"Bill and Marty were anti-racists, thought they fought racism in different ways"
A little more than a month after the end of African American History Month may strike some as a strange time to write about two white men. But William McLoughlin, professor of history at the time of his death in 1992, and Martin Martel, professor of sociology at the time of his death in 1995, made important contributions to the study of blacks in our nation in general and at Brown in particular. Marty's research on the image of blacks in such magazines as Life and Look anticipated by nearly four decades the current preoccupation of popular culture scholars with blackness. Bill's many books on relations between Native Americans and African Americans anticipated the growing scholarly interest in relations among people of color.
it was my good fortune to work closely with both of them. Bill was notorious among Brown's faculty for having read everything about everybody, everywhere, "everywhen," and in the course of his omnivorous reading stumbled across a couple of articles I had written - in most obscure journals - about relations between blacks and Indians. He asked whether I would be interested in working with him to develop a course on the topic. Bill proposed that we each write a few pages about what such a course ought to cover. We would exchange our comments in sealed envelopes, read them, and then decide whether we could teach together. We wrote, we exchanged, we read, and together taught "Red, White, and Black in the Americas" until Bill's death.
Marty invited me to lecture in his course, "The American Heritage: Racism and Democracy." Taught in the sociology department, the course offered lectures by Brown faculty with an interest in the study of race. Marty not only handled the difficult task of managing such quirky faculty as Ross Cheit (political science), Lydia English (Afro-American studies), Ann Fausto-Sterling (Biology and Medicine), Paget Henry (Afro-American Studies and sociology), George Hicks (Anthropology), John Ladd (Philosophy), Robert Lee (American Civilization), William McLoughlin (History) and Suzanne Oboler (American Civilization), but involved students in the course as well. Sections of "The American Heritage" were led by undergraduate teaching assistants who spent the first semester with Marty preparing for the course and the second semester working in the course. Marty never pretended colorblindness. The sections were carefully balanced by race and gender. AT a time when universities complained they could not find students of color interested in graduate study, many of Marty's undergraduate teaching assistants went on to graduate school, often to such distinguished institutions as Berkeley, Chicago and Yale.
It is one of history's many ironies that black Americans are represented as simpletons when in fact as a people without power we had no choice but to be thoughtful. African Americans have always been a reflective folk, carefully watching white people. Whites have the luxury of pretending all black people are the same, but blacks have always taught their children to carefully watch European Americans to determine which whites in America's on-going race war are fighting to end racism, which support it, and which claim to be neutral. Today, the favorite position of whites who claim to be neutral is that racism is dead so they have no reason to be concerned about it.
Bill and Marty were anti-racists, thought they fought racism in different ways. Bill seldom openly attacked the racism of the past head-on, preferring instead to carefully pile historical fact on historical fact until the self-serving actions of racists and their illogical arguments toppled over on their ugly simple heads with a crash loud enough for all to hear. Marty insisted that racism was based on love, not hate, and that the challenge facing anti-racists was to persuade human beings to lover persons of different races just as they loved members of their families. Ending racism meant not fighting hate, but expanding the circle of love.
Though Marty, Bill and I were friends, shared many a meal, lots of laughs, and worked together with many other members of Brown's faculty to create the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, I confess I watched them all the time, trying to figure out how men of their generation escaped racism. Why, I now ask myself, since we shared so many personal and professional confidences, didn't I just ask them? As so many white people seem unable to break free of racism, their answers would surely have helped our nation and us all. I know they would have helped me.