Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge

Epilogue

231 Epilogue When the big cotton tree falls, the little goat eats its leaves.—Haitian Proverb If my world’s black and yours is white How the hell could we think alike. —Sister Souljah M elville j. herskovits died of a heart attack on February 25, 1963.∞ Born into a world that devalued Africans and African Americans and their cultures, Herskovits devoted his life to the idea that all cultures have worth and to discovering the dynamism and strength of African and African American societies. He supported African self-determination in the midst of colonialism. He worked to establish African American and African studies as legitimate disciplines in American higher education. His work empowered African diasporic peoples and served to undermine ideas that supported white supremacy and European colonialism. He helped usher in a world in which African peoples would be accorded the dignity they deserved. And the work goes on. As historian Henry Adams said, ‘‘A teacher a√ects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.’’≤ Sociologist St. Clair Drake remarked in 1988 that Herskovits himself believed that his studies’ relevance was expansive, saying, ‘‘they would enter into firmament .’’≥ Drake added, ‘‘[Y]ou can’t control the ferment once it gets going, you see. But the ferment did come.’’∂ Although Drake was referring to Herskovits’s research into black cultures, his statement was equally true for Herskovits’s ideas on cultural relativism and his work in building the disciplines of African and African American studies. Herskovits ’s intellectual and institutional contributions in all these areas have clearly entered into that firmament, with the controversial issues he discussed omnipresent, his ideas as relevant as ever. Epilogue 232 In the four decades since Herskovits’s death, the issues that engaged his attention have assumed great prominence in public debate. Moreover , the tension between cultural particularism and universalism that was present in his work has emerged as a driving force behind debates about race and culture. The 1960s witnessed the reemergence of the earlier argument between Frazier and Herskovits on the nature of black culture and the question of pathology in black culture. Was black culture unique or a pathological distortion of mainstream American (white) culture? The reemergence of a strong black nationalist movement in the latter stages of the civil rights movement reinvigorated popular and scholarly emphasis on black culture and history. The idea that elements of African culture had influenced the life and thought of African Americans gained a new respectability ‘‘with the rise of Black Power rhetoric, the questioning of the assimilationist ethic, and the new interest in the distinctive aspects of the culture of the black working class.’’∑ Many intellectuals and activists now spoke out in support of Herskovits’s interpretation of black culture. Indeed, his conclusion about the African in- fluence on American and African American culture has been redeemed by the scholarship of the last twenty-five years. Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977), for instance, ‘‘served as a brilliant demonstration of the validity of what Herskovits wrote’’ about the connections between African and African American culture.∏ The 1965 publication by the U.S Department of Labor of its report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, engendered a huge public controversy on the nature of black culture. Moynihan’s report, based in part on the writings of Frazier and Myrdal, blamed the pathological matriarchal black family for many of the problems of blacks.π With the rise of the Black Power movement and black cultural nationalism in the mid-1960s, the position taken by the Myrdal and the Moynihan studies and their proponents came under widespread attack, and the Herskovits position was embraced. Like Herskovits, critics of the Moynihan study argued that if black family life and culture deviated from white culture, it meant that it was di√erent but organized in its own way, based in part on the African influence. It was not a pathological or distorted version of white culture. The critics emphasized the positive attributes of black culture and African culture.∫ Many of Moynihan’s critics, including black sociologists Joyce Ladner and An- Epilogue 233 drew Billingsley, either invoked Herskovits’s work, notably The Myth of the Negro Past, or similar ideas about the strength of black cultural institutions , including nontraditional families.Ω Billingsley, supporting the Herskovits view of black...