a mystery to me.  

 I was glad to receive it.  I had read books dealing with black historical events, but I didn't think I knew as much about this subject as I should know.                               

                          

 

This book is a collection of essays and excerpts.  My review will include what I learned from this book that I considered most significant.

 In "On Racial Justice, Black History, Critical Race Theory and Other Felonious Ideas" by Robin D. G. Kelley, I found out about Freedom Libraries for the first time.  I was never taught about them in the library history class I took at library school.  So I looked up Freedom Libraries on Wikipedia.

Most Freedom Libraries were established in 1964 in response to the Civil Rights Movement.  African Americans had to sue for access to most Southern public libraries.  In Mississippi alone fifty Freedom Libraries were established.  There were also Freedom Libraries in Alabama, Arkansas and Pennsylvania. This implies to me that Pennsylvania had racially segregated libraries before the Civil Rights Movement. I did not know that any northeastern states had segregated libraries.   Freedom Libraries were staffed by volunteers.  They were vandalized or firebombed by local whites or Klan Members. 

An excerpt from The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution  by C. L. R. James taught me about racism among white Jacobins, the "radicals" of the French Revolution.  They didn't condemn slavery because property rights were so important to them.

I recorded a quote from the essay called  "The Case For Reparations" (2014) by Ta-Nehisi Coates which I underlined and starred. Here it is:

"Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net."

My comment on that quote was that any personal emergency becomes a financial disaster.  Now we have to think about an environmental disaster destroying a home that could be a black family's only wealth.

The British definition of  "liberalism" as opposed to the American definition of "liberalism" has come up for me in this discussion as it did in my review of We Organize To Change Everything here. If you read what I had to say about Neoliberalism in that review from nearly a year ago, you'll be up to speed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates  mentions The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander in his reparations essay in this collection, Our History Has Always Been Contraband.  I decided that I needed to find out whether Alexander's book appeared during Obama's Presidency. It did.  What an interesting confluence of references and eras! 

In "Introduction: Black Health Matters" from Black Disability Politics (2022) by Sami Schalk ,Schalk says that the mainstream disability movement is very white and racist.  This alienates Black disabled people.  

Schalk also points out that disability justice is intersectional. White supremacy and ableism are intertwined.  It occurs to me that people who are deeply prejudiced are prejudiced about everything.  For them, prejudice is a pervasive mindset.

"Crip theorist" Alison Kafer is brought to our attention by Schalk.  Kafer says that diabetes and asthma are more common conditions among minority populations.  Schalk  quotes Kafer as saying  that asthma occurs more often in heavily polluted neighborhoods where minorities live.  I would also like to cite an excellent article from the Diabetes Council on the prevalence of diabetes within minority communities which can be found here. 

On the other hand, I read another book a while ago that included the salient insight that pollution can't actually be confined to poor neighborhoods if they share borders with more prosperous ones.  Your nice neighborhood that is adjacent to the polluting factory in  the general vicinity will not totally escape the foul fumes. 

Finally, I will bring the essay "In The Spirit of the Midnight School" by Roderick A. Ferguson to your attention.  It centers on an enslaved woman named Lily Ann Granderson who founded a secret school for black slaves in Natchez, Mississippi.  It was called a "midnight school" because classes began at midnight and ended at 2 AM.  Granderson started with twelve students. She eventually graduated hundreds of  people knowing how to read and write.  They could then write their own passes and flee northward. And that's exactly what they did.

Now that I am finished reviewing Our History Has Always Been Contraband , I will give this collection the very good grade of B+.