By Kira Logan
Harvard University history professor Vincent Brown spoke at UC Santa Barbara late last month, for what he believes may have been the “last nationally recognized Black History month.”
Brown was hosted by UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center for a Key Passages series talk titled “Black History’s Warning to the World.”
“I feel like we’re in the midst of a life-changing transition,” Brown said, referring to the Trump governmental attack on diversity policies, and other recent political shifts.
He asked himself and the audience how Black history has affected the past and what it means for our future.
“How do we make sure Black history is not only celebrated , but a blueprint for how we operate as a society?”
Brown said it is difficult to make truth and justice fit into the so-called ‘American way,’ which he described as the opposite end of the pendulum to inclusion of Black people in American society.
“Different acronyms like BLM, CRT, and DEI are being called racial indoctrination, and now different K-12 schools are being penalized if they stray away from “patriotic history,” Brown said.
Harvard historia Vincent Brown at his IHC Key Passages talk at UC Santa Barbara to mark Black History Month.
In order to understand what our society looks like now, one must engage with international Black history to fully comprehend the journey our country has gone through, and how much further we have to go, Brown believes.
“Not teaching about Black culture is denying them [students] the experience to think outside the patriotic box given to the United States,” Brown said.
Brown explained that teachers of Black history inherited information from assumptions that Black people’s history does not matter and is not important — which he labels as “subset history,” relegating Black history to be just a smaller piece in a longer, larger history of the U.S.
“But the Black experience is crucial to understanding key themes in America,” Brown said. “The very things Americans care most about make no sense without Black perspective.”
Brown said an abundance of important Black history has been undervalued and that U.S. institutions try to minimize it.
“Black history does not begin in 1776 when Christopher Columbus founded America. Black history is world history — thus has history for the world,” Brown said.
He urges a multidimensional approach, a larger variety in the ways in which people engage with it, and noted he found his passion in reggae music.
“I never thought that everything worth being learned was learnt from academic institutions,” Brown said. “I got into learning about slavery because I listened to reggae in high school!”
Brown did hone in on the importance of the year 1776, naming it a key moment in the U.S.
“The date obscures the general context of its time and inadvertently deflects how Britain’s biggest colony was in the Caribbean.”
Brown encouraged the audience to regard history less linearly, saying that by default, people tend to think in discrete units: the West, the East, etc. But “history doesn’t tend to unfold like that,” Brown said.
“In the long run, if we were to absorb the lessons from history into the way we teach now, we’re trying to transform the way we teach – we’re learning how to put clean water into dirty bottles.”
Critical history is key to the conversation, Brown said, pointing to the fact that the transatlantic slave trade tells us not only about slavery but about civilization at the time.
With most Black people enslaved and in captivity, some only saw fighting in war as their way out of slavery. War was waged between the slaves and those who held slaves during the transatlantic slave trade time period.
“Small, dirty wars epitomize the reality of slavery,” Brown said. “Wars are an anomaly in regular order. When war becomes a way of life, violence has an afterlife.”
Slavery itself can be seen as low-intensity warfare, according to Brown.
“When you make people slaves, you compel them to live with you in a state of war,” Brown said.
Harvard University professor and filmmaker Vincent Brown, pictured speaking at the Museum of the American Revolution, in Feb. 2020. Photo courtesy of Museum of the American Revolution.
Brown concluded his talk by coming back to today, and noted that the first casualty of war is truth and we are currently witnessing the outright sabotage of truth in our system of government.
“People blind themselves to complexity and would rather just see the black and white of friend and foe, of good over evil,” Brown said.
Brown, who is both a history professor and a filmmaker, ended by speaking about his work in film, which focuses on the history of slavery, and has been broadcast on PBS to a large viewership.
“They’re not Taylor Swift numbers, but they’re higher than typical academic history video numbers,” he said.
Brown said he still needs to constantly make compromises in his film genres in order to reach more mainstream audiences, and that he constantly grapples with which compromises he’s willing to make.
“If you’re telling brand new stories with unfamiliar conventions, you’re going to get smaller numbers,” he said. “You have to work with existing conventions and familiarity to tell unfamiliar stories.”
Finally, Brown encouraged his audience to think not just about history but how it bleeds into thinking about one another during such uncertain times. He wants his audiences, and continually his students, to think about the individuals who are in our American story, both geographically and historically.
“People coming together in these tumultuous moments so we can think and act together is a process, and is always ongoing,” Brown said.
Kira Logan is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.