Black Identity and Historiography: A Review of W.D. Wright

Introduction: Wright's Central Challenge

Black History and Black Identity: A Call for a New Historiography by W.D. Wright (New York: Praeger, 2002, pp. 247) takes up a deceptively simple yet historically charged question: what does it mean to be a Black historian? Wright, Professor Emeritus of History, argues that too often the history of Black Americans has been diluted by combining it with histories of Afro-Caribbean peoples, or by treating Blackness solely as a racial or geographic category. By grappling with the definition of what constitutes Black history as opposed to African history, Wright structures his book around a survey of past historiographical efforts and the failed ways of defining what makes Black history a unique discipline.

Wright is uniquely qualified to undertake this project, having been a professor of history through the very creation of Black studies within the modern university curriculum. He concludes that while "the subject of Black history in America became an accepted academic discipline in the 1960s," its origins stretch well back to the beginning of the twentieth century and W.E.B. Du Bois' seminal work The Souls of Black Folk. Its popularity from the 1970s into the 1990s on college campuses across the nation nonetheless failed to clarify what the academic discipline of Black studies actually constitutes. Wright's book is unique and provocative in its insistence that definitions — even linguistic definitions — are critically important to understanding Blackness, a controversial yet ultimately fascinating approach.

Wright observes that even after decades of controversy, there is still a struggle to understand "who Black people have been and who they presently are in America. Are they Africans, Afro-Americans, African Americans, Blacks, blacks, Black Americans, or black Americans? This question and these many possible identities for Black people in America, all of which are in use, indicate, emphatically, that historical research and writing have not cleared up this matter."¹ In his quest to clarify things, Wright admits — despite his criticism of previous Black scholarship — an enduring debt to those who came before him, especially Du Bois. It is Du Bois' definition of Black culture as the only truly unique American culture — spanning from jazz to soul food to the literature of "otherness" and a "double consciousness" — that Wright pays tribute to. Wright calls himself a Du Bois sociologist as well as a historian of Black studies.

Black Identity Versus African Identity

Rather than an Afrocentric perspective, Wright argues his book takes a Black-centric perspective of modern history. He states that Black people in the United States "are distinct and different from all other black people on this planet, and are not to be mistaken for any other black people."² Too much of an obsession with African heritage, however admirable such self-identification may be, can conceal the fact that Black people are Americans as well as people of African descent. His book therefore "endeavors to answer these two questions; namely, by arguing, based on historical evidence and sociological analysis that Black people are to be described as Black, Blacks, and Black Americans."³ The once politically privileged terms "African-American" and "Afro-American" are deemed confusing and misleading by Wright.

Wright's work was originally published in 2002, and it is almost irresistible to consider how the later election of Barack Obama might bear on his thesis. After all, Obama is the child of a Kenyan father and a Caucasian American mother — and yet Obama's experience may actually testify to the veracity of Wright's challenging argument. Despite his mixed-race heritage and not being a descendant of enslaved people, Obama was still read as Black by peers and teachers while growing up. Although raised by a white mother and grandmother, his formative experience was defined by the struggles of fitting in as an intellectual Black man — someone who aspired to law school yet also sought acceptance on the streets of the South Side of Chicago during pick-up basketball games.

Wright's thesis presents a direct challenge to scholars who, however well-intentioned, sentimentalize or essentialize African identity. Black Americans, Wright points out, generally cannot trace their heritage to a common nation or ancestral line, given that the slave trade severed their connection to any particular individualized African nation. He thus rejects Afrocentrism as a fundamental political act of self-definition, along with the term "African Diaspora" as a descriptor for the slave trade, on the grounds that the slave trade dispersed members of Black African tribes not only throughout the Americas but across other areas of the Western world as well. Black Americans have produced a unique cultural legacy and suffered unique historical injustices — injustices distinct from those of colonialism.

Wright's Critique of Afrocentrism and the Diaspora Framework

Wright further notes that even before the era of slavery, Africans lived all over the world, but for reasons distinct from those originating with the Middle Passage. While Afrocentric ideology "reflects the renewed pride of black people in shaping a future based on the concept of one African people living in the African Diaspora," Wright argues that the notion of Diaspora fails to convey a sense of the "vast global presence" of black Africans and their descendants. Moreover, "the African Diaspora concept, as it is usually used, puts black Africans into Western hemispheric history and reality much too late in human history."⁴

Additionally, Black Americans, though they may feel a sense of kinship with Africans, do not necessarily share the same geopolitical interests as Africans living on the African continent — and Africa itself is not a homogeneous identity bloc. While "events on the African continent and in the African Diaspora [Western Hemisphere] have profoundly affected Afro-American thought and action," Wright insists that "an interest in the political objective of unity between black Africans and black people of the 'African Diaspora' should not be permitted to supersede" the specific interests and concerns of Black Americans.⁵

As an alternative to the Diaspora framework, Wright proposes the term African Extensia — the extension of African peoples and their contributions into other spheres of the world — without denying the fusing and blending of cultures that inevitably accompanied this process. This Extensia was partially compelled by slavery, of course, but Wright suggests it "could be said had its origins millions of years ago when prehistoric creatures initially left Africa and migrated to the continents of the world."⁶

Conclusion: The Value and Limits of Wright's Contribution

In the future, it will be interesting to see whether the new Black president differs in his relation to Africa, and whether that difference might call into question some of Wright's definitions of "Third-Wave Black historiography."⁷ At times, Wright's insistence on excluding certain individuals from the category of Blackness becomes troubling — more of a verbal exercise than something genuinely useful from the perspective of a policy-maker, historian, or even an ordinary human being.