The Making of African America (7 page)

In the late twentieth century, shuttling between Africa, the Caribbean, or other distant places and the United States became even more common, as changes in transportation and communication created new kinds of global connectedness. If the isolation of slaves—their one-way ticket—shaped African American culture during the first three centuries of the history of black America, the mobility of their successors did the same during the last one hundred years. Assessing the circumstances of the men and women who “returned” to the South in the 1970s, anthropologists discovered that returnees had been “born in northern cities, but almost all had been well acquainted with their destination since childhood through school-year and summer residence as well as through repeated visits.”
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Returnees brought the new world back to the old and, in the process, remade the old society. Increasingly, the transmission of culture moved both ways, as movement and place became conjoined in an unbounded process, subverting the notion that culture is formed by a linear process. The new culture, in short, was as much a product as a precipitate of movement.

Those differences reflected the ways in which migrants should be understood. While the motives of forced migrants can be reduced to a function of economic calculus—the market for labor, for example—free migrants have a multitude of reasons for moving beyond that of finding work. The needs of families and kin, the desire to create new societies, and the aspiration for greater political freedom or material prosperity are just some of these. A similar event—war, for example—could have a different effect on both forced and free migrations. While forced migrations created protocols of their own, modern free migrations are governed by all sorts of legal regulations, and affected by many more factors. Migrations of choice-even made under difficult conditions—tended to be much more selective. Forced migrations tend to spew men and women helter-skelter across the countryside.
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The comparative homogeneity of free migrations suggests the ability of migrants to plan their exodus by seeking out information and joining together with family and friends.

The unique experience of black people as slaves and as free people cannot be reduced to another version of the classic struggle of immigrants for recognition, acceptance, and success. Frederick Douglass was neither John Altgeld nor Carl Schurz, and Bigger Thomas was neither David Levinsky nor Mike Dobrejcak. The centrality of white supremacy has distinguished the history of black people from that of the Germans, Irish, Italians, Japanese, Jews, Mexicans, and others.
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The former lost their freedom in crossing Atlantic, while the latter often celebrated their arrival in America as an expansion of their liberty; the former's arrival was understood in terms of their unnatural injection into American society and their contested incorporation, while the latter have been seen as a continuous, even natural process of absorption or what some have called assimilation.

The assimilative power of American pluralism apparently had little effect on people of African ancestry. “Ethnics”—a term rarely applied to people of African descent—might be incorporated into the melting pot and given a ticket to full inclusion into American society, but black arrivals were not. The concept of the melting pot (and its close relatives: assimilation, amalgamation, and cultural pluralism), whatever its utility for the study of European and Asian immigration, has been given little weight with respect to the forced arrival of Africans.

Such notions of assimilation fail to accommodate the effervescent diversity of American society or its lack of a single hegemonic core in favor of more complex cultural reciprocities by which American society (or perhaps any society) was continually refashioned. Still, few have applied the idioms of pluralism (Horace Kallen's “democracy of nationality” or Israel Zangwill's “melting pot”) to African Americans. The “process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life” is generally not part of the study of African American life, although people of African descent have been “interpenetrated” in American life and “fused” with peoples of Native American, European, and Asian descent. While scholars repeatedly revisit the debate over the assimilation of Europeans and others deemed “white” in terms of ethnicity (a concept invented for just that purpose), religion, or work experience, people of African descent remain of one piece, primordially rooted with a presumed collective identity.
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The putative staying power of ethnicity—suggested by the mid-twentieth-century popularity of such books as
Beyond the Melting Pot
or
The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics
—has seemingly drawn the experiences of white and black immigrants together.
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Yet profound differences in the experiences of blacks and whites even in the post—
Brown v. Board
era validate the categories of race and ethnicity, which are often used in opposition to one another.
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Studies of whiteness affirm that race remains a driving force in understanding American life.
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But all human beings share a migratory history. That ubiquity integrates African American experience into world history, modern history, and American history (and vice versa).
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From the largest historical perspective, the great migrations of African American peoples straddled the great historical divides created by the expansion of Western capitalism and informed—perhaps determined—the lives of peoples in Europe and Asia as well as Africa and the Americas. Between the middle of the fifteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, most of the men and women crossing the Atlantic were forcibly repeopling the Americas in the wake of the catastrophic destruction of Native American peoples and the reluctance of Europe's underclass to leave their homelands. In a like fashion, the massive expansion of industrial production—and the subsequent demand for foodstuff and other commodities—during the nineteenth century initiated both the surge of Europeans to the Americas and an internal migration (free and forced) within the Americas. The emancipationist century—the years between the 1780s and the 1880s when one Atlantic nation after another proscribed the trade in persons—set loose another massive movement of peoples, as Asians, many of them contracted, indentured, and shanghaied, also found their way to the Americas. In the United States, the dual migration—Europeans settling on the East Coast, Asians on the West—tethered African Americans to the Southern states. Not until the spigot of European and Asian migration shut during the second decade of the twentieth century would black people begin to move north. Finally, most late-twentieth-century migrations reflected both the movement of highly trained technicians and managers from the third world to the first—the so-called brain drain—and the desperate flight of poor people from low-wage to high-wage nations.

