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Whose History? During his tenure as president, Bill Clinton initiated a national conversation on race. He appointed scholars and activists to a coordinating committee that organized a series of town meetings and group discussions. This gesture was laudable, but ultimately the project failed to usher in a new era of race relations, a new series of political initiatives or a deeper understanding of the significance of race in American life. After more than 30 years of social movements initiated by both the right and the left, Americans are familiar with the value of creating safe spaces in which potentially explosive ideas may be explored. But in the effort to stimulate conversation, we often avoid confrontation only by failing to interrogate the ideologies underlying our sense of identity. Academics have adopted critical theory as a tool for interrogating the construction of identities, but this strategy has not fully permeated public discourse. As a result, we need to look at the sites of translation - people and places that can help the general public come to a more complete self-understanding. In this context, museums and other public history institutions sit in the center of the intellectual gap, and they face a specific set of dilemmas in their efforts to interpret race. Historical institutions have made enormous strides in including African American history, and particularly the history of slavery, into their everyday programming. But for many well-informed administrators, curators and visitors, the historical experiences of people of color continue to feel ‘tacked on” to the main story. During the summer of 1999, I participated in a visitor survey project at Monticello, the home Thomas Jefferson. Slavery interpretation has been generally well-received at the site; the well-attended Mulberry Row tour offers not only a walk through the gardens and fields where most of Jefferson’s slaves worked, but also a detailed account of slavery in the years surrounding the Revolutionary era. Nonetheless, most of the visitors to whom we spoke distinguished the history of slavery from the history of Jefferson. They created emotional distance between slave ownership and the founding father by dubbing him “a man of his time,” arguing that he “felt bad” about owning slaves or even filling in imaginary facts to make history less complicated and painful. One visitor told us that Jefferson could be forgiven for owning slaves because he freed them all upon his death - a popular misconception that is not stated anywhere at Monticello. This persistent sense of disconnect can be partly explained if we recognize that Americans misunderstand “race” as a synonym for African American identity. Indeed, our national conversation on race rarely overcame the perception of race as a “problem” misunderstood by whites and embodied by blacks. Our interpretive programs may unintentionally repeat a similar cognitive slide - from race to identity to problem. Thus, Monticello visitors interpret slavery as a “problem” that does not fit their image of Jefferson. Despite the best intentions to be inclusive, historic sites and museums have not explicitly contextualized slavery as one of a number of historically and culturally specific systems that functioned to inscribe beliefs about the significance of race onto the bodies of Africans and their American descendants. And herein lies the crux of the dilemma. Rather than property that belongs exclusively to African American people, race is an ideology. It has a function in the way we think about American history. It has a function in determining how, when and why communities of people develop a political identity. Contemporary thinking about race is, itself, a historical product of the past 30 years. The 1970s interest in preserving “ethnic identities’ became the 1980s call for “cultural diversity” in education. These trends were intimately related to the prominence of what was then called ‘the new social history.” Social history broadened our sense of what kinds of people and events were worthy of study, and museums gradually and successfully used it as a guide for developing new collecting strategies, new exhibition subjects and new public program themes. Social history transformed the American Melting Pot into a patchwork quilt. But in such a quilt, the boundaries of each patch are clearly delineated. Similarly, despite the best intentions, much public history strategy has unintentionally shored up boundaries, making racial identities appear natural, impermeable and ‘real.” When we interpret African American history, we testify to the importance of a particular set of experiences in the larger story of American life. But if we wish to interpret race as a series of beliefs with specific and changing social and political functions, we must necessarily interrogate not only the meaning of historical events but also very private and cherished notions of identity - individual, family, community and national. Public history institutions must move beyond efforts to be inclusive in order to become more conscious of the ways in which we represent the meaning of social categories. Our representation of group identities communicates messages about what it means to be an American. American identity is neither the product of a melting pot nor a neatly arranged patchwork of cultural patterns. It is something more organic and more complicated, an organism of interdependent systems and social movements. “Blackness’ exists as a category of identity because “whiteness’ exists. Race is not one or the other but the process by which we create both. Interrogating early historical interpretation policies in the National Park Service can be a telling lesson about the place of race in the construction of 20th Century American identity. The National Park Service is particularly interesting because it is a government agency charged with the mission of preserving unique and significant places. By enacting this mission, the Service transforms the American landscape, shaping it into a document of American identity. Embedded in decisions about what name to give a particular place - whether “historic site,” ‘monument” or “national park” - are a series of assumptions about what counts as history, who counts as a historical actor, and which actions are significant enough to be claimed as part of the national story. Race affects the scope of each choice. The Park Service first began developing historical interpretation policies in the 1930s, and racial ideology specific to this period is embedded in early policy decisions and it dogs efforts to broaden the criteria for site selection and interpretation. Between 1933 and 1965, the Service identified and catalogued information about thousands of historic buildings and places. The Historic Preservation Act of 1966 increased National Park Service authority to protect nationally significant properties, and by the early 1970s about 1,000 sites were granted status and protection as National Historic Landmarks. Only four had any stated connection to African Americans. In 1972, the Service contracted with the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation (ABC) to engage in a three-year survey of sites “important in illustrating the role of Black Americans in United States history” and worthy of Landmark designation. (And, a few years later, they contracted with a team based at