Does Black History Month actually separate us as Americans?
Not if it’s done right.
Freeman is hardly the first African American to gripe about Black History Month.
Funny story:
About 15 years ago, I was working in the training department at a commercial nuclear power plant, back in New York. I was partnered with a Caucasian fellow named Bob, who was and is simply one of the most upright, kind and completely unflappable people I’ve ever dealt with. We had lots of fun conversations in what was essentially a boring job-at least, it was supposed to be boring; when it was exciting, there was usually something terribly wrong.
Anyway, one day in late January-and remember, this is winter in upstate N.Y., cold to rival Alaska-I jokingly said, And what is up with giving us February? I know what it was, ‘they want their own month now? Let’s give ‘em February, and there’ll be no marching….” Bob looks right at me, deadpan, doesn’t miss a beat and in the utmost sincerity says, “It’s not your Black History Month; it’s all of ours.”
To which I could only say he was right-he was, like me, usually right….
More seriously, an uncle of mine used to complain, “Why do we get the shortest month?” Why, indeed?
It was Carter G. Woodson, a great black historian educated at Harvard and the University of Chicago who initiated what would become Black History month with “Negro History Week,” in 1926. He used to complain about it, too. He hoped the event would eventually put itself out of business by promoting the respectful integration of Negro history with everyone else’s history. In many ways, black history studies have made a lot of progress since those days. In many other ways, we’re still waiting.
Woodson chose the second week of February so the big week would coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. If Frederick Douglas, who escaped slavery to become a pioneer journalist, diplomat and advisor to Lincoln, were anywhere near as well integrated into American history studies as he is into African American history studies, there would be no need for Black History Month.
And the fact is, most Americans have at least a vague idea of who Douglas, G.W. Carver and Crispus Attucs were, and that’s about as far as it goes-they may have heard of these men, or even remember them in detail, but what they really remember is Paul Revere, and “two if by sea,” even though it didn’t quite happen that way. Sadly, there are numerous other African Americans throughout American history who made substantial contributions to America, and odds are good that without Black History Month, many of you would never know about them..
Fact is, there isn’t one aspect of today’s American culture that hasn’t been informed by or some form of a response to the presence of African Americans (and yes, that is a challenge), in spite of my famous joke about convening a meeting of ‘the Society of African American Nuclear Engineer..”(you know, as I’m heading off to sit on the toilet….)-and yes, along with my usually more noted American Indian heritage, mine is essentially an Anglicized African American name, and I am descended from freed slaves-who went on to rather famous success in shipping, agriculture and commerce, though one ancestor was burned alive in the slave riots of new York in 1712…..things you probably didn’t read about in American history class, but should have…..
Morgan Freeman offers a delightfully enlightened viewpoint on how to perceive people as individuals, but as far as eliminating racism goes-and it still exists-I’ve never known a problem to go away by not talking about it. The French sort of tried that: they swept their race problems under the rug in the spirit of “liberte, egalite, fraternite”, and refused, as a matter of French law, to recognize that different races exist, which made it hard, if not impossible, for the law to deal with decades of racial discrimination. Long standing racial and ethnic grievances led to the recent uprisings by poor, largely unemployed Arab and African youths in towns across France, just as they led to riots throughout American history.
We Amercians need not, and should not run from our own racial past. It is very much a part of our turbulent history, from the great debate the Framers of the Constitution staged over how to count slaves for purposes of reapportionment (“three-fifths of a person”??) to today’s first black woman Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice.
The bad old days of separtism tried to erase black folks from American history. Black History Month , if only for that month, puts us back in. It is not “:ridiculous” to study the tragedies and triumphs of the many, many people who made this country what it is. They have a lot to teach us. We need Black History Month. We don’t need to limit it to blacks only-or to only a month.
