But, in partial defense at least for myself, and speaking only for myself: I have (naively) believe that about prominent white women scholars, too. (That is, I’ve thought that their having tenured positions at prestigious unis and prizewinning books and other honors was natural or predestined because they are really good at what they do, rather than an awesome amount of work and a determination to triumph over adversity.) But then I got involved with the Berkshire Conference, and discovered that pretty much all women have some horror story or another–tenure fight, tenure denial, maternity leaves denied or punished, terrible environment, etc. Big name after big name of scholars whose work I had long admired and whose careers I had (until then) envied–they all had their stories to tell.

My need to believe this at one point may also be due to the fact that I’ve also probably internalized some of the career obstacles that I’ve faced, and I simultaneously blamed myself to some extent (or believed I deserved it because I’m not so great), while wanting to believe that some people have charmed lives and careers. I know that doesn’t completely make sense, but there it is.

And yet, the mythology still persists among many white historians that black historians are privileged and advantaged by being vastly outnumbered. Clearly, this is a belief that can be held by people who have never been a minority in any environment anywhere.

And as for African Americans not in US/Afam history: yeah, I’m with you, and we’re probably thinking of the same people. I was recently at a conference in my own field; of about 300 people, I was the only African American who wasn’t a part of hotel staff. And without giving too much away about my field, I can say that I was surprised by this development, b/c the field is one in which there are very important and central questions about race.

Just to be clear, you are talking about some area of history, correct? And not social or natural sciences?

Without question, and I learned a lot from that discussion. I’m with you that this should join the Novick/Smith section of “Intro to Graduate Study of History” courses. I also think that b/c it was a series of personal memoirs, I got a better sense of the rigor required to do this work professionally than almost any of the similar books I read in those intro classes.

And as for African Americans not in US/Afam history: yeah, I’m with you, and we’re probably thinking of the same people. I was recently at a conference in my own field; of about 300 people, I was the only African American who wasn’t a part of hotel staff. And without giving too much away about my field, I can say that I was surprised by this development, b/c the field is one in which there are very important and central questions about race.

I thought it was interesting that the older contributors to the book (those born in the early to mid-1940s), like the white women scholars of that generation, first wrote traditional (men’s) history books, and only after establishing their credentials thusly were they able to go on and participate in the invention of black women’s history. But unlike you, they mostly wrote African American men’s history books.

I think the book that addresses your experience has yet to be written. I can think of only a handful–as in, the fingers of one hand–of African Americans who write something other than U.S. and African American history. (The ones I’m thinking are Europeanists, medievalists to early modernists, men as well as women.) But I think the fact that that book hasn’t been written is further evidence of the major themes of professional isolation and exclusion that each of the book’s essays addresses.

The book was immensely useful, and yet frustrating in another way. I am not downplaying the struggles these women had trying to do Afam women’s history, but I really wanted to hear from black women who were working in fields other than Afam women’s history, and who didn’t even have the small cohort of crucial support that the women in this volume had managed to cultivate in their respective programs. In my experience, the subject I study isn’t questioned; it fits into the kind of scholarship that’s deemed acceptable. (I mean that in the broadest sense; I’m sure there are those who would argue on the nitty gritty of my work.) But my presence in the academy itself is constantly questioned. Last year, I was somehow seen as the go-to target. Want to make a grad student’s life difficult? Well, she’s fair game. Usually it’s not okay to state to someone’s face that they pale in comparison to your other students (especially when according to hir (flawed) metrics, I was right at or ahead of hir other advisees). But since it was me, it was completely fine, and the designated point person in the department couldn’t be bothered to set things right.

Furthermore, although there are black women in my department’s faculty, I hadn’t had any scholarly reason to work with them. (They arrived after I finished coursework, and I don’t do African-American/women’s history.) So I had no allies in the faculty who could recognize my treatment for what it was.

All of this is to say that I think there are two things that the book discusses, and only one is the crucial factor in determining treatment in the academy. (Now, I mean, not the 1970s-80s generation of scholars.) I think the issue is less black women’s history–I suspect that white women who have done similar work on black women get some abuse but not to the same degree as these historians reported in Telling Histories. For me, the determining factor is being a black woman in the academy, and while the book was certainly useful and a must read, as one of very few black women not working in American history, I felt like a crucial part of the experience was left out of the book: what happens to those black women who don’t have the intellectual home that these cohorts of women created?

widegon’s comment is telling of the state of the field now. I’m not surprised that black women are frequently seen as adjuncts to the “real” (male) African American and the “real” (white) women’s history. It’s like we can’t see or understand black women’s experiences unless they’re translated through an intermediate experience that they’ve already decided is legitimate (or legitimate enough, anyway.)