Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !
I still haven't made it to Black history. I'm close! But I'm still on white US history. It's everywhere!
Q: Why does it seem like Black folk don't contribute much to society or science or history? Most inventions are from Europeans? Why does it seem this way? Don't cancel me!
A: Racism. The lie of white supremacy requires that we pretend that white men are the only people that ever invented anything or contributed to society.
(Image: nedroid.com)
Instead of just listing a bunch of Black accomplishments to try to counter that lie, I want us to look at the language that US folk use to describe discoveries or inventions. It's dripping with racism and white centering.
Non-white people are invisible. They don't even count. When we say "discovered," we really mean discovered "for white people." This is baked into our language.
This "I only see white people" impacts people of all other races, but anti-Black racism is most egregious.
If you ask a US citizen who discovered America, they will instantly respond "Columbus!" Others might argue Cabot or Vespucci. I don't know how to tell you this, but you can't say you "discovered a land" that already had people waving at you from the shore when you got there.🤡
The conversation breaks down into a pedantic discussion about the words "discovery," and "America."
You get a different answer to this question if you ask Native American people.
If you ask many folk in the US what the population of North America was in 1650, they will start counting up colonists. They have to be reminded that there were *millions* of native Americans living in North America.
They know that indigenous people were here! They just didn't realize that they mattered.
The conversation soon devolves into a pedantic discussion around the word "America."
Some of my white US friends worry about the day when white folk will no longer be the majority. But if you count African slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Asian immigrants, how many years was it even true that white folk were the majority here?
Most US folk haven't even thought to ask themselves this question, let alone answer it. 🤷🏿♂️
If you ask people who invented vaccination and when, US medical pros will tell you "Edward Jenner!" If you ask them why it's called vaccination, they'll tell you "variolae vaccinae" (smallpox of the cow). Vaccinae basically means "of the cow" In Latin. Cow in Spanish, is Vaca. In French, Vache.
Then ask them how the earliest smallpox vaccines worked. They know. Introducing weakened variolae through the skin, rather than through the lungs. Ask them if African doctors had done this. They say yes.
Africans had been doing variolation for hundreds of years before "vaccination." Asians too.
The medical professionals know this! But they'll say, "That doesn't count!" It devolves into a pedantic discussion about the definition of vaccine vs innoculation, and attenuated virus, and cowpox vs smallpox.
If you ask, "who invented small pox innoculation," You get a different answer if you ask Nigerian or Ghanaian or Chinese doctors.
If you ask mathematicians who discovered a² +b² = c², they'll yell "Pythagoras!"
Then ask the mathematicians if Pythagoras ever traveled to another country to take a geometry class. They'll tell you yeah, he studied abroad in Egypt, and like, majored in triangles.
Egyptians had known about right triangles for thousands of years. Then ask the mathematicians if Babylonians knew about right triangles. They'll tell you, also yes.
Babylonians had clay tablets where they stored commonly useful right triangle side lengths, like (1, 1, √2), and (3,4,5). Egyptian builders even had circular ropes with 12 evenly spaced knots tied in it, so they could measure 3,4,5 triangles.
The conversation breaks down into a pedantic definition of the word "theorem," and if the Egyptians are Babylonians ever wrote it down the way that we are expecting to see it.
The discovery didn't count until Pythagoras wrote it.
Professional mathematicians genuinely convinced themselves that Babylonians and Egyptians did know that the hypotenuse of that triangle was the square root of 2, but because they didn't find a specific clay tablet or papyrus with the theorem, that they didn't really understand the relationship.🙂🙃
That would be like a future anthropologists finding a 5ft tape measure at a Philadelphia construction site, and concluding that 2023 humans could only count up to 60 inches. 🤡
If you ask psychologists who invented the "Hierarchy of Needs," they'll yell "Maslow!" If you ask them to define his theory, they tell you, "Each person has a hierarchy of needs that must be met!" Then ask if he ever studied Native American culture, they'll tell you "Yes! Blackfoot Indians!" Then ask if their culture had a theory of hierarchy of needs. They say yes. They know.
