W.E.B. DUBOIS INSTITUTE LECTURER 2010, DR. VINCENT BROWN
connection between the people of Africa and people of African descent in the Americas. But it was Herskovits who elevated the profile of African and African-American studies during these decades and brought this topic into the academic and scholarly mainstream.
“Who has access to understanding and explaining a people, and to what use?” Dr. Vincent Brown, Professor of History and AfricanAmerican Studies at Harvard University and this year’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute lecturer, raised this question in February as part of his compelling discussion of his documentary film, “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness,” its subject, Dr. Melville J. Herskovits, and the historical and political implications of Dr. Herskovits’ work.
Dr. Brown pointed out that while Herskovits adamantly maintained that academic work like his must stay clear of political agendas, this in and of itself was a politically charged position, especially with the growing civil rights movement in the United States and around the world. According to Dr. Brown, Dr. Herskovits himself came to realize the topic was more political than he had thought. As a scholar, he idealistically believed that educating people about African- American culture would end racism. Later, he realized racism was more intractable. Brown wondered aloud what this quiet, but influential scholar Herskovits, who died in 1963, would have made of the fact that Black Panther activists would be carrying and quoting his book, The Myth of the Negro Past.
Herskovits was a leading anthropologist in the 20th century. Herskovits’ work connected African and African American cultures, illustrating that people of African descent carried elements of their African culture to the Americas. In his field work in Suriname, Herskovits saw music, dance, folklore, and other cultural traditions that had been carried over into the Americas. He compared and contrasted the habits and styles in Africa to those in the Americas, in an attempt to illustrate that African culture and humanity had not been lost in the Middle Passage. His work overturned prevailing assumptions, actively challenged the notion of African and African-American inferiority, and provided another scholarly foundation for those fighting for the cause of racial equality in America.
After his presentation, Dr. Brown joined some Upper School classes and then participated in an active round table discussion with a large group of students at lunchtime. Dr. Brown encouraged students to understand that no one’s race should preclude them from participating in any discussion—that the building of understanding and perspective was essential and that we all should seek to pursue whatever discussions interest us most. Dr. Brown is the fourth W.E.B. DuBois Institute lecturer at Hackley School. The series, created in partnership with the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University and made possible by gifts from the Hackley community and the Hackley Parents’ Association, brings leading scholars in the field of African and African-American Studies to Hackley. The inaugural speaker in the series was Professor Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., who visited Hackley in 2007.
Herskovits’ work also raises questions about identity. Is it significant that this groundbreaking work about African and African-American culture was done by a white Jewish man? In his presentation and film, Dr. Brown asked: Does anyone have the right to define someone else’s identity? If scholars “define” an ethnic group, do they thereby limit and control that group? Does the right to characterize a people give you control over their fate? These questions surrounding Herskovits’ identity, his work, and the identity of those he studied framed Dr. Brown’s film, “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness.”
—Andy King & Suzy Akin
In his lecture to Hackley’s students and the parents who attended his lecture, Dr. Brown makes the case that Dr. Herskovits’ own identity was not detrimental to social progress or to the overall caliber of his work. Brown affectionately refers to Herskovits as “the Elvis of African American Studies” and compares him to Eminem. Elvis did not create the rock and roll musical form—it evolved through the influence of numerous black musicians who were already performing these songs. Yet Elvis brought the musical form to the majority culture. Similarly, Eminem’s rap albums outsell those of his AfricanAmerican mentor, Dr. Dre. These musicians do not invalidate the form, yet they make it accessible to the mainstream majority culture. Dr. Herskovits, similarly, did not invent African and African-American studies. At the time of his research (the 1920s through the 1950s), numerous black scholars, including W.E.B. DuBois, were already exploring and writing about the 13