You Gon Listen

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Welcome to You Don't Listen at 91.5 KUNV. I'm your host, Karen Jean Charles, and I'm here with my two guests, Dr. Perry and Dr. Wilkinson, and we're talking about Black History today. So a little bit of context, February is dedicated to Black History Month to highlight the struggle and accomplishments of Black people that are usually less prioritized by the education system, media, and the general population. We use this month to appreciate our rich history, celebrate Black lives in the past and now, and highlight activism about issues we face as a community today. Black History Month acknowledges our past as a proud foundation for us to build upon. Today I'm here with two professors from UNLV, Dr. Perry and Dr. Wilkinson, to talk a little bit more about Black history. So first, thank you all so much for coming. Can you tell a little, can you tell the audience a little bit about yourselves, who you are,

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and what do you research? So I'll start off. I'm Dr. A.B. Wilkinson. I'm an associate associate professor in the Department of History here at UNLV. My main interests, or I guess my specialty, is in people of mixed ancestry, so I do a lot of African-American, Native American, and ethnic studies, and those types of histories. And yeah, just thank you for having us here today.

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No problem, thank you for coming.

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Yeah, and my name is Tyler D. Perry. I'm an assistant professor of African American and African diaspora studies and I'm in the Department of Interdisciplinary Gender and Ethnic Studies. And my research broadly is the study of the African diaspora, but a specific emphasis on the cultures of enslaved people, their resistance techniques, and really how slavery is remembered in American history and visualized by the public and that ever-changing saga of American politics. So thank you again for inviting both of us to be here. I'm really excited about the conversation.

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Thank you for coming. So how does your, so how does black history tie into your research or what you teach, what you study?

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Well, I think if you maybe look at it from the perspective of how black history has developed from Carter G. Woodson's activities in the early 20th century, developing what was called Negro History Week and then expanding it eventually to a month in black history, and the ways in which scholars have engaged the study and analysis of black people in American history, but also more broadly looking at how the black Atlantic ties the United States to other areas throughout the Atlantic world, Western Africa, Western Europe, South America, the Caribbean, Central America. The contributions of black people in many ways before Carter G. Woodson came on the scene were being misrepresented intentionally, and part of his motivation was to give voice to black people in the records as much as you could uncover. And so scholars who followed along that trajectory developed models in which you could look at enslaved people, despite being a marginalized group, and try to unpack the many ways in which they created a dynamic culture amidst their oppression. And so for me, the way in which I study black history, but particularly within the paradigm of slavery, is trying to elevate the voices and the resistance techniques of people who were trapped within a system that tried to take everything from them. And so it's a narrative of resilience and an eventual narrative of triumph, but also one in which people feel compelled to continually fight for a better world. And so for me, black history is part of that broader narrative.

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Cool.

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Yeah, and that's a right on point for me as well. I teach a lot of U.S. history courses and colonial North America, U.S. Revolution, and I think that my students are sometimes taken aback by how much African-American history is within those histories, those early studies of U.S. history and colonial history, not only in North America, but through the Americas, as Dr. Perry mentioned there. And so for me, I think it's great, of course, and acknowledge all the history that Dr. Perry is talking about there with Carter G. Woodson, and I've done many talks on Black History Month and so on and so forth, but you know, I really iterate with my students that this history is everyday history as well. This is a part of the narrative and a large part of the narrative, really, in U.S. history. If we're looking at the growth of the United States, how integral the plantation system and the institution of slavery was to the growth of economics, the development of politics and society. It's really a part of the fabric of America and the larger history of the United States as well.

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Cool. Y'all are so accomplished. Y'all research and stuff. Y'all know so much. Okay, I see y'all. So I want to reiterate that you are listening to You Gone Listen at 91.5 KUNV. I'm Karen Jean Charles with my two guests, Dr. Perry and Dr. Wilkinson, and we're talking about black history. So next question. What's the most fascinating thing you've learned about black history so far? Hmm. That's a good question.

