Dear Ms. Traynor:
Thank you for publishing the article by Faustine Colin on my presentation, “Barack Obama, Race and the American Presidency,” in the November 11, 2009 issue of The Recorder. I would like to compliment you and your staff for the coverage accorded this important topic.
The presentation was accompanied with graphics and text for those who wished to take notes. Understandably, the reporter condensed and paraphrased portions of the presentation. However, the published article contained some statements that I did not say. I would like to ask you to publish this letter to correct inaccurate comments that were perhaps inadvertently attributed to me.
Regarding the case involving Professor Gates and the Cambridge Police, the CCSU article ascribed the following comment to me: “. . . Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home after a neighbor called police with suspicions that he was trying to break into his house.” I did not make this remark. I did say: “I heard the transcript of the call that was aired on the television. The caller did not mention race. She said that she thought the person trying to get into the house probably lived there. Professor Gates, the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, stated that he had trouble unlocking his door after it became jammed.”
On the next topic, healthcare, I did not say “There is a theory that says healthcare reform should be used in order to pay back the African Americans who were slaves or “healthcare as retribution.” This is an error which should not be attributed to me. I stated that a critic of the administration’s health care proposal used the phrase “health care as reparations.” I explained, for those in the audience who may not have been familiar with the subject of reparations, that an initiator of the reparations proposal in the 19th century was Ms. Callie House (1861-1928), a formerly enslaved person. She targeted $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton (over $1.2 billion in 2005 dollars) and demanded it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor.
I elaborated on the historical background of the issue of a national healthcare policy. It emerged during the 1912 presidential election. Former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, running as a candidate under the Progressive Party (the Bull Moose Party) campaigned on a platform that incorporated health care as the 11th issue listed under “Social and Industrial Justice.”
I then stated that the topic of a national health care policy was introduced in 1943 during the Roosevelt administration and in 1948-1949 during the Truman administration. Universal health was proposed during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, but the President rejected it. Most importantly I stated that the critic of the current healthcare plan connected the healthcare debate to an unrelated item ‘reparations for formerly enslaved African Americans’ instead of placing the healthcare issue within its proper historical context.
The Recorder article attributed another inaccurate comment to me. The author wrote: “She explained that the world is binary, in a world in black and white.” I did not say this. I stated that “race in the United States is conflated into binary opposites – black and white. I explained that African Americans are not a monolith. Black as a category includes African Americans born in the U.S., Caribbean Americans in the French, Spanish, Dutch Caribbean, continental Africans, and South Americans – Afro Brazilians and Guyanese for example.”
I stated furthermore “White Americans are not a monolith. White as a category includes the European descended population from multiple ethnicities born in the U.S., new arrivals from Bosnia, the Russia Federation, and other parts of the European Union.”
I explained that “the United Stated is composed of communities that do not neatly fit into the black-white dichotomy of binary opposites. They include Native Americans – Schantikoke, Pequot, Wampanoag, and Mohican to list a few in New England. Communities not do not fit into the black-white dichotomy include Asian Americans – a term generally applied to Americans of Chinese and Japanese descent, but the Asian continent and its descendants in the U.S. are from India, Pakistan, South East Asia (Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Laos for example), and Western Asia commonly called the Middle East. Those communities that do not fit into the black-white dichotomy also include Americans of Spanish speaking language heritage (Hispanic) with ancestry from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic.” These observations also appeared in the text that was formatted for quick reference and projected onto the viewing screen for the audience.
The presentation connected the topic “Barack Obama, Race and the American Presidency,” to several additional issues. One of those was the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama; one of only three United States presidents to earn that distinction. The other two were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, however, critics found fault with the Nobel Peace Prize Commission’s decision. The presidential signing of the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Act was another item that elicited criticism was also examined in the presentation. I am not insisting that every facet of the presentation appear in the article because time and space limits what can be covered in the articles The Recorder publishes. My central purpose in writing to you is to provide a true account of my remarks that were perhaps unintentionally incorrectly represented.
May I close with the question that the reporter correctly quoted me as asking: “Can the discussion on the topic become a source of a transformative dialogue on race, trust, reconciliation, and humanity?
Thank you for permitting me the opportunity to correct comments in the article “A World in Black and White?” Thank you also for the coverage of the presentation “Barack Obama, Race and the American Presidency,” a part of the African American Studies Program Lecture Series chaired by Central Connecticut State University Professor, Dr. Felton O. Best.
Sincerely,
Katherine J. Harris, Ph.D.
Department of History