From such a global perspective, the seventeenth-century slave trader in El Mina, the eighteenth-century crimp in Bristol, and the nineteenth-century labor contractor in Pozen performed the same function, and the enslaved African, dragooned English sailor, shanghaied Chinese peasant, and desperate Polish peasant likewise stood in a similar relationship to the making and unmaking of a transnational labor force that was driven by the expansion of commodity production. The enslaved African, impressed Chinese coolie, and the Polish peasant found themselves swept up in a process of rural dispossession and urban proletarianization. Moreover, these massive changes in the world economy were often preceded by environmental disasters—droughts and floods, famines and plagues—on one hand, and political violence—civil wars, state-sponsored terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansings—on the other, which made life unbearably difficult. These upheavals would eventually reach into every corner of the globe.

The global perspective and the long view of human history call into question distinctions between coerced migrations and voluntary migrations.
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For while many migrants moved on their own free will, the labor drafts and political discord that accompanied these migrations strained the very meaning of human volition. English peasants driven from the land by enclosures, Irish tenants avoiding starvation, Poles running before Cossacks, Jews escaping pogroms, Armenians dodging Turks, and Native Americans fleeing the U.S. cavalry, or Ugandans, Croats, and Laos escaping the murderous ethnic cleansers could hardly be called free immigrants.
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Moreover, the process of settlement, integration, and assimilation of free and forced migrations had much in common as men and women whose primary identity had nothing to do with nation-states were transformed into nationals of one sort or another. The processes whereby enslaved Angolans and Wolofs became Africans followed much the same path as Genoese and Tuscans who became Italians or Hausas and Igbos who became Nigerians. Although some moved in chains and others by choice, transplantation transformed networks of kin groups into new peoples.

While the distinction between forced and free migrations cloaks the fact that all migrations involve cultural transformations, these various migrations also mask the essential reality that even the most traumatic uprootings do not necessarily dissolve the migrants' humanity, their sense of self, and their determination to shape their own lives. Forced migrants, like free ones, carried with them ideas about family, work, religion, and much else that they put into practice at the first opportunity, albeit in different circumstances. Emphasizing the distinction between the voluntary and the coerced, moreover, revivifies the myth of stability—the timelessness of premodern society and fixity of peasant life. Such notions may be useful foils for understanding the hyperactivity identified with modernity, but they have long since been exposed as hollow stereotypes. Geographic movement, as students of migration have demonstrated, has been and remains the normal condition of mankind.

The experience of migration that made and remade black life also entwined the lives of black people with that of other Americans. Sometimes they were so intimately connected that a reduction of one enlarged another. When the movement of European indentured servants to the Chesapeake region faltered in the 1660s, the trade in African slaves—and the commitment to slavery—grew. When the constitutional mandate and congressional law closed the transatlantic slave trade to the United States in the early nineteenth century, European migration swelled, whitening the North American continent. When that migration ceased a century later as a result of World War I, black people left the South for the North. Meanwhile, Africans and their descendants mixed with Native Americans and European Americans as they met sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, and sometimes curious bystanders eager to avoid entanglements caught in circumstances not of their own making. The experience of these peoples was likewise tied to vast uprootings, sometimes of their own choosing but often made under duress. Threats of enclosures, horrors of famines, trails of tears, and nightmares of state-sponsored terror drove many of these people from their homelands. To doubt these movements were founded in extreme coercion belies the obvious, and to say that some found opportunity in these changes states nothing new. Following such traumatic uprootings, these migrants also became identified with particular places, be they ghettos, reservations, or suburbs. As they took root, they too constructed their histories from fading memories of the old country, biblical allusions to the promised land, images of the Golden Mountain, transcendent hopes of American life, and certainty that they too were God's chosen people whose destiny was foretold in sacred texts.

Even the violent cultural cleansing whereby European slave masters stripped African slaves of the very signatures of their identity—their names—was not unknown to other immigrants. At Ellis Island, immigration officers regularly renamed the new arrivals, often in the most flippant manner and with the same sorts of ridicule that slave masters applied to their newcomers. Suggesting how the weight of a foreign cultural hegemony bore down upon them, many immigrants needed no prompting in disposing of their ancient appellation, so Sophie Abuza renamed herself Sophie Tucker, just as Asa Yoelson transformed himself into Al Jolson, Harry Lillis into Bing Crosby, and Israel Baline into Irving Berlin.
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Many peoples, in short, shared the rhythm of movement and rootedness. If the names were different—Hester Street, Swede Town, and Little Italy rather than Drayton Hall, Monticello, and Mount Vernon—the experience was undeniably a common one, and a powerful reminder of what Americans share.

In the end, what distinguishes the African American experience is not merely the difficult distinction between free and forced migrations or the alleged absence of an immigrant past, but rather the collective weight of multiple migrations. Coerced or by choice, repeatedly and—then again—by coersion or choice—people of African descent rooted themselves in the land. In the process, they produced two massive contradictions.

First, the necessity of the periodic reconstruction of black society on new ground created a sense of “we-ness,” which joined together black peoples who had vastly different origins, beliefs, and interests across space and time. Bonds created by the terror of the Atlantic passage, the horror of the long march from the James to the Mississippi River, and the hopeful expectations of the train ride from Biloxi to Chicago provided a common experience, which became the basis of a new collective to which newcomers could identify and into which old hands could be incorporated. Men and women who had been utter strangers were joined together by the most elemental of shared experience: survival. African American culture was formed in the holds of slave ships and the necessity of dealing with harsh circumstances beyond their own creation. It was reformed in coffles tramping west, and reformed yet again in the segregated railroad cars that carried black people northward. In deplaning a jet at Kennedy, O'Hare, or Hartsfield airport, new arrivals in the twenty-first century echo the experience of their forebears who were likewise caught in the maelstrom of a changing world economy.