Black History Month

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

One of the things that suddenly confused me wrt Black History Month - is it meant to be the interaction of black people with history, or is it meant to be the history of people who happen to be black? Because that's a hell of a lot of differing histories, either way. ETA: I've also seen it suggested that it's the history of Africans/people of African descent. Which is all of us ultimately, but never mind that.

In any case, what it practically means in school is that we talk about MLK/Rosa Parks and Mary Seacole. All of whom are fine people to talk about, and Mary Seacole has relevance to a British school by virtue of being Scottish. Also, she did a lot to combat growing colour-based racism in England (and presumably Scotland and Wales) by just getting on with being an excellent person. (Basically, at the beginning of her stint in the Crimea, she was 'that weirdo who looks weird and what the hell does she hink she's doing?' and at the end she was 'Mother Seacole who saved a lot of the lives of our brave boys'.)

However, I'm sure we could branch out. How about the first black pope? Actually, Victor I is quite important in Catholic history - he was the geezer who brought the Latin Mass to Rome, where previously they used Greek (but Latin was used in Africa). How about St Augustine? I know they might not be main-stream enough for general consumption, but I work in a Catholic school so Catholic history seems relevant.

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

You read my brain. I just bitched about a load of this stuff, and may bitch some more later if I have the energy.

While I think Mary Seacole is great, it's tiresome seeing the same old faces evey year. Howeversee my links to the BHM website for why the whole thing is always so confused - no reliable funding or organisation.

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

I do get frustrated when people jump to the obvious and don't look any further for people of (for example) local significance. There is a unit in the National Curriculam which I understand calls for students to study a historical figure, the example given being Florence Nightingale. You would not believe the number of schools who study Florence Nightingale, and who get in contact with museums asking for them to run a session on - you've guessed it. What is even scarier, there are museums who do, despite the fact that they have absolutely nothing associated with her and her time on display.

Having said that, Mary Seacole, Rosa Parks and MLK are fine, fine people and worthy of learning about.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Reasons for thinking Victor I was black? The only page I can find that ventures an opinion the matter says "unknown"...

[alison-lees.livejournal.com]

'native of Africa' usually means black...

[mooism.livejournal.com]

But not near the Mediterranean. The Roman province of Africa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_(province)) looks to have been contained in modern day Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia.

[alison-lees.livejournal.com]

true. it also depends on how you define 'black'

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Argh, yes.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Not when Africa means 'Algeria, Libya, Tunisia'. The Roman province is not the same as the continent. Romans got posted there for all sorts of reasons from all sorts of home territories, and being born there means nothing when it comes to skin colour, 2000 years ago or now.

I wrote a comment including this point earlier but it seems to have been deleted.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Oh, I thought you deleted it as it wasn't there when I went to reply to it :( I don't have a copy any more, sorry.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Ah. Don't know what happened there then. I did experience a browser crash not long afterwards but that shouldn't have deleted it. Weird. Oh well. The point I was making has been made in comments anyway. :D

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Err, if you mean "born in Africa" (which I understand he indeed was) then no, it doesn't.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Indeed. 4 of the 5 grandparents in this line-up were born outside the UK, two of them on the continent of Africa. Which two?

[alison-lees.livejournal.com]

I took native of Africa to mean a little more than simply born in Africa (of possibly completely non-African immigrants), although I'm not really sure that this Victor fellow was. I suppose if this wasn't the first black pope, then there maybe was another one?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Even then northern Africans (as Victor I would have been assuming he wasn't actually descended from recent immigrants) seem more brown than black.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

seem more brown than black

Now there's another question... who gets to be called black,and does it really matter? I'm very unclear on it myself, and tend to avoid any specifications of skin colour of people I know except when mixing paints for self-portraits. (And that I rarely do now I don't work in a class.)

Take 'white'. If a blond northern European is unequivocally white, does that mean anyone paler than them is white? Even if they are from Eastern Asia? Does it really matter?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I don't know exactly where you'd draw the line (and many people who draw it exactly are probably up to no good); but I don't think Algerians are normally thought to fall the same side of it as Kenyans (for instance). And yeah, as a general rule it ought not to matter, but, well, the question did come up.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Yes, I just think that if we're not meant to care, then we may as well visualise him as black as white. Hmm. I'm beginning to shoot myself in the foot here.

[alison-lees.livejournal.com]

and a very long time ago, 'black' could be used to describe a white person with a dark complexion and black hair...

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

It's all a bit confusing. Hispanics don't (AIUI) count as white in America, although they do in Europe, for example.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Ok,so there's no evidence that he was black, but there's also no evidence that he wasn't. Actually, I take this as a sign that we're not meant to care about his skin colour, which would seem the ideal position.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

The problem with that is that people's mental images then tend to default to white, which contributes to a lack of awareness of the contributions of non-white people, alienation of minority ethnicities, and other suchlike bad things. It's a bit like the saying "I'll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy"; ideally no-one would have to pay attention to such things, but in our current non-ideal state, it's incumbent on us to do so.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I think the pictures I've seen of Victor I (and certainly of St Augustine) tend to show them with dark skin, so that's how I think of them.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

That's encouraging. Our church has a secondary dedication to St. Augustine, and our statue of him is very definitely white!

