Historical Sankofa: On Understanding Antiblack Violence in the Present through the African Diasporic Past

Abstract

This essay makes a theoretical and methodological intervention into the historical discipline by arguing that there is a serious and necessary role for historians to engage with the realities of our contemporary world. Using the Black Lives Matter movement and the global uprisings of 2020 as a case study, the author rejects long-standing critiques of presentism in the historical discipline. Instead, she argues that the history of transnational black activism and protest engaged by activists in the African diaspora throughout 2020 were indicative of the ways in which the realities of the past continue to materially inform the lives of real people in the present. The author calls the process of excavating these connections between the past and the present “historical sankofa”—a concept borrowed from the Akan tradition of Ghana.

On every interminable day of the COVID-19 pandemic, Patrice Peck felt like she was experiencing déjà vu. In an opinion piece published by the New York Times in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Ms Peck, a black woman and journalist, admitted that three months of reporting during the coronavirus and the constant murder of black people had drained her emotionally. With every black death from COVID-19 and every unprosecuted police murder of black men and women she personally felt the “waves of trauma crashing down” on her community. For Ms Peck, these traumas did not simply exist in the present, but were also rooted in the past. Black journalists had expressed these traumas as early as 1827 when John B. Russwurm and a group of black New Yorkers published the first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal. Ms Peck's experiences were not novel, but rather exposed long-standing structural inequities that had survived and transformed from the antebellum era.¹

Ms Peck's editorial was published at the end of a long and tense spring punctuated by the brutal and casual murder of Mr Floyd by white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. For a minimum of eight minutes and fifteen seconds Chauvin knelt on Mr Floyd's neck, refusing to yield to his panicked cries that he could not breathe.² These facts, brought to light by a cellphone video posted to Facebook, stood in stark contrast to the statement that the Minneapolis Police Department published the day before, cryptically noting that Mr Floyd died after suffering from “medical distress.”³ After the video was posted, hundreds of people gathered in protest at the corner where Mr Floyd lost his life.⁴ These protests soon transformed from raised fists and placards to destruction of the physical manifestations of police brutality, white supremacy, and racial capitalism. Protesters breached the doors of big-box stores like Target and Walmart to loot goods and set Minneapolis police stations ablaze.⁵ Like the fires these protestors set, the rage and anger that ignited these protests spread from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, Europe, the Caribbean, and beyond.⁶

The murders that ignited widespread protests in May 2020 began in the United States, but protesters around the globe felt the injustices just as keenly as if George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, or Rayshaud Brooks had been murdered on their own shores. With the same rage that sustained the protesters that filled the streets of American cities, thousands of global citizens filled public squares and blockaded highways day after day for weeks.⁷ On 13 June 2020, as protesters in Atlanta blocked highways and set flame to the Wendy's restaurant where Rayshaud Brooks was killed by police, a crush of bodies filled London's Trafalgar Square protesting instances of police violence, marginalization, and racism not only in America, but also in the heart of the British Empire.⁸ On 13 June, as Atlanta burned, an overwhelmingly black and brown crowd of protesters filled Trafalgar Square, a space named for a colonial-era battle of domination between the British and the French, to declare their solidarity.

In Trafalgar Square, against a backdrop of buildings funded with the spoils of the transatlantic slave trade, protesters raised their fists and held signs declaring their humanity as black people. In Paris, Rome, Madrid, Hong Kong, and Sydney, protesters echoed these actions.⁹ Ignited by the grotesque violence against black people in the United States, protesters seized this moment to shine a spotlight on the ongoing legacies of white supremacy and racial violence in their own countries. In Bristol, activists tore down a statute of slave trader Edward Colston and threw it into Bristol Harbour.¹⁰ In Barbados, protesters demanded the removal of the likeness of Lord Admiral Nelson, the same British naval captain whose likeness graces the center of London's Trafalgar Square.¹¹ In Sydney and Melbourne, Aboriginal peoples and their allies rejected the prime minister's assertions that activists were “importing” problems that did not exist in Australia, and shone a light on disproportionate Aboriginal death at the hands of the police.¹²

