1.3: History and Social Justice

The Practice of History Can Serve the Interests of Social Justice.

Williams’ point about perspective is an important one and also feeds into a larger theme about social justice. In an interview with Gary Younge in The Guardian, the late Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano confessed that his, “…great fear is that we are all suffering from amnesia.” When Younge asked who was responsible for this forgetfulness Galeano responded:

"It's not a person…It's a system of power that is always deciding in the name of humanity who deserves to be remembered and who deserves to be forgotten … We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful.” (Galeano, Porciuncula, and Younge 2013)

It is not difficult to present World History in a way that obscures the beauty that Galeano was referring to. It can seem that no matter the time or the place we see the same catalog of calamities: wars and massacres, selfishness and greed, cruelty and suffering. It is largely for this reason that the great Indian anti-imperialist Mohandas Gandhi despised history as a discipline: “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul…a record of an interruption of the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is not in history.” (Gandhi, n.d.) His point that recorded history mostly seems to pay attention to moments of disruption is a valid critique, yet if we fully accepted it, we would not have dedicated ourselves to this project. Interestingly Gandhi and Galeano both recognized something similar about the practice of history: the kinds of stories we tell about the past influence the way we think about who and what we are in the present. Where the two diverged, however, is that while Gandhi thought that history was only capable of telling stories about “interruptions of the course of nature,” Galeano believed that a better kind of history was possible if we dedicate ourselves to remembering what the system of power would rather we forget. History can be and has been a tool of the status quo, but it can also be employed in pursuit of social justice. 

What Galeano understood was that the production of history requires making choices about how we want to represent the past. There are countless stories that could be told and innumerable different ways to tell those stories. Thus, when a historian chooses what story to tell and how to tell it, they are signaling what they find important and what they believe their students should understand. In the mid-19th century, however, when history first emerged as an academic discipline, most of its practitioners would deny that who they were as people determined how they practiced history. These early generations of historians, who were predominantly white and male, liked to imagine that their work was neutral, objective, and apolitical. By the 1960s, however, the assumption that the study of the past was a scientific pursuit of truth started to be challenged by a new cohort of historians. The mass movements for civil rights during that decade helped crack open the doors of history departments just enough to allow in larger numbers of women, people of color, and scholars from outside Europe and the English-speaking world. While still underrepresented and still subject to various forms of discrimination, such scholars brought a new perspective that led them to ask different kinds of questions and which challenged the conceits of traditional historical practice. Was the exclusion of women from the dominant narratives a neutral position or a reflection of the fact that most male historians had little interest in exploring the spaces where women had been most present? Were the lives and exploits of white men objectively more significant than anyone else’s or were these just the people with whom white male historians most identified? Was it really apolitical to present the history of the United States or Western Civilization in terms of “the march of liberty” or was this just a handy way to suggest that enslavement, imperialism, exploitation, and violence were just errors on the oath of progress rather than constitutive features of the system? 

Questions such as these helped to highlight the fact that the dominant historical narratives that came out of traditional scholarship were, in fact, influenced by the perspectives, values, interests, and identities of those who produced them. The difference between the old guard and the new generation of historians was that the former denied having any perspective other than pursuit of truth, while the latter acknowledged and embraced the idea that who we are influences what we write. This point was not appreciated by many historians at the time and there were (and continue to be) frequent written defenses of what they saw as “neutrality and objectivity.” In one of the most disgraceful examples of this pushback, in 1968 Thomas A. Bailey, president of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), would complain in the pages of a major historical journal that the struggle for recognition by African Americans was a danger to the discipline of history. He wrote: "Pressure-group history of any kind is deplorable, especially…when significant white men are bumped out to make room for much less significant black men in the interests of social harmony.” (Bailey 1968, 7-8) This is, if nothing else, a revealing statement. The assumption behind Bailey’s argument is that a neutral, apolitical, and objective history would necessarily focus on white men since whiteness was the norm against which everyone else was judged. Conversely, the attempt by African American scholars, for instance, to write a more inclusive history, one in which Black folks were more than just bit players in someone else’s story, was assumed to represent the insertion of politics and identity where it did not belong.

Thankfully, despite his complaints, the kind of scholarship Bailey deplored -- those written about and often by women, people of color, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized groups – would be published in greater quantities and receive greater attention in the decades to follow. Yet, we continue to hear complaints in certain quarters that the replacement of truth and objectivity with what has come to be called “identity politics” is ruining the discipline. One of the clearest responses to this sort of argument was expressed by the historian Robin D.G. Kelley in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. When asked how he could pursue truth while also pursuing a politics of liberation he responded:  

…it’s really important for me to be engaged in these movements [for social justice], to make no pretense about some kind of dispassionate, detached objectivity…Objectivity is a false stance. I’m not neutral. I’ve never been neutral. I write about struggles and social movements because I actually don’t think the world is right and something needs to change. (Cunningham 2021)

It is hard to stress how atypical this sentiment is from Kelley. He is saying that historians do not have to pretend to be neutral observers standing above the fray. Instead, our work can help identify the things about our world that aren't right and encourage some of the change that needs to happen.