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That is fascinating. Like a story or just like a theme or you want, you know, the most fascinating thing.

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Wow.

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So I'll, I'll start out with maybe kind of a broad answer and then maybe narrow it down a little bit as we converse more. I think the most fascinating thing that I've been able to find is how many voices are out there if you look for them, because when you approach black history, particularly within popular discourse, what you are told is that you just can't find marginalized voices in the archive. They don't exist. Enslaved people didn't write anything down. You can't find their histories. And for a long time, that's the way people wrote about enslaved people. They just assumed they were laborers. They had no culture. That if they had a culture, it died off and they essentially just became Americanized after 1865. But for me, some of the most compelling pieces of information I found is just browsing through these old 18th century and 19th century papers and finding those snippets and stories and pieces of information that fill in the holes of the research questions that I'm trying to answer. And so, it's hard to pin down one single story, though I may think of one a little bit later, but what continually excites me is how much I still don't know about black history. I mean, even though I've been studying it professionally for over a decade, there are still so many stories and so many narratives that when I see them, I all of a sudden just get very enthusiastic that I can tell this particular story that is up to this point undisclosed.

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Yeah, and eloquent answer, great answer.

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And I would also plug Tyler's book here, because I'm about to plug mine. That's appreciated.

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Tyler's got a new book out called Jumping the Broom that looks at the history of that kind of wedding cultural aspect and I'm sure he can talk more about that, but I found a lot of things interesting that he's had to say in other talks that we've had. The multicultural aspects of that and I think that maybe I'll go with kind of my tool shed there and say that all the mixture that takes place in the early colonial period and through even the early US Republic, even though mixture between African peoples and European peoples was oftentimes looked down upon within society, but you find in the early period, there's a lot of mixture that takes place. And so that's what my first book that just came out a couple of months ago is on, Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom, Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods, and Early Colonial America. And so there are a lot of European women who have African husbands in the early colonial period. And when I initially started off my project, I thought I was going to write this history. It was mostly US focused because I didn't think there would be a lot of sources kind of tying to what Dr. Perry was talking about. You don't think that you're going to find the voices. You don't think you're going to find many of the sources from 300, 400 years ago. And when I got into the archives and found these documents, there was so much evidence of mixture between not only African and Europeans, but also Native Americans as well. And so that turned a book that was supposed to be on kind of U.S. history and a little bit of colonial to a book that was just on the colonial history of kind of Africans mixing with Europeans and Native Americans. So that was something that surprised me and I've been passionate about the topic for a long time now. Cool. Do you want to talk about your book.

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Well, no problem there.

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Yeah, yeah, this is a good opportunity. I will be brief though, but the title of the book is Jumping the Broom, the Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual. And in reality, this project began when I was a student at UNLV. So I think one thing I didn't mention in my bio was that I am an alumnus of UNLV. I went here as a student for undergraduate and I was born and raised in Las Vegas and the inception of the project really was that I was getting married and my wife wanted to jump the broom. At this point I was preparing for graduate school, and I was asked to do kind of a brief report by the wedding minister explaining the tradition. And, you know, as an ambitious undergraduate going to graduate school, I thought report meant he wanted like a full-fledged 15 to 20-page analysis of it. And ultimately, that was not the case. He did not want that much in the document. But I was fascinated by what I found. So in a similar case to what A.B. was saying, all of a sudden, I had all of this material that it didn't seem like anybody else had written about. And for me, what I found was that there were a lot of different people who used this tradition before enslaved people and people who used it after enslaved people. So the wedding tradition, for those listening that don't know, is a relatively simple process in jumping over a broomstick, but it's laden with symbolism. And I found that it had origins within Western Europe, particularly after Alex Haley's Roots came out. but seem to have origins within Western Europe. And so the ultimate question is surrounding this idea of cultural ownership. Does something have to begin with a group of people for it to be authentically theirs? And ultimately what I conclude, to not give too much away, because I hope people do read the book, is that culture and cultural transmissions are much more complicated than simply starting at point A and ending at point B. But that there's a fluidity in which people associate with one another and transfer different cultural tools, and then the way in which they adopt and adapt those tools is really what ultimately matters. And so it's kind of an interesting story for me since I was attached to the ritual and it became what is my first book of my academic career, and so I was really grateful for all of the opportunities provided for me to write about it. But yeah, so, jumping the broom, the surprising multicultural origins of a black wedding ritual is available for purchase, University of North Carolina Press, which is the same press that my friend A.B.

