Of Black Whites and a sickly obsession with skin colour

Black Like Me was a best-selling book in the early 1960s. It is a memoir by John Howard Griffin, a white American journalist, who set out to explore life in the American South while disguised as a Black man.

Griffin’s success inspired another white American journalist, this time a woman, disguised as a Black domestic worker, to carry out a comparable experiment. Grace Halsell’s Soul Sister was published in 1969 and it, too, enjoyed an avid readership.

Two news-making personalities reminded me of these books in the past few days. Both happen to be women, university professors, American and of Jewish descent. The first is Jessica Krug, alias Jess Lam Bombera, 54, who recently resigned from her professorship of African American History at George Washington University (GWU), following her ear-shattering revelation that she had been lying about her identity nearly all her public life.

The other personality is City University of New York (CUNY) Professor Emerita Florence Howe, who passed away last Saturday at the age of 91. She is best known as the founder of the Feminist Press of New York, which is celebrating its Golden Jubilee this year. I was a friend and great admirer of Florence Howe, and I once confessed to you in these columns that I fell in love with her almost at first sight.

Howe was actively involved in the African American Civil Rights Movement, organising and leading anti-segregation protests in Baltimore, Maryland, in the early 1960s. In 1964, she moved to Jackson, Mississippi, as a “Freedom Summer” volunteer.

Register black voters

 Her main assignment was to help register black voters, to boost their political power in their deeply segregated and disenfranchised American South. She also had the added task of setting up, in the basement of a church, a Freedom School for disadvantaged Black children.

In Mississippi, Florence Howe, who never had a biological child, “started her family” by informally but dearly adopting a 16-year old African American girl, Alice Jackson. Florence doted on her daughter, later Alice Jackson-Wright, Alice’s two daughters and their four children. This is her surviving family.

Yet it was not always plain sailing, Florence told me, when I was visiting with her at her Upper West Side Manhattan residence in 2008.

In the latter days of the Civil Rights struggle, some of her Black comrades, including one with whom she had been quite intimate, started avoiding her. Apparently, it had become unfashionable to be seen in the company of “White folk”. When I asked her if it had become politically incorrect, Florence assented with an emphatic, “Very incorrect!”

Let us, however, first get a little thoughtful before we get personal and emotional about these matters. After all, we agreed that we would be operating at some intellectual level. That operation of ideas is no mean task. My students will, for example, remember my recommending to them the basic reasoning procedure of the “wh-“ (who-what-how-why) questions. Mzee Philip Ochieng hinted to us that, in our perilous postcolonial contexts, the “know-why” may be more important than the knowhow.

Colour differences

Anyway, three facts stand out from these people’s pursuits. The first is that the American society appears to be obsessively preoccupied with race and colour differences, which are entirely superficial, as the adventures themselves illustrate. I first heard the term “colourism” from Beyonce Knowles’s father. It equates quite closely to the Kiswahili one “ugozi”, which I first heard from my former colleague, Prof Alamin Mazrui. Discriminating among people on grounds of their skin colour is as shallow as judging a book by its cover.

Secondly, as the case of Jessica Krug shows, racial discrimination, in addition to all its well-known evils, can lead to dreadful distortions in the functioning of not only individual minds but also in institutions and society at large.

Krug had, until September 3rd, 2020, presented herself as an African American while she was, in fact, of entirely white Jewish stock. Prof Krug described her life of lies about her identity as a serious “mental illness”. This may be the first truth she has ever told in her adult life.

You do not have to lie about your origins in order to join the African American struggle. Nor do you need a faked “Blackness” in order to be a scholar or a professor of African American or Diaspora studies. After all, many non-African and non-Black scholars have distinguished themselves as excellent Africanists.

This is where, by contrast, my dear departed friend, Florence Howe, comes in. A New York-born daughter of Central European Jewish immigrants, she never pretended to be anything else. More importantly, Prof Howe learnt quite early in life that what mattered was commitment to people and their causes rather than to artificial colour, ethnic or religious definitions.

Disadvantaged people

Her fundamental concern was the empowerment of disadvantaged people. The two causes for which Florence Howe is most celebrated in America are Women’s Liberation and the African American Civil Rights Movement. In both, she was guided by her burning desire to empower, to give voice and space to the disenfranchised. In the many eulogies following her death, she has been hailed as the “Mother of Women’s Studies”.

Her Feminist Press was part of that struggle to give a voice to the voiceless. It has succeeded marvellously in publishing the work of many minority writers whose work would otherwise never have hit the international stage. These include our own sisters, like Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye, Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, Ugandan Goretti Kyomuhendo and Tanzanian Elieshi Lewa.

Indeed, I met and fell for Florence through the Feminist Press, when she invited me and several African sisters and brothers to work on her monumental Women Writing Africa project. I think a look at the four-volume publications from this project would help one decide if Florence Howe was not a better Africanist than those who boast, and even lie, about their African or Black commitments.

But I am not an impartial judge. I have already told you, I was, and still am, in love with Florence Howe.

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