Washington's speech, which remains controversial today due to what many African Americans view as its apologetic and overly conciliatory tone, illustrated the influence of race on at least one African American's perception of his identity in 1895. Emory's participation in last month's centennial observance of that address prompted plans for a conference titled "Race, Identity and Public Culture," which was held on campus Oct. 13 and 14.
Leading off the conference on Oct. 13 was a session on "Race and Identity" that featured presentations of the work of three prominent scholars in the field of race and culture.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of African American Studies at Harvard University, began the conference with a presentation titled "Against Culture." In his address, Appiah asserted that the United States, because of the multiplicity of ethnic, cultural and national backgrounds found in the population, does not have a common or "tribal" culture, but a dominant culture. In light of that dominant culture, Appiah said, the country should not seek to define a set of cultural core values by which we all should live. Rather, the United States "needs citizens committed to the institutions that provide overarching order to our common life," he said. If the country were to have genuine common culture, Appiah said, "the state would have to define that culture, which would create massive schisms in our national life."
The session's two other presenters, Jacquiline Brown, assistant professor of anthropology, and Amy Lang, professor in the Institute of the Liberal Arts, discussed their work on race and identity, work that focused on specific groups within their culture, rather than the issue of national culture.
In her address, "Slaves to History," Brown explored the ways in which the perceptions held by black residents of Liverpool, England, changed after they became aware of the historic role their city played in the American slave trade. Brown said more slave ships were built in Liverpool than almost any other British city, and Liverpool received about 60 percent of the British slave trade with the United States in the late 18th century. Brown said most of the black Liverpool residents she interviewed in the course of her work expressed anger at finding out about their city's history with slavery so late in life, and not being taught about that history as children in the schools of Liverpool. Brown said that it is a bitter irony for many black Liverpudlians that they played as children in the tunnels and on the piers in the area where slave ships once docked.
A relatively common realization for many of the black Liverpudlians Brown spoke with was the realization that racism is not a black issue, but rather a problem with Liverpool whites, whom they characterized as the group "who can't stand to look at a person with a different color skin."
Titled "Jim Crow and the Pale Maiden: Color and Class in Stephen Foster's `Hard Times,'" Lang discussed the meanings behind 18th-century minstrel shows, in which whites performed racially derogatory skits and music in "black face," and their relation to the more genteel parlor songs of the same era. Songwriter Stephen Foster, perhaps best known for the ballad "My Old Kentucky Home," wrote a great deal of music in both genres, Lang said. She said that black-face performances served the purposes of white working-class men, allowing them to "get blacked up," in Lang's words, in order to feel free enough to criticize and ridicule their more affluent and powerful employers. Afterwards, the white men took off their black make-up and resumed their white identities.
One of the primary composers of music used in black-face minstrel shows, Foster was less noted for his parlor songs, written for what Lang described as a much more genteel audience of women. Despite their relative subtlety, those parlor songs served many of the same purposes as the more blatant minstrel show music, Lang said. Many of those parlor songs, as well as sentimental novels of the period, featured sympathetic white heroines who began as pure, virginal figures. But when their fortunes took a downward turn and they were forced to toil, "they became blacked up by their labors," Lang said. The heroine, however, always had the possibility of moving upward in the class structure through marriage, a path that would allow her to take off her blackness and resume her white identity.
"If black-face minstrel shows express class dissatisfaction," Lang said, "the white face [represented in parlor songs] shows the possibility of class harmony."
The conference continued the following day with a session on "Race and Public Culture" featuring scholars from Griffith University in Australia, Montana State University, the University of London and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
--Dan Treadaway