AHA president James H. Sweet’s September column for Perspectives on History, “Is History History? Identity Politics and the Teleologies of the Present,” generated controversy and discussion in venues ranging from social media to the op-ed pages of major newspapers and the academic press. Perspectives has invited two critics of the piece, Malcolm Foley and Priya Satia, to respond.
I’m glad that James H. Sweet wrote this column. It did what he intended it to do: it opened a particular conversation about how we “do” history, something that Sweet, in his apology, noted as his initial wish. There is much to reflect on from his piece, whether it is the continuing redefinition of “identity politics” away from its radical coining or its singling out of The 1619 Project as a point of critique. I’d like to widen the conversation, however, and make a suggestion about the relationship between history and politics—namely, that the relationship is a necessary one, and if we flee from it, we do our students and our world a disservice.
As someone who initially intended to do theological work about the influence of early Greek theologians on the Reformation theologian John Calvin, I had very little intention, when I embarked on the journey to become a historian, of uttering the words of the previous sentence. As I learned and imbibed historiographical methods, my own understanding of human activity continued to expand. I became aware of the ways in which religion, economics, and politics shape human and institutional action and change. But one thing that I found most interesting is that there is an idea that binds historians and theologians together: everyone is one, but not everyone is a good one. This also leads to significant academic anxiety: Wherein lies what makes us special? Is it in our language? Our guild is one that relies not on jargon but rather on intelligibility. Is it in our content? Who has the right to police what is or is not the historian’s content? As Norman Cantor and Richard Schneider said in their framing of the field for undergraduate students, “What a historian does is obtain information about the past and then make judgments about the significance, meaning, importance, and relevance of these bits of information.” The field is lively because we have so many people looking at the past while asking different questions. These historians also make different judgments. But central to the work is the understanding that the past matters today, a truth that every thinking human being assumes and regularly acts in light of. Yet this is also fundamentally a political act, insofar as politics are understood to be the exercise of power by groups and individuals. As Sweet stated, bad history does indeed yield bad politics. The opposite, however, is also true: just history yields just politics.
As the field has expanded, so have the questions.
This is, of course, distinguishable from doing history to justify current political stances and agendas. But the desire to live well is not an agenda; it is something common to the human experience and something we each bring to everything we do. We all ask particular questions and focus on particular data because of what we think is important. A field historically populated by mostly white men writing histories of white male hegemony asked particular questions and was open to particular conclusions. As the field has expanded, so have the questions. An insight that has stuck in my mind from the work of women’s historians such as Catherine Brekus is that history is as much about things staying the same as it is about change. Said another way, when we note that oppressive and exploitative conditions continue, a state of affairs that we only become aware of when we investigate the lives of the exploited and oppressed, we must ask the question, Why do those conditions persist as long as they do? These are some of the questions I ask as a historian of lynching and Christianity and as a Black man. Who are the ignored voices? In periods of apparent darkness, where are the glimmers of light? When Sweet approvingly spoke of Stephen Breyer’s recognition that “historians engage in research methods . . . incompatible with solving modern-day legal, political, or economic questions,” he spoke of a conception of historians and their craft that is unnecessarily narrow. Modern-day legal, political, and economic questions and the conversations that surround them are best treated by good history rather than no history. Abusus non tollit usum—abuse does not invalidate use.
This returns me to the claim that I made at the beginning of this piece: that history and politics are deeply interwoven. If history is the telling of human stories, not merely the reporting of their stories but an articulation of their meaning, then we as human beings have much to learn from it about ourselves and about our fellow human beings. Most importantly, however, it gives us more resources to love one another well. My historical work is meant not merely to ask interesting questions and get true answers; those elements are incidental. My emphasis switched to racial violence because I saw trends and norms that persisted over time and that led to death. I wanted to study Calvin and the Greek Church Fathers because they were interesting. I studied the brutalities of racialized lynching because my not-so-distant ancestors fled Mississippi pursued by a lynch mob and because the threat of racial violence has never had time to fade from the Black historical, political, and ethical imagination. It is my love of humanity, but especially my love of my Black brothers and sisters, that encourages me to pursue work that enriches their lives. That is no slight against the historians of early modern China, the Roman Empire, or ancient Mesopotamia. It is to make the point that as historians, we are primarily concerned with people in all their complexity, and in our orientation toward them, we regard them not merely as subjects to be studied and experimented on with our hypotheses but as people to be loved and to be justly interacted with.
History is the telling of human stories, not merely the reporting of their stories but an articulation of their meaning.
This, to me, strikes at the core of the anxiety that Sweet alluded to throughout his piece. The issue was his attempt to restrict the work, rather than an invitation to collaborate in it. I am of the opinion that there is no conversation in which a good historian ought to feel unwelcome. Why? Because a good historian knows, when they look at the world around them, that there are very few truly new questions. The author of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes was right in his introductory lament: what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. It is perhaps this point that communicates history’s value rather than undermining it or threatening its integrity. Historians have the unique opportunity to show, through rigorous analysis and argument, how similar or how different our past is from our present rather than assume, a priori, continuity or discontinuity. This openness, humility, and willingness to “follow the sources where they lead,” as many are wont to say, ought to be an example to our fellow academics and an example to the academy of what the liberal arts are all about: the moral exercise of freedom. We are indeed free to ask whatever questions we want, but I believe that we will find that the questions our students and our world will find most compelling are the questions and answers that actually set them free. We can observe and study societies and civilizations unlike our own, and instead of assuming superiority or inferiority, we assume humanity and thus seek not to dominate and to exploit but to learn.
As much as academic careers can be built on infighting, we daily have the opportunity to bear witness to a different world of possibility: one where historians, sociologists, political theorists, scholars of religion, and others can compare notes and enrich one another’s work without the nagging desires to police boundaries. Granted, this may be difficult in the political economy that suffuses current colleges and universities, but the historian knows that those systems are not entirely self-perpetuating; they depend on our complicity. Perhaps it is the subtle resistance against the alienation of our colleagues that is the concrete act of love that we can engage in today. Perhaps that is one way the work of history can be conceived of as the work of love.
Malcolm Foley is special adviser to the president for equity and campus engagement at Baylor University and director of the Black Church Studies Program at Truett Seminary; he tweets @MalcolmBFoley.
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