In African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, David Hackett Fischer provides a comprehensive survey of African contributions to Americanism at its most aspirational. Fischer gives particulars of knowledge and skills advanced by Africans in the United States and prized by white people in various regional economies. His primary argument, though, is that Africans in bondage, and their descendants, as a result of their unique American experience, formed “a very powerful idea of equity for all, cast in a distinctive moral calculus that rose from the experience of human bondage.” He summarizes: “Africans both slave and free have long reflected on a deep moral paradox in America, between the continuing horror of race slavery and persistence of racial injustice on the one hand, and the hope of expanding ideals of human rights, social Justice, the rule of law, and dreams of liberty and freedom.”
Professor Fischer’s quest to name the African founding of America adopts a deeply empirical commitment that resists white ignorance and can inspire a broad critique of the American jurisprudential and popular attachment to lazy thinking, especially when race is the topic. The book provides a deep refutation of the reasoning process that has produced today’s climate of white resentment of Black visibility (ban on race studies), public role (attacks on prosecutors and judges), and access to all of American life (threats to corporations on hiring and resistance to housing integration).
The long history and importance of African and African-descended persons in the United States, with talents, intelligence, and character that have benefited the United States, provides an answer to the enduring insistence on treating their presence in white spaces as an anomaly-to be removed by violence and Jim Crow, or “color-blind” claims merged with theories of suspect race discrimination. By revealing the Black population’s part in making the nation, African Founders provides a starting point for a curiosity that might deflect willful amnesia and serves as the antithesis to the embrace of ignorance or alarm about Black presence in white spaces.
The setting for such a book, and a needed corrective, is captured by the late philosopher Charles Mills’s work on “white ignorance” in his lifelong work that addressed the epistemology, in a white-dominated academy, of conceptions of liberalism and of race:
White ignorance . . .
It’s a big subject. How much time do you have?
It’s not enough.
Ignorance is usually thought of as a passive obverse to knowledge, the darkness retreating before the spread of Enlightenment.
But . . .
Imagine an ignorance that resists.
Imagine an ignorance that fights back.
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated,an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly–
not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated
at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly
as knowledge.
Professor Fischer’s scholarship moves white ignorance away from the long embrace of the white majority’s preference for an uninformed stereotype by “going there”-to the site where ignorance must meet its enemy: the empirical world. Fischer’s book points its reader away from stereotypes and flattening treatment of African ethnic variety arising from African civilization, and toward the distinctively regional experiences of enslaved Africans in the colonies and then the United States. In so doing, he shifts the focus away from a story of victims needing redress and toward an understanding of the rightful presence in formative American spaces of African American talent.
Professor Fischer reports new discoveries of archaeological evidence of relentless cruelty in the destruction of bodies through forced labor. At the same time, he leavens that disheartening revelation of the American past by depicting what enslaved persons were able to contribute to the American “founding.” Though he does not address contemporary differences over “inclusion,” he provides an important, fog-clearing description of connections that have been enriching to America at large, and hence relevant to race jurisprudence and a shared culture today. Creativity within associations of enslaved persons nurtured collective work away from the “masters” and fashioned cultural connections that made for a more open, free, and creative America. Discussing the Hudson Valley and New York City, Fischer writes: “The rhythms of urban life allowed slaves to meet others in complex webs of voluntary association, defined by African ethnicity, place of origin, occupation, gender, and more.” These associations among Africans radiated into the whole culture, with the effect of transforming “multiple Afro-European cultures into a pluralist society.”
W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the construction of the racial category of “white” was used to exclude others at various points in history. It brought about, he said, a great emotional discovery of color as a difference in which “white, by that token, was wonderful.” 1 More recently, Ibram X. Kendi argues that “powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era…” The idea that “race,” though a creation used to subjugate, has become something so real that it must be declared to be not real, while at the same time arguing it is so real that it is uniquely dangerous, is a new move in the maintenance of white-centered justification of ideals and policies. An example of this move is the campaign that has arisen in the wake of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College. The targets are corporations, private funds aimed at giving start up seed money to Black women, 150 colleges, and surely more to come. It is only fair to describe the campaign, in the words of Charles Mills, as “militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated,” “refusing to go quietly.” Not coincidentally, SFFA converges with the “militant, aggressive” Florida laws requiring an erasure in Florida public schools of the Black experience in America, if presenting that history makes white students “uncomfortable.”
The emotions embedded in the currently dominant judicial imagination about the American experiment produced the startling description in SFFA by the Chief Justice of the United States of university admissions as “a zero-sum game.”
At best, the phrase seems to lend a patina of economic reasoning to a claim arising from a quantifiable basis in human psychology rather than empirical evidence of the real world. But a recent survey on zero sum thinking suggests that “high-status groups (white people and men) are more likely to espouse” zero sum beliefs. In adopting this term, Roberts is positioning the court with those concerned with loss of white privilege, not those concerned with individual fairness. More significantly, the “zero sum” phrase negates higher education’s long-held cultural value: the admissions process is meant to build a learning community that reflects a talented demographic with historic injuries and historic strengths valuable to the academy.
Fischer’s account of the shared benefit to American society provided by members of the whole American community, emphatically including Black enslaved persons and African American citizens, casts doubt on that description. The tale of interpersonal connections across historic American legacies told by Fischer speaks more of collectivism than individualism. Yet Roberts’s meaning is hard to read as anything but an emotional embrace of individualism-more for me and less for you.
The story of the continuing impact on the Black American population of enslavement and Jim Crow is a proper and morally weighty basis for race conscious programs addressing a historical burden for which remedy is due and compelling. Fischer’s book helps to point from a historic injustice meriting a benefit to the Black minority, and authorized constitutionally, to the gain shared by the whole culture of working to add a Black presence to our elite educational institutions and other spaces.
Fischer is a white scholar who embarks upon the project of knowing. He wants to know, and for readers to know, who the people are who were brought here against their will and whose descendants have wound up subsumed into one undifferentiated category. In white fantasy they have been called “slaves”-and eventually, in the mouth of a member of the Supreme Court, “the blacks.” Yet those subject to the flattening one-dimensional depiction of their shared “race,” and allegedly simultaneous colorlessness in a “color-blind” legal world, are individuals whose ancestral story, talent, and shared yet varied experiences support reasons for universities to seek their contributions to an environment dedicated to advancing knowledge and culture. Narrow, self-referential attachment to a “game” of individual winners and losers betrays our “African founders'” legacy.
- Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress 47 (2023), quoting Du Bois.