The disparate media responses to this crisis reflected the gulf between the rights and protections afforded to white citizens and denied to their black and brown counterparts. But they also reflected a difference in perspective and experience of the ongoing impact and legacy of historical racial violence and resistance. The mainstream media reacted as they had during uprisings in 1968, in 1992, and in 2014—with shock tempered by relatively sanitized “objective” coverage, and a myriad of questions about why black people were driven into the streets in protest at that particular moment.¹³ In 2020, the mainstream media surprise extended to the global nature of the uprisings as well, relying heavily on gorgeous photograph essays documenting Aboriginal populations protesting in Sydney, Congolese immigrants raising fists in Belgium, or the descendants of Caribbean migrants holding placards in London.¹⁴ To this end, as the protests endured, newspaper op-eds compared the uprisings of 2020 to the unrest that swept the country after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, asking how they were (and occasionally were not) similar.¹⁵ On the other side of the spectrum, the black media response was exhausted, exasperated, and impatient.¹⁶ Journalists for all publications intermittently advanced the view that “it”—the cycle of police brutality, black protest, and the exoneration of those responsible—was “happening again,” or that “history was repeating itself.”¹⁷

The above approaches try to make accessible for readers their present realities, but they both fall short in one key way. As historian Tom Sugrue argued in two op-eds on how 2020 is in fact not like 1968, the reasons why these approaches are inadequate is that they ignore the historical realities of long-standing ideas of solidarity between black people in the United States and other colonized people of the global South dating back to the antebellum period.¹⁸

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I argue here, in the spirit of this forum on the historical discipline and the study of the present, that there is a serious and necessary role for historians to engage with the realities of our contemporary world. To do this, I will examine the global Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 in relation to the historical precedents that activists engage while keeping themselves rooted into the present and looking toward the future. I call this process historical sankofa, a concept that I borrow from the funerary practices of the Akan tradition of Ghana. Loosely translated as “go back and fetch it,” sankofa is symbolized as a bird with its legs rooted to the ground, its feet and body pointing forward, and its beak reaching into the past to grab an egg from its back. This powerful symbol is indicative of our relation to our ancestors as we stand in the present and look to the future.¹⁹

Like the more than a century of transnational black activism that came before, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 are rooted in a long tradition of freedom dreams that have continuously emerged from black protest and solidarity movements. The effects of 2020 are likely to reverberate, just like the national and global uprisings of 1968, the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992, and the Ferguson uprisings of 2014. The ways that this will manifest, however, are a matter for the historians of the future to figure out as they use our contemporary experiences of uprising, grief, and anger as their historical archive. Using a process of historical sankofa—recognizing the unique moment of the present while reaching back in history and looking toward the future—is critical for us as historians to contextualize the ways in which the radical imagination of 2020 blossomed while respecting the long and particular history of transmission and translation of ideas on black freedom, liberation, and solidarity in the African diaspora.

As I write, it is 2022. Until very recently, it was common practice for the majority of historians to reject an impulse to write an article on events which occurred a mere two years prior. Presentism has long been identified as the archnemesis of many historians.²⁰ This desire to starkly separate the past from the present reflects in the disciplinary standards that we set for ourselves and the ways in which others view the role of history in the world. This has been implemented and supported at an institutional level. As late as 2002, eminent historian of the French Revolution and then president of the American Historical Association Lynn Hunt wrote a piece in the AHA's Perspectives on History magazine entitled “Against Presentism.”²¹ In this essay, Professor Hunt argued that presentism led to two problems in the historical profession: first, the tendency to examine the past with the values and concerns of the present; and second, a shift of interest toward the contemporary and away from the very distant past. Focusing so much on the present carried the risk that our profession would at best turn into a secondary-school version of history, where specificity is wanting and the dangers of “short-term history of various kinds of identity politics defined by present concerns” lurk around every corner.²² This is not the opinion of just one historian, but rather of an eminent, highly respected, and extremely prolific professor who at one point headed the largest organization of historians in the United States. For historians who are trying to historicize the present, however, there is nothing short-term about the type of history that we are doing. Instead, we seek to illuminate the deeply entrenched, longue durée history of racial violence and white supremacy, and the equally lengthy history of minority protest that accompanies it.