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Oops, stupid question - is it the same St Augustine? I mean St Augustine of Hippo, but when I was talking to marnanel he got confused because he was thinking of St Augustine of Canterbury. Sorry if that was obvious.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Not at all stupid, but yes, our dedication is to the one from Hippo. It's quite a rare dedication for C of E parish churches in England - in fact, our vicar thinks we may be the only one. I haven't tried to verify this myself, though.

ask a historian

[tenthmedieval.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

There's no evidence, because the Romans didn't care. Augustine wasn't a Berber, I'm pretty sure, because he was Christian and conversion among the Berbers (who are (relatively) indigenous to Africa and white, suntans not withstanding) was as far as we can tell rare. But which of the various ethnic groups that remain (Nubian, Numidian, Punic/Carthaginian, I don't know what, Italian-Roman expat.), it's hard to guess. He and his mother seem to have had family in Italy but we know little about his father. Wikipedia says that "Augustine was of Berber descent", but their cites are all encyclopædic or textbooks; I don't know what their ultimate source is. I'll have a look in the U. L. next time I have a minute. I do know, however, that he spoke Punic, which might just be coincidence and/or convenience but may imply Punic ancestry, which is Semitic/Berber mixed.

As for Victor I, I doubt we even know that much; the Catholic Encyclopedia says that the African origin is testified to by the Liber Pontificalis, which is first pulled together from we're-not-sure-what in the seventh century and so may not know much, but it apparently names his father as Felix, which is at least a Latin name. That doesn't mean much though, as a Christian family would usually have such. Jerome's De Viris Illustribus has even less. Text for these two is online, the LP here in Latin (the translation is copyright) and Jerome here. Eusebius also mentions him in his Ecclesiastical History (English translation online here) but says nothing of his origins.

The word the LP uses for African is interesting though, "Afer" not "Africanus". Classical usage implies that this is native African not European immigrant, but I can also find instances of it as a nickname for Europeans with many years' service in Africa alas. The trouble with this sort of thing is that the web presence of any sane discussion has always been drowned by African Caucus-style "all key figures in European history were really black!" So in the end I don't have a final opinion, but it seems a shade more likely that Victor was genuinely dark-pigmented than was Augustine.

Re: ask a historian

[tenthmedieval.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

And the Internet's power of coincidence strikes again: someone has, just this week, posted online a translation of Possidius's biography of Augustine which is the main source for him except for the Confessions: it can be found here.

Re: ask a historian

[tenthmedieval.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Online edition of the Confessions here, and there is a little bit of discussion of origins in the first note of all, which points out that his, and his mother's name, are both vanishingly rare in Roman Africa, which may suggest either, as the commentator says, "aristocratic pretensions" or, as I suspect, Italian descent. But again, names usually come from mothers; who was the father, and why were they in Africa?

There's also an old English translation of the Confessions here. That gives you approximately all the source material yourself, so I'm going to leave this now...

[alison-lees.livejournal.com]

I'd probably interpret it completely wrongly, e.g. as a month to spend studying the history of the black country, or the use of black in art, or, worse, a month for black people to study history in. If I wanted to take it seriously, I'd be looking at the history of England with respect to black immigration, the first slaves, the development of the slave trade, the abolition of the slave trade, the very large immigration of commonwealth people that I know happened but know nothing about, and such like. Which would be a lot more interesting than just two or three famous black people.

I do this wrong interpretation in a different way at our school. They have a 'Life Education Caravan' for one week in the year, and I automatically think 'pro-life, anti-abortion group' when it is actually about healthy eating, exercise, tooth brushing, and stuff like that.

[firinel.livejournal.com]

I had no idea that the UK celebrates a Black History month (ours is in February). I can't really say what yours is meant to study, as I strongly suspect there's cultural differences between here and there as to what it is to be black.

fyi, I've never heard of Mary Seacole.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to say I hadn't either until ghoti was talking to me about her the other week.

I like the idea of talking about the Pope who introduced the Latin mass. I think people forget that at one time Latin was actually the common tongue and it was Greek which was the inaccessible language.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

She was half Scottish half Jamaican, and a nurse in the Crimea. Unlike Florence Nightingale, she set up her hospital in the centre of the war zone, and also had (admittedly limited) medical training.

[jacquilynne.livejournal.com]

I think it's any and all of those things. History encompasses the biographies of noted figures, it encompasses the history of cultures and countries, of sub-cultures and races and religions. In any way that history can be studied about people in general (most often about white people in general, hence Black History Month), it can be studied with a particular focus on Black History.

Black History month here tends to focus on individuals, I think because biography is easy to get people interested in, but I think the idea of Black History month is much more all encompassing.