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Black history month ends, problems continue
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Today is officially the end of Black History Month. Unofficially, black history marches on, right through March and April and beyond.
Real black history is a powerful tribute to the collective will and struggle of a people despite years of past-and present-oppression. Black History the Month, is a pithy attempt to make-up for the past, to liberate through acknowledgment decades of historical exclusion.
The activities highlighting the month ring with a hollow celebratory tone. An elegy is more fitting. For in the process of attempting to recognize the excluded, we have also sanitized them. We have transformed their history of forced slavery, segregation, and violent abuse at the hands of white people and white police, as well as their brave struggle against that oppression, into a single charming phrase, not even the whole speech, simply “I have a dream.”
Some of us go farther, criticizing in angry letters to the editor the recognition of past errors on the part of our “corrections” system. But these blatant acts of racism aren’t the most dangerous feature of the new landscape. Far more insidious are the quieter forms of racism, expressed in angry diatribes against affirmative action and slavery reparations. For in these angry pronouncements we ascertain the cost of sanitized history-that is, continued injustice, and subtler, deeper racism.
The greatest danger of our token Black History Month lies in its de-politicization of the powerful and moving voices of those we claim to celebrate. The people who actually created black history don’t fit into our congratulatory schedule, so we erase them. In so doing, we lose the important, larger message that those individuals risked their lives proclaiming.
Our new convoluted history gives birth to a perverse morality, one that rejects responsibility for the past. Randall Robinson calls this new attitude “contemporaneousness.” Essentially, it claims “If the wrong did not just occur, then it did not occur in a way that would render the living responsible.” Robinson argues against this distorted assertion stating, “when living blacks suffer real and current consequences as a result of wrongs committed by a younger America, then contemporary America must shoulder responsibility for those wrongs until such wrongs have been adequately righted. The life and responsibilities of a nation are not limited to the life spans of its mortal constituents. Federal and state governments were active participants not only in slavery but also in the exclusion and dehumanization of blacks that continued legally up until the passage of key civil rights legislation in the sixties.”
Such admonitions are entirely foreign in the party-like atmosphere of today’s Black History celebrations.
The most prominent casualty of this gloss-over approach to black history is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself. A true revolutionary, Dr. King has been reduced to a palatable sound bite for a self-righteous America. His steadfast commitment to non-violence, including his statement that his own government “was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”; his powerful use of civil disobedience; and his support for policies of material assistance to blacks are rendered mute in today’s de-politicized version of Black History.
In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Dr. King wrote, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.” He also expressed his support for billions of dollars in direct aid to black America in a 1965 interview stating, “For two centuries the Negro was enslaved and robbed of any wages: potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.”
Matching these words with deeds, Dr. King co-led “Operation Breadbasket,” a movement that threatened to boycott private employers who didn’t hire blacks in approximate proportion to their presence in the larger community. All of these things represent what Dr. King had in mind for achieving his “dream”; yet all of them are notably absent from America’s sanitized MLK legacy.
Rewriting history is the first step in denying justice. As it stands, Black History Month is an example of such revision. Conversely, affirmative action, reparations, and other similar policies represent a real step in abandoning our mischaracterization of Black History, and choosing instead to embrace reality, boldly transforming it in the process. Our decisions on these policies also reflect our collective commitment to justice. Will we move beyond mouthing the words “I have a dream” and act to fulfill it?
Or, will we continue to say to Black Americans “get over it”; arrogantly suggesting that the only thing keeping them from middle-class utopia is a lack of personal fortitude and/ or character on their part? Material steps towards equality are not acts of charity-they’re justly owed dues. While it’s true that these actions aren’t a panacea, they are a damn good litmus test of our commitment to Dr. King’s “dream.” History, black and white, is comprised of heroic action and cowardly inaction-it’s up to us which route we’ll choose.
Nate Williams