Institutional prerogatives can do much to limit the study of particular subjects and the adoption of particular perspectives, such as a lens that considers the present. A salient example is the recently resolved question of whether oral history falls under the purview of Institutional Review Board (IRB) review. On 21 January 2019, after years of debate, federal Rule 82 FR 7149 went into effect.²³ This rule, which governs the protection of human subjects in federally funded or supported research activities, excluded oral history from the list of activities that fall under IRB review. This revised rule was the result of decades of lobbying by historians to automatically exclude oral history from the list of IRB-regulated activities. In the process of lobbying, historians laid out many excellent reasons to exclude oral history—there are already privacy and informed-consent protocols recommended by the professoriate; the IRB process assumes a scientific method that does not apply to historical research; and the potential of harm that is inherent to, say, pharmaceutical trials on human subjects or even psychology research is not present when performing oral histories. All of these were excellent reasons for exclusion, but ultimately the argument that won—and the path of least resistance—was to argue that what historians do is not “research” at all because it is not designed to “contribute to generalizable knowledge,” and therefore is not covered by DHHS requirements.

I am certainly not arguing that we should return to the days of onerous IRB applications, but for oral historians of marginalized peoples who use oral history as much to record individual experiences as to fill the enormous craters present in Eurocentric and white-dominated institutional archives, this is not representative of what we do. We do not ask standardized questions, but that does not mean that what we discover in the process of our research is not in some way generalizable or applicable to our society at large.

The types of values articulated in the debate on oral history and IRB review have led to a self-fulfilling prophecy for the historical profession. We have been encouraged to approach our subjects by framing our discipline as the examination of sets of events that exist in the hermetically sealed chambers of neatly defined historical decades, movements, and eras. Those of us carrying the burden of our double consciousness as marginalized people who study our own histories are prevented from breaching the walls of these sacred disciplinary tombs. We are prevented from emotionally and politically engaging with our own pasts, lest we be accused of the type of identity politics that Professor Hunt identified in her address two decades ago.

The problem is beyond personal—it's disciplinary as well. People of the African diaspora, even given, and perhaps because of, their violent disconnection from the African continent, have been driven to engage with their pasts. Other disciplines, like English, comparative literature, and anthropology, have fleshed this out much more clearly through ideas like sequelae, wakes, and “tragic continuities.”²⁴ These theories give us tools to understand the ways in which the past ripples into the present and informs the lives and realities of people of African descent. It also gives us language to describe the ongoing violence that our institutions and methods of evidentiary extraction do to the history of black people.

The field did not have a name at the time, but when W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 that the “problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” he was articulating ideas of imagined relations and solidarities between people who had never met, but who shared a common history of oppression and subjugation under white supremacy.²⁵ Du Bois, and his contemporaries like Marcus Garvey and his second wife Amy Jacques Garvey, articulated a diasporic consciousness that pre-dated the formation of the field of African diasporic history by nearly a hundred years.²⁶ Arguably, they were engaging with an imagined consciousness that connected black people in all corners of the world and which pre-dated them by four hundred years, stretching back to the hulls of slave ships and to the African continent itself.²⁷

African diasporic studies was designed, from its inception, to elucidate the connections between people of African descent on the African continent or in their locations of dispersal.²⁸ Scholars of the African diaspora reject using a lens limited by the boundaries of nation-states and instead adopt a perspective that sees the development of “diasporic consciousness” on a global level. Necessarily, the history of the African diaspora is connected to the exchange of the history of ideas—it relates to the ways in which black people define themselves and each other as part of the same communities over sometimes expansive geographical distance.²⁹ Because of this, as historian Robin D. G. Kelley has argued, much of the black radical tradition is premised on the ability to dream of a dramatically different world.³⁰ In dreaming of this world, black people have found ways to redefine themselves as global majorities and develop strategies for navigating and overthrowing global white supremacy. They have redefined the contours of blackness, as they did in the aftermath of the Second World War and as they do now, to include Muslims, Dalits, Aborigines, and East Asians in their movements.³¹

