What is America to Me? Defining Black Life Through the Motherland

James H. Meriwether. Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 336pp. Notes and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Not long ago I had the good fortune to teach a seminar on post-civil rights public policy and politics to a seminar of American Studies graduate students at Xiamen University in China. It was an intensive one-week seminar with the stated goal of presenting the "latest" insights of American Studies scholars. As the week unfolded, however, I often felt that the seminar participants had their own implicit goal: to learn American Studies from "authentic" Americans. While we tried with varying degrees of success to stick with a particular day's topic, invariably our conversations turned toward real life in the United States. Almost none of these graduate students had been to the United States and so were eager to enrich their own book knowledge with some vicarious lived experiences. The authentic Americans, then, helped these Chinese graduate students better understand a country they studied with intense curiosity yet one they had not yet had a chance to visit.

On numerous occasions, distance and a lack of experience with the "real United States" allowed the students to offer refreshingly provocative or insightful interpretations of what the United States meant. During a discussion on the persistence of race in post-civil rights America, I asked the class what America would look like if race no longer mattered. What would happen, I wondered, if, overnight, Americans of every tone stopped caring about color and stopped imbuing it with meanings that determined where one lived, whom one married, how much one earned, and who got what job. Without hesitating, Zhang Xiaoli, one of the quieter members of the seminar, simply said, "Without race, America would disappear."

Zhang was speaking metaphorically, of course, but her answer stayed with me. Extrapolating meaning from her brief response, one can hear Edmund Morgan's analyses about the interwoven relationship between slavery and freedom in colonial Virginia and the notions of identity and statehood that evolved from this relationship. I seriously doubt that Zhang Xiaoli had the opportunity to read Morgan's classic text, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975). But whether she had or had not is immaterial. What her response illustrated for me was the power of metaphor, sign, and symbol to confer meaning upon real places, particularly those that only exist in one's imagination. America may mean several things to Zhang Xiaoli. It may represent an oasis of free-thinking and dissent or it may represent an imperialistic superpower. But the United States may mean nothing at all if one takes away the roughage of race.

In a very similar light, James H. Meriwether demonstrates how black Americans imagined Africa—a land the vast majority of blacks never visited but a place that they frequented in their mind. While race was not necessarily the defining factor of that imagining, Meriwether makes clear that without race and the linkages that it implied, Africa could easily have disappeared to black Americans. Meriwether examines the various ways blacks imagined Africa during an era of profound political, economic, and social change in the United States. The author argues that black Americans' attention to and opinions of Africa shifted frequently in light of watershed moments in African history, the development of the Cold War, and the dramatic growth of civil rights struggles in the United States. The attendant "-isms" that emerged from or defined these moments—fascism, anticommunism, anticolonialism, nationalism, and racism—were the mind's eyes for blacks when they thought about Africa.

At the very least, Meriwether's book is a demonstration of how far civil rights historiography has come in the last decade. We have moved beyond the hagiographies of the great, charismatic leaders of the mainstream civil rights movement. In recent years, historians...