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Chapter Two History, the White/Black Binary, and the Construction of the African American as Other In chapter 1, I discussed the African American as being constituted within an unequal white/black binary system. In this binary system, which is reinforced by the cultural, social, political, and economic institutions and apparatuses of the United States and Western civilization, the African American is represented only in terms of his experience of racism. To be represented as a victim of racial oppression is to be defined exclusively and negatively by someone else’s discourse. For the African American, racial oppression/victimization becomes the site of a beginning, an origin, and the events of African American history and culture are defined in terms of this beginning. In short, the African American is represented as the passive object of a white middle class that is the maker of history. As a consequence, other African American representations, identities, and experiences that do not fit into this white/black binary are ignored. These exclusions forestall social and cultural heterogeneity, or a polycentric approach to American /African American social reality, in favor of a single paradigmatic perspective in which white, middle-class America is seen as the unique source of meaning, as the U.S. center of gravity, and as the ontological “reality” for the rest of the country. Also, these exclusions further signify, within the context of the Neolithic revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a polycentric representation of the world where the civilizations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas stand as pillars of world history in their own right. The staying power of this white/black binary of signification rests, in no small part, on the fact that it has been rearticulated in a dense cultural network of normative definitions, including binaries such as nation/tribe, middle 13 class/poor, knowledge/ignorance, colonizer/colonized, culture/folklore, Christian /heathen, and suburban/inner city. In other words, the middle-class white norm, along with the representation of the African American as devalued Other, is woven into the core cultural premises and understandings of the U.S. society. Whence did this white/black binary come? How has it manifested itself historically? How can we disrupt it? All literature dates this particular binary to the birth of modernity in 1492 and to the European Renaissance. As Enrique Dussel argues in The Invention of the Americas, whereas modernity“gestated in the free, creative medieval European cities, it came to birth in Europe’s confrontation with the Other” (10). The rise of capitalism and colonial Europe and the Renaissance’s qualitative break with the earlier history of humanity began when Europeans became conscious of the idea that their conquest of the world was a possible objective. From that they developed a sense of absolute superiority, even if the actual submission of other peoples to Europe had not yet taken place. By conquering, controlling, and violating the Other, Europe soon defined itself as discoverer, conquistador, and colonizer of alterity (12). The so-called voyages of “discovery” inaugurated modernity, catalyzing a new epoch of European colonial expansion that culminated in its domination of the globe. For many revisionist historians, 1492 installed the mechanism of systematic advantage that favored Europe against its African and Asian rivals. If we look at the world before 1492 from what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in Unthinking Eurocentrism call a polycentric rather than a Eurocentric perspective , it did not contain a single hegemonic power (8). According to Janet L. Abu-Lughod in Before European Hegemony, between 1250 and 1350, an international trade economy developed that stretched from northwestern Europe to China, including India and parts of Africa, in which all states and empires were basically equal in terms of economic and social development. This international trade had its roots in the much earlier Neolithic revolution, which saw the birth of agriculture and cities (8). This revolution, according to Dussel and contrary to Georg Hegel’s proposal, began primarily in the West, “first in Mesopotamia and later in Egypt, and then surged forward toward the East, usually with few contacts between civilizations” (75). The Neolithic revolution spread eastward to the Indus Valley (today Pakistan), to China’s Yellow River Valley, to the Pacific Ocean region, and finally into Mesoamerica, home of the Mayan and Aztec civilizations , and the southern Andes, where the Incas resided (75). This means that prior to 1492, progress toward modernization and capitalism that was taking place in parts of Europe was also taking place...

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