But Maslow changed the hierarchy up a lil bit (AKA, made it worse), before passing it off as his own.
If you ask people if we can reverse some of climate change by planting trees, many will tell you "No! Planting at scale doesn't work! Monoculture! Fires take all the carbon back!" Then ask them if Native Americans planted forests. They say yes. Then ask if these forests lasted more than a few years. Again, yes.
For some, the accomplishment of planting massive forests, won't count until white folk do it, even though indigenous people have been doing it for millennia.
We haven't even gotten to the intentional erasure of non-white contributions, from 1800s phrenologists justifying slavery, all the way to present day DeSantis.
The lie of white supremacy requires the elevation and celebration of white contributions, and the minimizing of everyone else's.
This is the environment in which we pretend that white Europeans and white Americans contributed the most to society.
It's a lie because everyone has contributed to technology and society. Everyone. ♥️👍🏿
Even today, I hear people say that (white) Americans innovate and make quality products, but (Asian) Chinese and Indians copy and make cheap knock-offs.🤦🏿♂️
People literally type this into their Samsung Galaxies and iPhones, knowing full well where those devices are made, and knowing what the demographics of the "American" tech companies that produce Apple, Microsoft, and Google products look like.
I've literally had to tell people "Bro, you know like 9 PMs at Apple! What race are they?"
This is the "default white" background framing in which people try (unsuccessfully) to share Black accomplishments in science, technology, and society.
For me to say that my dad is a heart transplant surgeon, feels like a magical Black accomplishment. But the first successful open heart surgery was done by a Black doctor. And the first c-sections where mothers consistently survived were done by Black doctors.
I reject the entire premise of some Black folk being medical geniuses, as surprising.
@mekkaokereke like about how cesarean sections were a common practice in Uganda when an "explorer" first observed them...
@rebeccafinn @mekkaokereke the point this article makes about imperialism relates in an interest way to this toot from upthread: https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109926767007332595
It’s not just the “discovered it for white people” factor it’s the “discovered it for white empires” factor. Nobody talks about Leif Erikson even though he beat Columbus by 500 years because his expedition doesn’t led support for imperial territorial claims.
@elfprince13 @mekkaokereke
We where taught about Leif Erikson.
We were also taught that when he arrived to America, there were people already there.
Also "discovered for white" (empire or people) always resulted in colonization (which in itself implies erasure): Between the Saga of Erik the red and the Saga of Greenland, there's a story of conquest too. This happened around the year 1000, and I have been to Mayan temples from 1000 years prior to that.
@rebeccafinn @mekkaokereke when I was in school “the Vikings discovered the Americas before Columbus” was a claim treated with the same level of seriousness as like “Area 51 is where the government keeps crashed aliens”, even though it had basically been proven for 30+ years at that point
@mekkaokereke @rebeccafinn anyway if we are talking about whiteness specifically in the context of historical American racial politics, the core of that is really specific to Germanic western-European whiteness, with all the contradictions that entails: for a long time Italians + Greeks weren’t party to the full privileges of whiteness even though the mythology of “western culture” is rooted in Roman + Greek history.
@mekkaokereke @rebeccafinn colonization, empire building, and cultural erasure are the global norm for most of written history (including swaths of European being conquered by “non-white” empires), and the only thing that’s uniquely white about it is the extent to which Germanic/Western-European colonial empires have been ascendant over the last 500 years or so (and Anglophonic ascendancy esp. in the last 250 years).
@mekkaokereke @rebeccafinn Anyway not trying to argue here. The points Mekka is making are super important precisely because we are having this conversation in the shadow of American imperialism and colonialism. But I think it’s important to highlight that the mythology of “white achievement” or “western culture” or whatever you want to call it is a tool supporting a particular imperialist agenda and not the other way around
@mekkaokereke @rebeccafinn because that has explanatory in identifying inconsistencies within that mythology - where white achievements aren’t useful in supporting the imperial/colonial narrative, they get erased too.
