Black History Month - Asset or Liability?

I began the first day of Black History Month watching a police-cam video of a 9 year-old girl being pepper sprayed and handcuffed by police in Rochester, NY.

Did you immediately, subconsciously, infer the girl’s color while reading that sentence?  I suspect so.

Black History Month has roots in Negro History Week, proposed by historian Carter Woodson in 1926.  While Negro History Week was notable for its formal acknowledgment of Black traditions and history, it was not a rousing success, greeted with yawns or derision by most of white America. The black nationalist movement, embodied in the Black United Students group at Kent State University, spawned the first Black History Month in 1970.  This new movement grew organically through schools and community centers until its more formal recognition by President Gerald Ford in conjunction with celebration of the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. 

His message read: ’The last quarter-century has finally witnessed significant strides in the full integration of black people into every area of national life. In celebrating Black History Month, we can take satisfaction from this recent progress in the realization of the ideals envisioned by our Founding Fathers. But, even more than this, we can seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

And here we are, in 2021, with a 9 year-old Black girl pepper spayed and handcuffed by police, an image that would be entirely at home in 1926.

I acknowledge both the caution and the obligation implicit in a privileged white man opining about Black History Month, but I lean heavily toward the obligation.

As student, citizen and educator I’ve always felt dis-ease about Black History Month.  For those who engage in deeper anti-racist work, Black History Month is often seen as emblematic of a ‘Heroes and Holidays” approach to racism.   It is not that either Black heroes or the holidays dedicated to them are unimportant.  Heroes and Holidays are too easily weaponized against the real struggle.  I need direct you no further than the endless, unctuous and passionate invoking of Martin Luther King, Jr. by politicians establishing their “I’m not racist” bona fides without even a cursory understanding of Dr. King’s life work - other than that he had a Dream.  You will not hear many politicians on either side of the aisle quoting Malcom X and James Baldwin or introducing legislation to create Angela Davis Day.

Barack Obama’s election served a similar purpose.  It spawned an ugly backlash to be sure.  Donald Trump’s election, seeded by the explicitly racist birtherism myth, can be directly attributed to this racist reaction to Obama.  Without the Obama presidency there would have been no Trump presidency.   Even outside the virulently racist realm that enlivened the Proud Boys and countless white supremacist groups, millions of white Americans believe they absolved their own racist complicity by casting a ballot for the moderate, unthreatening, bi-racial Obama.  Don’t misconstrue that inarguably true comment.  I admire Obama and recognize that a more radically truthful Black candidate would have had no chance of election.  Let us not forget that our current president described Obama as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

The ongoing celebration of Black History Month portrays the success of a few Black Americans as the exceptions against a backdrop of stereotypes and racist structures.  As though the easy exceptions disprove the ugly rule.  It is a generalized version of “Look at Oprah! or Tiger! or (name your favorite black pop music star)! as a declaration of the great American meritocracy, where there is no racism, just too little effort.  

The flip side is to conveniently see the most violent expressions of racism as aberrations in a post-racism society rather than as boils that inevitably burst when the white body politic is terribly diseased.

Black History is American history.  Isolating the complex Black experience into the rigid boundaries of a month gives permission to deny it in all the other months.  To a great extent, American history is shaped by Black experience.  It is Black history that created white prosperity and should be the source of unmitigated white shame.  At a time when we should finally have a national reckoning, we are instead writing another ugly chapter with the terrifying rise in white nationalism. 

As Steven Thasher suggested in a powerful Guardian column, perhaps we should have a Dismantle White Supremacy Month.  

I could get behind that.