Anthropologist treks into controversial territory in ‘Heart of Blackness’

Thursday, February 4, 2010 | by michael fox

Like many a Jewish child of Eastern European immigrants, Melville J. Herskovits spent a good deal of time and energy wrestling with what it meant — and what it took — to be an American.

His personal answer lay in scholarship, science, accomplishment and assimilation.

But Herskovits went a bit beyond simply “fitting in,” becoming one of the most controversial intellectuals of the 20th century. A scholar and pioneering anthropologist from the 1920s through 1950s, he is often credited with inventing the field of African studies.

Although his work is largely unknown (if not forgotten) outside certain circles, a dense and fascinating documentary titled “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness” paints a picture of the man who dared to conclude that black cultures in America were distinct and African-based.

This set off not only a battle over how we look at race and culture, but also sparked a power struggle over who gets to tell the story of a people.

The film, which screened in the 2009 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, airs Tuesday, Feb. 9, on KQED channel 9 and is well worth checking out, although it leaves us wanting more detail, depth and debate than its 56-minute length can accommodate.

On one level, this is the story of a turf battle in academia, which may not make your heart go pitty-pat. And the impulse to couch incendiary disputes in high-minded rhetoric, a trait of our overly cautious public television system, lowers the temperature another couple degrees.

But listen closely, and read between the lines, and you’ll be transported back to a time when a fresh idea in the social sciences had the power to alter the lives of millions.

Herskovits was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio in 1895 and raised in El Paso, Texas; there are remarkable photos of him with Pancho Villa’s troops during the Mexican Revolution.

He was raised Jewish and had notions of becoming a rabbi, although his yen to travel was already apparent. After enlisting in the Army and

witnessing the carnage of the last months of World War I, Herskovits re-examined his relationship with God and set out on a new path.

He did his postgraduate work in anthropology at Columbia University under the influential Franz Boas, and was attracted to Africa. The film suggests that Herskovits practically had the field to himself when he began traveling to the continent in the 1920s and ’30s with his wife Frances, taking thousands of photographs and recording hours of film and audio. He quickly established himself as a leading expert.

The man doesn’t look particularly imposing in his wire-rimmed glasses and bowtie, but it required plenty of moxie to trek around Africa in those days. When Northwestern University made him its first Jewish professor in 1927, one gathers that it was a mild trial by fire in comparison.

The film depicts Herskovits as an idealist and scientist who labored to separate his work from politics. That seems naïve in retrospect, but it’s as if he wanted to influence other anthropologists more than the public.

He certainly succeeded with the publication in 1941 of “The Myth of the Negro Past,” in which he exploded prevailing perceptions that race (and any differences between races) was the product of biology. Herskovits argued that the similarity of dance movements between Surinamese men and black Americans, for example, was evidence of a cultural connection. (Curiously, while the film does mention the Nazis, it doesn’t cite their pseudo-scientific rationales for determining that every race was inferior to the Aryan master race.)

While Herskovits’ work was and is lauded by black scholars for its critique of racism and its contributions to black self-esteem, those same scholars objected to the strong-willed professor’s efforts to dominate the field — that is, to exclude blacks from participating in the debate. Herskovits obtained grants to establish the first African Studies Center on an American campus, yet opposed W.E.B. Du Bois’ fundraising efforts for an African encyclopedia.

Of course, anyone can use ideas once they are out in the world. So it was that “The Myth of the Negro Past” became a key reference work for the Black Panthers in the fraught years following Herskovits’ death in early 1963.

“Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness” airs at 11 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 9, on KQED channel 9.