Presenter:
Dr. Jacqueline Copeland Carson, PhD, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Introduction

john powell:
Before we start with the next presentations, I want to suggest that there are many models to address the complex issue of reparations. There are ways that probably would be negative and there are ways that probably would be positive. Once we get introduced to the idea, we must examine this issue very carefully and consider the Jewish experience, the Japanese American experience, the experience in South Africa, or the experience of native Americans and try to figure out, if we ever get to that point, what would make sense for the experience of African Americans in America. Any answer would probably be some composite of all those experiences and something new in trying to address the complexities of individual claims and the group-based claims.

We have a treat in store for us as we hear from Dr. Jacqueline Copeland Carson. She is going to be talking about the issue of reconstructing African American identity.

Dr. Jacqueline Copeland Carson:
I first want to thank Atum Azzahir who has been an advocate and supporter of mine for quite some time. I commend her and Dr. Miles for putting this together. It is rare to have an opportunity as a scholar to conference with people from the community on issues that affect us all.

These new technologies present a range of complex opportunities and dangers for us. I want to talk today about our possible agenda for constructing an African identity that might prepare us for the implications of using genetic mapping to specify our heritage. We can see now that this mapping has already had a profound effect. We all know that humanity started in Africa. As we begin to use this technology to retrace our own family histories, it will have a profound effect on us.

As Randall Robinson shows in his writings, the destruction of African American culture has had a profound affect on our identity, our spirituality, our sense of self-worth, and our sense of self-esteem. These effects are intergenerational; our youth are affected as well. The conversation about constructing or reconstructing our cultural identity is tied to these profound issues. One could argue that many of the persistent social challenges that we face, from the alienation of our youth to the breakdown of our communities across our country, can in part be attributed to the fact that our original culture has, in many ways, been destroyed. It is incumbent on us to find constructive ways to define and teach our culture and our history. I believe it is a foundation for our continuing survival politically and economically as a people. This conference asks another question, a practical question: What next? The technology exists. How can we use these technologies in a way that productively builds our communities and strengthens us as a people.

I do not intend to upset anyone, but I think arguing about our identity is a part of our culture. Whenever you get two people of any partial African heritage in the room, that is one of the top items on the agenda. Most of you know what I'm talking about. Given our history, that is a natural tendency, but I would like you to give me a little grace as I suggest some ideas that may sit well with some people and not so well with others.

I am a social scientist. I firmly believe that, although we all try to do research that is as objective as possible, our personal backgrounds unavoidably affect how we ask questions, how we collect data and how we interpret it. I am a cultural anthropologist and an urban planner. I decided to become a cultural anthropologist to better understand how culture could be used to promote community development, particularly in African diasporan communities. I have spent much of my scholarly life studying how people of African descent reconstruct their identities. I have studied it here in the United States and in West Africa. I particularly look at the role the nonprofit sector has played in helping us create new identities. I do not study these issues simply out of an academic interest but because they also inform my own personal interest in defining identity in our family and transmitting our cultural values to our daughter.

I do not believe that we are ready to use genetic mapping to trace our family histories and our community histories.
*First, we will not only learn the specifics of our African origins but also details of our European or other genetic heritages. Even if we come to understand the African part of our heritage, we will still face the challenge of defining our culture and identity vis-à-vis Europe and America. Genetic mapping will tell us about our several different lineages because of the history of the Americas and the history of the African diaspora. This is a struggle that is faced not only by people of African descent living in the Americas, but also by African immigrants and, to some extent, by Africans living on the continent. The literature by Wole Solyinka or Chinua Achebe addresses the issue of how do we position traditional African culture in the context of the West and the effect of colonialism. This issue or struggle is not unique to African Americans but genetic mapping will complicate our understanding of our history. The complications that now exist will remain if we obtain more specific information about our heritage.
* Second, will the knowledge of our specific African origins, our particular country, tribe or village, cause further division in an already fractured African heritage communities, here, in Africa, and throughout the diaspora? Will knowing that your ancestor is Hausa or Tutsi make you feel compelled to take up one side of some of the tragic battles taking place in Africa today? We need to give some thought to that.
*Third, will this new information be a basis for further unity or division among people of African descent, African Americans living in America? Will we start to construe ourselves as hyphenated African Americans, so Yoruba-American versus Fonti-American versus Ibo-American, versus Hausa-American. Will these distinctions be useful or destructive?

