Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Who Gets to Tell the Story? In Search of the Stories We Almost Lost While reading James Baldwin's Princes and Powers, I found myself thinking about something that happened seventy years after the 1956 Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists. In September 1956, Black writers, artists, and intellectuals gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris to discuss culture, history, colonialism, assimilation, and the political circumstances that shaped the lives of African and Black peoples. Today, I find myself asking a related question: Who gets to create the record of human knowledge? The technology has changed. The problem has not disappeared. From Paris in 1956 to Wikipedia today Baldwin described a gathering of people from many different cultures. They did not all have the same histories. They did not speak with one voice. They did not necessarily agree about the future. But they recognized that something had happened to their histories through colonialism. Their cultures had often bee...