I haven’t yet read the article that sparked this debate but it’s on my list the next time I’m in a library with access to the journal. I do, however, have a couple of thoughts to add regarding the comments made about the article’s scholarship or lack thereof. Over the past couple of years I’ve been documenting the erasure of African American historic resources and history from a small southern city. Since late 2011 I have done several interviews with black residents about history, historic preservation, race, etc. Many of them point to a consistent corpus of alternative historical literature that privileges Afrocentrism over western history. The most common citation is Lerone Bennett’s, "Before the Mayflower" (1966). Others include “The Black Matrix” <http://theblackpeoplematrix.com/>. This literature is relevant to my work because it presents an insider’s perspective into how the urban “Other” views history and its producers. In our world (archaeology, history, anthropology), we can draw on the Annales School and a wide array of “western” sources that deconstruct how we build our historical world view. It falls into place in my work on gentrification and the erasure of black history because of the prevailing urban legend in places like Washington, D.C. and elsewhere that white gentrifiers are trying to ethnically cleanse black neighborhoods/cities. There is a good discussion of this in Mary Patillo’s 2007 book on Chicago gentrification, “Black on the Block” and an accessible and brief treatment of urban legends of this sort by Patricia Turner in "I heard it through the grapevine: rumor in African-American culture” (1993, UC Press).

I’m not writing to defend or detract from the article. I don’t know if this work is on par with the pseudoscience that purports Mayans in the Georgia mountains, Egyptians in the Midwest, and aliens in Peru. All I’m suggesting is that we apply some of that good old cultural relativism we teach to our students, et al. to ourselves and our views of other ways of viewing history and its narratives.

David Rotenstein

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David S. Rotenstein, Ph.D.
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