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published with, too.

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Speaking of which.

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Yeah, yeah.

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So, yeah, also under University of North Carolina Press, my book, Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom, Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America is now out. It's up there if you go to UNC Press's webpage. And yeah, I've always been interested in the topic. I think just kind of tying back to my own ancestry, my father's African American and Native American. My mother's of European descent. So I tell my students and tell people sometimes, I heard somewhere that my research was a lot like me search. And so I wanted to kind of discover and explore more of the people who were like me and like my family and what those roots were like. And so my research project began more than 10 years ago as a PhD student at UC Berkeley, University of California. And yeah, it's led me a long way, I guess now more than, you know, a dozen years, probably at least 10 years working on the book, but book is finally out. And I was able to really get into how we first came to think about the idea of racial mixture. And I think that's kind of like the baseline question for my book and also how did people of mixed ancestry view themselves as well as how they were viewed by others. And so I found that there were spaces in between that people could occupy in between the racial categories of white and black and that this term mulatto and other terms like mestizo were used to describe people of European, African, and Native American ancestry. Yeah, so without giving too much of the book away, that's about what it is, but many people are familiar with the one drop rule that if you have any African ancestry, that makes you socially black, right? And so what I found in the earlier periods is that there's a lot more gray area where people are able to kind of move in between and across racial categories or so-called racial categories a little bit easier than they are in later periods. So, yeah, that's what the book is on in a nutshell and I think me and Tyler are both glad to be done with the book and also looking forward to our next projects as well. Yeah, and

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also looking forward to people reading it and, you know, telling us if they liked it or not.

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Yes.

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Speaking of mixing, I know you wrote an article you sent me about Native American Heritage Month. Oh, yeah. So as indigenous people also have had a significant struggle in this nation as well, how does Native American history and Black history coincide for you? Are there parts of both histories that are very similar or very different?

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Yeah, that's a great question. And as I said before, I do a lot of ethnic studies, African American and Native American history, and the struggles are very similar in the ways that people have had to overcome or fight oppression, stereotyping, discrimination, prejudice, things of that nature. Some of the issues, though, are very, very different in terms of African Americans traditionally striving at least in the United States to become a part of the nation and to be accepted as full citizens, a struggle that we're still fighting with today, obviously. And Native Americans still fighting a similar struggle today, but I would say that the difference with, you know, if we're going to compare groups and look at some of the differences, is that indigenous peoples, Native Americans, are also fighting for sovereignty, those with tribal citizenship. I, myself, do not have tribal citizenship. Sometimes you need a certain amount of blood quantum to qualify and you need a direct connection in other cases to that ancestry. So many African Americans, we have Native American ancestry and you hear kind of this and the Indian hair or things like that within the community that people talk about. And there's a lot of truth to that and I think that people are drawing on those connections and making further connections with those histories, which is a good thing. Though I think we also need to be careful and look at how the struggles are different in ways and how indigenous peoples are fighting to be, I don't want to say separate from the nation in ways but maintain also their cultural identities that they still have with a tribal entity separate from the United States.

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Really cool. It's really cool connection. But I also wanted to ask you, Dr. Perry, about your interview with Vegas PBS about the school-to-prison pipeline. I think this topic is really interesting, and I think a lot of people would be really interested to hear about it. So can you give us a brief overview of what that is and how police on campus affect the children learning there?