Howard University to include African American history at sites already established as Landmarks.) This language is meaningful. The National Park Service evaluated sites in terms of several overarching themes. The largest of these in 1972 were: Original Inhabitants, European Exploration and Settlement, Development of English Colonies, Major American Wars, Political and Military Affairs, Westward Expansion, Americans at Work, the Contemplative Society, and Society and Social Conscience. The ABC was not asked to create a new thematic category, but to evaluate African American sites through the lens of these categories. By 1976, the project had succeeded in designating about 90 Landmarks. This effort to be more inclusive troubled well-established notions about what kinds of historical experiences composed American identity. Race functioned as a tool in the process of shifting the boundary between “national” and “local.” Close consideration of one nearly unsuccessful Landmark nomination illustrates this point. In 1973, the ABC nominated a privately owned Massachusetts farmhouse connected to Paul Cuffe, the Revolutionary War era shipping merchant. Cuffe had petitioned the Massachusetts government to extend voting rights to all property holding men. He also participated in efforts to create an African American colony in Sierra Leone. The house in Westport, Mass., was important not only because it had been owned by Cuffe, but also because it still contained his docks. The town of Westport had maintained a Cuffe tradition, and claimed him as a local hero. There was no disagreement that he should be remembered, but there was sharp disagreement over his significance. According to a National Historic Landmark file on the case, though the locals called into question the criteria for authenticating the house, the most significant point of controversy was not about the ownership of the farm, but about the ownership of history. A close reading of competing biographical sketches - one produced by locals and the other by the ABC - demonstrates that both sides obscured the historical function of race as ideology in order to situate race as an identity marker. The ABC’s biography underscored the ways in which Cuffe’s life reflected a common American identity. According to a 1973 ABC report, “Paul Cuffe was one of the most prominent black men of the 18th and early 19th centuries. He was an effective counter balance to the hostile stereotypes of blacks included in the literature of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville and in the widely circulated story papers and cheap pamphlet literature of the 1840s. In some ways, his life, as revealed in his Journal and “Letterbook,” is a classic example of rags to riches.” This statement reduces the social and cultural conditions under which Cuffe lived and worked to nothing more menacing than ’stereotype.” Cuffe’s representation as an example of the American dream is made possible in the logic of the narrative only by the absence of slavery. Ignoring the social and political ramifications of slavery’s persistence after the Revolutionary War allows the ABC narrative to categorize Cuffe under the National Park Service theme “Society and Social Conscience.” Each of Cuffe’s actions becomes an example of a uniquely American story: financial success, philanthropic generosity, religious faith. Even Cuffe’s participation in the back-to-Africa movement is simplified as an example of his commitment to social reform. Similar details are given a different spin in the town of Westport’s biography of Cuffe. Here, Cuffe’s racial identity is a marker of his status as an exceptional community member - not a typical American. Though the biographical statements identify Cuffe as “a Negro,” they describe him in terms that seem to purposefully counter stereotypes. For example, he was unusually ‘tall, with straight hair of light complexion and dignity of manner.” Cuffe’s intelligence is similarly portrayed as exceptional: “[H]e learned in two weeks sufficient ” science to navigate his own vessels.” The biography focuses on Cuffe’s community activities, particularly his role in building a Quaker schoolhouse, but it casts doubt on his larger historical significance. It argues that a copy of Cuffe’s petition for voting rights survives in the archives, but there is no evidence it had ever been delivered. Strictly speaking, neither biography fabricates information. However, each is inherently false because it diminishes the function of racial ideology. With a slight shift of focus, Cuffe’s life story demonstrates the way race has functioned in the construction of both national and personal American identity. Paul Cuffe, his brother John, sister Freelove Slocum and a brother-in-law enjoyed a measure of financial success from their family-owned shipping business. They owned a number of properties and, as a result, they were taxed. Post-Revolutionary War Massachusetts law awarded voting rights to property holding white men. For three years between 1778 and 1780, Paul Cuffe and his brother John refused to pay land taxes and purposefully echoed the Revolutionary battle cry ‘taxation without representation.” In the 1780s, the Cuffes and six other land-holding free men of color, petitioned for relief from land taxes on the grounds that they could not vote. Rather than lose tax revenue, the state passed a new law limiting voting rights only on the basis of sex, age and property holding. Cuffe understood his identity in terms of his economic status as well as his status as a free man, and he petitioned the government from this social perspective. Cuffe also understood his identity as a man of color, but the specific racial ideology that defined Cuffe’s actions as a free man in a slave holding society resulted in a “black” identity quite distinct from contemporary political configurations. Ultimately, Cuffe’s farmhouse received landmark status in 1974. The statement of significance ascribed to it by the National Park Service reads: "Cuffe, a self-educated African-American who became a prosperous merchant, pioneered in the struggle for minority rights in the 18th and early 19th centuries and was active in the movement for Black resettlement in Africa." While the statement attempts - very briefly - to address the complexity of Cuffe’s life, it remains an "identity-driven" way of historicizing the landmark rather than a more critical examination of ideologies embedded in notions of identity. A meaningful national conversation must testify to the ways in which race has functioned in identity formation. Historic sites and museums can participate in this process by exploring the ways in which law and custom have assigned meanings to race and race to bodies. The National Park Service has initiated a series of projects designed to transform its approach to race including a massive study to identify sites linked to the Underground Railroad. Increasingly, museums are developing interpretive strategies that historicize social identities. Programs such as the slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg or runaway slave role playing at Conner Prairie in Ohio are painful and often controversial, but they call attention to the ways in which apparently disparate experiences participate in the construction of American identity.
Denise Meringolo is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Discuss this article Related Sites Read the entire identity issue |