Thus, when a British Muslim holds up an anti-police-brutality sign in Trafalgar Square declaring that “Pigs are Haram” or waves a Palestinian flag alongside a Black Lives Matter placard featuring the likenesses of black Americans who fell to police violence, they are engaging with this long-standing tradition. This is perhaps the biggest pitfall of rejecting presentism—the way that ignoring the historical roots of these movements makes these formations seem strange, haphazard, and peculiar instead of intentional, powerful, and historically informed. Our twenty-first-century definitions of race and racial identity make Afro-Asian, Afro-Dalit, and Afro-Aboriginal solidarities, to name a few, seem out of the ordinary instead of part and parcel of the African diasporic and internationalist landscape. Whatever the latest technologies and advancements in communication—whether they were syndication networks, underground radio, or television—have been at the core of what has enabled these ideological connections to exist where physical travel proved too costly, too impractical, or simply undesirable.³² Today, these aims are achieved through a twenty-four-hour news cycle and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook that reach nearly every corner of the globe simultaneously.

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It is no surprise, thus, that today it is black historians and historians who study people of African descent who are leading the movement to reclaim presentism in the historical profession, and they are challenging the power of institutions to stop them. From the birth of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and its award-winning public-facing blog, Black Perspectives, to the controversial 1619 Project of the New York Times, black historians and their allies are speaking out in favor of a historical discipline that does not ignore the realities of antiblack violence in the present and makes sense of its roots in the past.³³ These historians are informed by long-standing indigenous practices of understanding the relation of the past to the present, like sankofa, and also powerfully by their own experiences.

The profession is coming around as well. In December 2020, after the coronavirus pandemic cancelled annual professional meetings and gatherings, the then president of the Organization of American Historians, Joanne Meyerowitz, made the decision to publish her outgoing address in the Journal of American History. Entitled “180 Op-Eds: Or How to Make the Present Historical,” Professor Meyerowitz broke from years of institutional suspicion of presentism by arguing that our mission “as historians [is] not only to study the past and not only to make the past somehow relevant … but also to study the present, to make the present historical, to give historical depth and complexity to the world in which we live.”³⁴ Perhaps I am in the minority of historians, but it is also what serves our students and the educated public with which some of us engage. Contrary to Professor Hunt's 2002 suggestion that focusing on the present threatens to put historians out of business entirely, business for historians who engage with the present is booming.³⁵ In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, I was inundated with requests from reporters wanting to know everything from the historical context of these protests to why Juneteenth mattered. In a semester held completely online and in an age of falling history enrollments, my hundred-person Race in America class was completely full with a waiting list. And I know I am not alone. During the protests, Professor Ibram X. Kendi's book How to Be an Anti-racist, Robin DeAngelo's White Fragility, and Michele Alexander's The New Jim Crow were sold out on Amazon.com and in local bookstores.³⁶ Black bookstores, in particular, could not keep their collection of antiracist literature in stock.³⁷

I do not argue that we should choose our subjects based on their likelihood to sell books. There is value in choosing a subject entirely contained in the distant past simply for the curiosity and wonder that it brings. But for those of us who have long waited for the public to care about our subjects because of how deeply they resonate for us in our present time, these are small silver linings in an otherwise bleak present. In support of implementing this practice of historical sankofa, I end here with the Akan proverb from which the concept of sankofa emerges. Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki—“It is not taboo to go back and fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” Simply because we are historians, we need not allow convention to prevent us from retrieving the gems which can enrich our world and enhance human understanding as we move forward into the twenty-first century.