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Sure, yeah, this is a great question. And this is one of those areas that I've recently gotten into a lot of times because I've been asked about it. But the school-to-prison pipeline, by definition, is essentially this notion that children, but particularly marginalized children, students of color, but particularly students of African descent, black boys in particular, are trapped within a system of education that is not preparing them for further schooling, but for incarceration. And a lot of this comes down to treatment in the classroom, discipline within the classroom, lack of representation within the classroom, confinement through detention or expulsion, this idea that black boys are told they don't belong, but this also goes into aspects of black girlhood as well, lack of representation in the classroom. And so, essentially what we find is statistically, and this is throughout the nation, but it also true in Las Vegas, is that if you look at percentages, black boys are not being prepared to advance to higher education. And they continue to be over-represented within the carceral system, which can include jails, penitentiaries, parole, or probation. So if you look at all four of those categories, black men are overwhelmingly represented and black women's representation is rising. So essentially, when we talk about the presence of police officers on schools or even resource officers who maybe take their job a little too assertively, school within Las Vegas and having a resource officer that seemed to thrive off of disciplining children that were perceived to be misbehaving. I remember his face very vividly. But when you have a uniformed officer or somebody who represents an arm of the state, and they are called upon because a black child is being disruptive, and they handle that black child in a more aggressive fashion than they would a white student, the message that you're sending to a young person at that point is that not only do they not belong within this type of educational setting, but that they belong in a place where people are treated that way, which is commonly associated with the carceral state. Las Vegas and Nevada more broadly has if you look at the statistics of Nevada's incarceration rates it actually per capita I believe is higher than the national average and so if the United States is the highest incarceration rate in the world and Nevada is higher on average than the United States that Suggested if Nevada was its own country it would actually be one of the highest carceral states in the entire world. And if you look at the statistics once again, and I don't know if they've been updated for 2020, but the last I think available data was 2010, African Americans comprise I think about 7 to 8 percent of the state's population, but I think they're around 25 to 27 percent of those incarcerated. And so you have an over-representation of African-Americans in the penitentiaries or within being incarcerated within a state that has a higher incarceration rate than the biggest incarcerator in the world. So this is something that I think people are feeling more compelled to pay attention to. And I'm not sure what motivations are. I think for politicians, they might just be trying to save face to some degree. But I think there is a deep and genuine concern within, in 2020 in particular, as we've seen police killings of black men and black women, but many of them being filmed as well, and police brutality being rampant throughout the country, that there is a deep concern concern that we cannot any further allow the school districts to prepare children for failure,

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and particularly if they're from marginalized and underrepresented groups. You know, and what Tyler is speaking there is, you know, real truth, and it reminds me of actually just going back to the question you asked of me, in adding on to that, there's such an under-representation of our histories, African-American, Native American histories in the schools. You know, and if you're not interested in it, it's harder to pay attention to some of those things, to keep focused on some of those things. If you don't see the representation of yourself in the history and in the stories that are being taught in the schools, it can be alienating. I know that that's how I felt many times in K through 12 grade school. And, you know, part of, you know, Native American History Month, African American or Black History Month, right? These are, these months are about bringing our histories to the center, right? You know, in centering our cultures, our stories within the larger context of, you know, U.S. history or other histories, right? And so that's another thing that both African Americans and Native Americans have in common, too, right, is that our histories are very misunderstood, undertaught in the schools, and misrepresented in the schools, which is what was part of Carter G. Woodson's original goal, as Dr. Perry was talking about before. So I think that that's something that both of us, obviously, in working with these histories and within ethnic studies have devoted kind of our careers to correcting within educational systems.

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Yeah, that's super important, especially about the representation part. When I was doing research for this episode, I realized that I've never had a black teacher.

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Wow.

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My whole life.

