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"…No group in the world has had more money spent on it to have its genetics examined, its fecundity stopped, its intelligence measured. (Who are these people who know our sperm count but not our names?) Yet despite years, despite decades of such academic energy, there is very little scholarly recognition that a major part of American history is the history of black people: how they influenced whites and how whites influenced them. There are are very few examinations of U.S. economics as the growth of a country that had generations of free labor to assure that growth. Or of the legal history of this country as primarily the efforts of the courts to contain blacks. Nor is there much notice paid to the fact that anthropology is pretty much limited to the study of the black peoples of the world. Not only are white historians and social scientists un-interested in examining their own poor, they seem never to consider directing their probes to the incidents of incest or bastardy among the rich."
Rediscovering Black History. Review of The Black Book. New York Times Magazine (11 August 1974):14+ Reprinted by the permission of International Creative Management, Inc. Copyright 1974 by Toni Morrison.
from What Moves at the Margin; Selected Non-Fiction Edited and with an Introduction by Carolyn C. Denard. 2008.