To avoid the potential dangers of this new knowledge and to take advantage of the opportunities, we as a people should redouble our efforts to define and create a new African identity that accommodates the diversity of African peoples living throughout the world, as well as the unity. There are two basic barriers to this culture-building process. One is that race, the notion that people can be classified on the basis of distinguishing physical characteristics and that there are biologically-based correlations between intelligence and other social practices with these physical characteristics, is a manmade fiction. That is not to say, of course, that it is not a social reality.

The concept of race emerged in the 18th century to help Europeans understand all of the ostensibly different people that they were encountering throughout the world. As this exploration became conquest, the notion of race became a way to justify domination. A hierarchy developed. A hierarchy developed whereby the people called "black" were considered at the lowest scale of human development. This is worth emphasizing as we think about using genetics to define our identity.

With slavery in the Americas, the notions of race and culture became further conflated with a very insidious impact on how African Americans perceived themselves. For people of African heritage in America, race was not only associated with culture, it became culture. Our various social practices have not been taken seriously as expressions of culture, but they are--especially in the conventional literature, though less so now - seen more as pathological adaptations to American slavery and subsequent social inequality. In this way, our social practices are seen as acultural, not really cultural, and expressions of social dysfunction.

Anthropologists say that producing and transmitting culture is what makes us human and distinguishes us from our primate cousins. However, if we are defined by race rather than culture, what does that mean for our humanity and how we perceive ourselves? It means that the ways that we dance, or sing, or do oratory, or cook, are seen as in our blood, as inherited, even thout every other person in the world learns comparable social practices through socialization and from parents and siblings. People of African descent, particularly in the Americans, are alleged, according to much of the social-scientific literature, to have the distinction of having race, but it is difficult to find a serious analysis of our culture. So, we are denied having a "real culture."

As we think about how we can use genetic mapping in constructive ways, how empowering it would be if our youth understood that the great things of our African ancestors in ancient Africa and the more contemporary cultural creations of African Americans, like jazz or rock-and-roll, which changed music throughout the world, are actually cultural creations. Hip-hop music and culture that have taken the world by storm can also arguably be seen as an African-derived cultural tradition created in the United States. A significant portion of American culture is African derived, especially popular music, colloquial English, and popular fashion, especially in youth culture. Some would say that these are African derived and created by the descendants of African slaves in the Americas and incorporated, some would say expropriated, into mainstream culture. We should think more carefully about the separations that are drawn between African and American culture. I cannot quantify it, but to say that half of American popular culture is African derived significantly complicates how we construe ourselves.

I would argue that this effort of trying to self-consciously and deliberately reconstruct culture may be a particularly American preoccupation that largely draws on the African experience because we were so radically disconnected from our original cultures and traditions. From the time we set foot in the Americas, we have been engaged in a process of creating a kind of creolized culture that we call African American or American culture. Roots, which came out in the 1970s, started the popularization in America of trying to retrace genealogy. It is also an example of how our search for our identity and our experience influences broader American culture and history.

We have ignored much of the culture that we have created. Sometimes in the search for our African ancestry, it is important to go look at the ancient precedents that enabled us to create our contemporary cultural expressions. It is important that we not stop there. Much of the culture that we created may be self-conscious. Some may be unconsciously embodied in a way that we do not take credit for, or document, or write about, or study, or transmit to our children. Certain Afrocentric movements have a conception of ancient Nubia or ancient Nigeria but we sometimes skip the intermediate step of looking at what have we done with our cultural material in America. How have we used this material to redefine ourselves and survive and create these great world cultural traditions that are right underneath our noses that we do not take credit for and do not teach to our children?