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I've been living here this whole time, but I've never had a black teacher. And I was like, yeah, it makes sense. It really does make sense. Like, you kind of have to find your own group within the school. There's like hardly any, how do you say this, hardly any teachers to look to and be like, yeah, I can do that. And it's just not saying that like I had a lot of great teachers, but when you don't see yourself, it really does affect you.

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Yeah. And it's not that Euro-American or quote unquote white teachers can't teach histories to people of color. But it's sometimes more difficult and you really have to have people that are devoted to really learning kind of the history and being able to deliver it in a manner that the students can receive it, right, as well. So sometimes I find that a lot of my students, they have so many misconceptions of people of color within history that I'm kind of correcting or undoing, you know, a lot of, you know, to be honest, damage that's been done in the K through 12 system.

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Yeah, I mean, because a lot of this comes down to cognizance and awareness on the part of a of a white teacher. And you know, I think at this point from the conversations I've had with people in the district I think still around 70 to 80 percent of all teachers in Clark County are white and women Essentially what what we're seeing here and this is a national problem is that if one is not culturally aware The students within the class and particularly a CCSD diversifies ethnically and racially every year. You know, it is there are multiple cases where white teachers have made some very critical mistakes in presenting the material. So singling out black students in class to participate in a discussion upon slavery or lining people up on the Middle Passage or putting them up on a makeshift auction block to demonstrate visually how the slave trade commences. And so you you are seeing these things repeatedly over and over and over again, every year, being being done. And you just have to ask yourself, what type of cultural training are people getting? I mean, how many conversations are occurring within education departments about approaches for giving a dynamic lesson about the brutalities and horrors of the slave trade, but also the resistance of the people locked within it. And, you know, what can be done as far as inspiring black students to be excited about their history and excited to study it and analyze the voices of people who came before them and survived and thrived within a country that tried to take away everything from them.

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Right, right.

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I want to thank you for those words, Tyler, and I think that we both do a good job of trying not to just express the discrimination and the pain and the difficulties, but also the struggle and the triumph, the resistance. That's something that I've been cognizant of in my teaching. If I'm talking about the brutalities, what else? You know and I think that sometimes You know Euro American white teachers, right? they they might get the struggle or not, maybe not the struggle itself, but The wretchedness the atrocities this that the other thing But if you don't and you're not capable of explaining, okay, but people overcame these things, you know We are we are here because our ancestors triumphed over these things. You know, the student's going to feel dejected about, well, my history is just about slavery. And yeah, that's a large part of it. But there are some, you know, and I have to phrase this carefully, and it must be put in context, but there are some beautiful things within that story of slavery as well. You know, people told jokes, people played, people laughed, you know, married, right? And jumping the broom as a ceremony, a cultural tradition. I mean, people made a way out of no way. And that needs to be celebrated as well. Thank you so much for coming, both of you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. So

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where can we find you at? My book is called Jumping the Broom, the Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, available now. I am on Twitter. I'm relatively active. My Twitter handle is at ProfTDPerry, P-R-O-F-T-D-P-A-R-R-Y, the most complicated Twitter handle in the world. But I also edit a blog called Black Perspective. And I'm the vice president of the African-American Intellectual History Society. I just always feel the need to represent the organizations. And I just teach classes within the African American African Diaspora Studies program, teaching a class in the spring called Anti-Blackness in the World. So it takes a global approach to looking at the origins of anti-blackness and how it's expressed not just amongst Europeans but throughout the the entire world and during kind of the process of globalization.

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And yeah, my book again is Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom, Mulattoes and Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America. And yeah, I'm also on Twitter, Dr. A.B. Wilkinson, just D-R-A-B Wilkinson, my last name.

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Thank you for listening. You gon' listen. I'm your host, Karen Jean Charles, and I will see y'all next week. I'm your host, Karen Jean Charles, and I will see y'all next week.

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Brown liquor, brown skin, brown hair, brown leather, brown sugar, brown leek, brown tea, brown liquor, brown pay, black skin, black pay, black pay

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