Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

This is not to say there has not been a toxic side to this reality. As widespread as it is, the brassage in America’s cauldron has always been partial or incomplete. Blacks were the catalyst that made an American society possible, but a catalyst that for the most part went selectively unabsorbed in the mixing process. Their presence and their persistent relegation to limited and secondary roles served to bind the others, including the rankest of newcomers. And in doing so, it served to create and to elevate whiteness, producing a legacy that we have powerfully suffered from and still struggle to emerge from today. As Toni Morrison once put it: Blacks were steady. Everybody could look down on them. Immigrant Italians. Immigrant Polish. There was always a bottom that you could be hostile to. And that was what brought the country together as a melting pot. . . . What was the basis of the cauldron, the pot? Well black people were the pot. Everything else was, you know, melted together and, what, American. That’s how you get to be American.