The dominant notion of culture is itself a cultural construct. The ways that we understand our collective systems of meaning, our collective ways of valuing and understanding the world are cultural constructs. Implicit in the dominant notion of culture is a division between what is considered authentic that organically created and passed down almost unconsciously over generations and inauthentic or artificial culture. The rituals and rites of passage that the Masai of East Africa use are an organic culture because the line hasn't been as severely broken. Kwanza is a deliberately created cultural expression; many people maintain that such kinds of cultural expressions are not real.

As anthropologists and others study how people create culture, we find that all cultures, at some level, are the products of deliberate efforts. The person creating the ritual in ancient Africa may have been a chief or the local shaman. Culture is always created in a social and political context and we then experience the residue of that culture over time. This distinction between people who have 'real' culture and the people like us who do not have real culture because we are thinking about it self-consciously or have conferences to talk about how to reconstruct it is artificial. This distinction is a barrier to our fully recognizing that we do have a culture and that we do on an unconscious level transmit it to our children. The pace with which culture is changing and the frequency with which we create modify longstanding traditions may have quickened in the contemporary period, because of the mobility of people throughout the world and because of the media. But, today's changes are simply a contemporary variation of an ancient human theme.

Although African Americans made need to undertake a more thorough cultural reconstruction because of the severity of the dislocations that we experienced, our experience today is not that different from other diasporas in the world. Many people have been dislocated; many are living in diasporas. Most of humanity is engaged in an effort to deliberately recreate their culture or reconnect to some perception of their traditional culture. We are not alone in this effort. Asians are doing it. The word Latino is a cultural construction. Native Americans are doing this. This is a postmodern condition as culture is wrested from one particular place. People are not necessarily living in the places where their cultures originated and America is a huge example of this, except for the American native peoples.

It is legitimate for us to attempt to reconstruct our culture. It is necessary for us to do so if we are to use genetic mapping and these other new technologies productively. It is a basic human right to ask these questions and to create answers that seem to be true to our historical experience. The question is: What next? What do we need to do to look back and move forward at the same time?

We should very deliberately consider how to create broad systems of cultural identity that recognize and encompass the diversity of African peoples and define a common ground among them. As we learn our genetic histories, we should remember that history. History is much more than biology; it is also cultural ways of knowing and remembering the past. African peoples throughout the world need notions of identity and culture that help us support and take responsibility for each other. In an increasingly global economy, the people who survive and thrive are those who will be able to think and act at scales of cultural identity beyond one village, one ethnic group or one nation-- people who can think, trade, act and support eachother in a transnational way.

We have a natural network based on the common experience at some level, of racial terror or cultural dislocation. We have the kind of hyper-cultural creativity that we need to engage in creating a semblance of an identity for ourselves through our experience in America. The old word for this was Pan-Africanism, a term that does not seem to be used seriously much, as a construct to conceive of our identity. Pan-Africanism often meant some essentialized, idealized notion of Africa divorced from historical reality. I am thinking of pan-Africanism in the way that you might think of the European Union or the concept of "the West." We have a transnational classification that has a historical basis that we could more constructively use to address the severe poverty and health problems that people of African descent experience throughout the world.

I believe that as a people, we need to recognize that we are at the crossroads. The decisions that we make as individuals and families in using this genetic mapping do not just affect us individually. History is just the accretion of all these individual acts and family acts over time. We should move our conversation from the level of the individual or the family to talk about cultural (not just political) organizing, to think about how we want to define this collectivity that we call by various names. People of some African-derived heritage who might call themselves Jamaican, African American, black, but who have the common experience of the middle passage at different historical periods. To prepare for this new journey, we need to recognize, as someone once said, "that those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history and they will have to accept its verdict." So we need to be very careful about learning more than we are ready to know about our ancestry as people of African descent living in America. We need to recognize that building a culture that allows us to survive and thrive in the 21-century is part of our agenda. Thank you.