Black History is Your History

Behind the Book: You aren't fighting for us, you're fighting for your souls

Image Description: A photograph of Ijeoma sitting across from a statue of Carter G. Woodson

It’s that time a year again. The time of a year where every white-owned and operated company suddenly has, from the looks of their advertising, all-Black customers. The time of year where politicians who spend all 12 months of the year denigrating and endangering Black lives through their white supremacist rhetoric and legislation will post a single tweet, vaguely thanking “African-Americans for their contributions to American history.” It’s the time of year where teachers remember that Black people exist, and have existed for …maybe hundreds of years - they have only existed to suffer and struggle, but still, it’s nice to remember that they exist. It’s a great time of the year to pretend to have read one of my books - or, if you’re really trying to impress people, one of Angela Davis’ books - and encourage all of your friends to pretend to read it as well. It’s a great time of the year to buy your hella pro-Black t-shirts from Target. It’s a good time to tell the most annoying and most racist of your friends to follow me on social media.

Ah Black History Month. What a time.

Here’s the truth: whatever exploitative, performative bullshit a lot of Black History Month may seem to mean now, it’s important to remember that this month cannot be defined by how whiteness has endeavored to distort it and so many other things that Black people have created.

Black History Month was the culmination of efforts led by Carter G. Woodson, widely recognized as the “father of Black history.” At a time when there was pretty much no institutional support or resources dedicated to the study of Black history, Woodson dedicated his life to building a field of study that would preserve our proud history, not only for the benefit of Black Americans, but for the edification of all people. Woodson believed that our history was worthy of documentation, study, and celebration. Woodson envisioned a week in February to celebrate the richness of Black history. The second week in February was chosen because it contained both Frederick Douglass’ and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays.

Efforts that Woodson started in 1926 for the adoption of Negro History Week were not federally recognized until President Ford officially declared February “Black History Month” in 1976.

Black History Month should be a time of celebration of Black history and Black culture. It should be a time dedicated to appreciation of Black contributions to our past, present, and future.

For Black people, Black History Month should be an uplifting time. It should be a time where we are strengthened and inspired by our history and our legacy.

But, more often, what we have now, is a month that traumatizes Black people for the benefit of whiteness - inundating Black students with stories of torture and murder. The reminder, as if we could ever forget, of how very unsafe we have always been. How very hated we have always been. Non-Black people get to take a field trip into this pain. They get to gape in horror. They get to shed a tear. And then at the end of the month it is all wrapped in a bow that is “Martin Luther King and how he ended racism,” and the entire package is put away until next year.

Black History Month was supposed to be a celebration of Black history - it was not supposed to be our entire history or the entire study of our history. Woodson dedicated his life to the study of our history. Every day of the year. Black History Month was supposed to be a month of appreciation and celebration, but the work was supposed to happen every other month of the year.

Many white Americans are terrified of Black history. Black history is a mirror held up to them. Black history at its most horrifying and traumatic is a mirror held up to whiteness. Black history at its most celebratory is a reminder of the strength, resilience and creativity that white supremacy has never had to cultivate. And all of it, the good and the bad, is necessary if whiteness wants to ever be anything more than the history that it has been constantly running from.

The true study of Black history is American history. It is not only what we have accomplished, but the circumstances that our accomplishments were created in. It is not only the horrors that have been visited upon us, but the systems that have built and perpetrated those horrors. It’s not only the hatreds and bigotries held by white people in the past, but the ways in which those hatreds and bigotries have been codified and made so ubiquitous for future white generations that it has been normalized into invisibility.

For white America, a true study of Black history will indict. A true study of Black history will remove the cover of claims to individuality and reveal the strategic and collective action of whiteness beneath it. A true study of Black history will reveal whiteness as not only a set of skintones and hair textures, but a social and political power structure willingly entered into, upheld, and defined by every individual white person in the collective. A true study of Black history will reveal the ways in which white America has never been able to survive without Blackness, and never will. A true study of Black history will show how neck-deep individual and collective whiteness is invested politically, socially, financially, and emotionally in violent white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

A true study of Black history is one that, even at its most triumphant, is one that white America cannot celebrate no matter how often it tries to claim only the best and brightest of it. But it is one that it must appreciate.

All of us are capable of violence. All of us are capable of oppression and exploitation. All of us have participated in violence. All of us have participated in oppression and exploitation.

Some of us more than others.

And all of us must decide to turn and take a long hard look in the mirror. All of us must decide to stare at our reflection and truly see what we have done, and by those actions, who we actually are. All of us must look at who we are and decide if that is who we want to truly be. All of us then have the opportunity to become someone who is more - growing, learning, and healing. We all have the opportunity to become works in progress, and that is a wonderful thing to be. But you cannot measure progress if you do not want to see where you are now.

Or you can keep running. You can keep fighting those who come to you with mirrors in their hand. You can destroy those whose very existence bears the reflection of what you have wrought.

But that will then be all that you are; and no matter how much you avoid your reflection - or try to paint a new, more flattering portrait of yourself - you will never be able to fully convince the world, or even yourself, that you are any more than that. A creature that runs.

Right now there are renewed and strengthening efforts to remove keep studies of Black history - and therefore American history - away from young people: those who have not had enough decades lived in collective whiteness to fear the enlightenment and growth that a true study of our history can bring. There is an effort right now to protect young white Americans from the disloyalty of a true understanding of whiteness until their personal investments in white supremacy have grown enough to do the work of the violent defending of comfort and ignorance for them.

Right now real history is being banned from schools because parents do not want their children to reject fear and take the important steps toward growth that they themselves are too terrified to take. They do not want their children to bring mirrors home.

And these efforts are winning. School after school, district after district, city after city, state after state. The fight against white accountability and growth has been packaged neatly by white supremacist political opportunists and served to a terrified white public as a way of growing and maintaining political and social power.

They are winning, not simply because the fear of those most invested in violent white supremacy is so strong. But because there are so many white people who do not fear the mirrors of history because they feel like these mirrors solely exist for the benefit of Black people and other poor, pitied victims of white supremacy; and therefore they can take passing glances at themselves when they are feeling generous, and hold the mirrors up to others when they are feeling particularly spiteful or superior. But they do not see this work as something they must do for their own humanity. They do not feel the same sense of urgency that those showing up at school board meetings yelling for the removal of dangerous truth feel.

As a Black woman, Black history is my past and my future. Black history is my physical and emotional survival. Black history destroys the lie told by white supremacy that we are not more than what they say we are and that we can never be more. Black history reveals the mechanisms of oppression. Black history holds the the skills and strategies that have helped us fight all that seeks to destroy us. Black history does not just inform me, it arms me.

As a Black woman I can truly celebrate Black history because I truly want to know it. I know that the accomplishments we have today were nurtured in the bosom of dreams held tight in the midst of great struggle. I know truly what we have accomplished and marvel at the potential of what we could accomplish because I know what we have been able to do in spite of such violent obstacles placed in front of us. I can love all of Blackness because I can see it more clearly.

I can have love and pride for us: the flowers that white supremacy has called weeds because I see that we have grown through the rockiest soil, soil that we didn’t plant in the cracks of pavement we didn’t choose. And we have had the audacity to bloom anyway, even when we were told that it was inconvenient to do so.

Black History Month should be ours to cultivate and celebrate. But Black history itself is also a reckoning that white America must face every month of every year.