Black History Month for me just used to be a reminder of how little this country cared to actually learn about black people, our history, and how we got to where we are today. It didn’t feel like a celebration but a mockery of our greatness. It felt like we were being thrown scraps for being reminders of this country’s violent and unthinkable history. Twenty-eight days sometimes twenty-nine designated for our history while the false history of this country’s founding wasn’t constrained at all but given an entire school year. It wasn’t until I learned more about where I came from outside of the abysmal curriculum and about how systems were built to divide that I was able to not only embrace Black History Month on my own terms, but really relish in how far we’ve come and how much we can and will accomplish.
Before my invigorating revelation, when I was really young, I dreaded Black History Month. Going to a predominantly white school, it meant that all eyes were on me when the teacher would tell us to put our books away and handout a flimsy printout of one of MLK’s speeches. It was always a very small section of “I Have a Dream.”
I could feel my peers staring me as the teacher picked on different students to read portions of it. I braced myself for my inevitable turn. When I was called on to read it was like the air disappeared. An uncomfortable silence settled in the room. Kids stopped shifting, whispering conversations would halt. It was as if they thought something magical would happen when I read those words. I was a show. I would look straight at the page attempting to block everything else out and read aloud, but I still felt as if a spotlight shown brightly on me and my little desk. I wanted to speed through it to get it over with, but I didn’t want to make any mistakes, because even though I was mortified his words meant a great deal to me. This would be the new normal during our Black History lessons for the whole month. I loved learning, but I loathed being their only immediate proximity to blackness.
The subsequent few hours a week of hapless activity to “celebrate” black history was not only an embarrassing display of ignorance, but a truly insulting one-dimensional portrayal of a history of my people who literally built this country. We wouldn’t talk about slavery at all, but focus on celebrities and the Harlem Renaissance so as not to go too near the past that so many wanted to forget. It wasn’t through school that I learned about James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison. I didn’t even know collections of slave narratives existed until I went to college. No, Black History Month when I was in grade school even into high school willingly evaded how black people got here and focused on famous black athletes and entertainers in a way that made it seem they were the only people who truly contributed to society and were of note. A few authors were sprinkled in here and there, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, but scientists and certain activists were always absent. Later on, nearing the end of high school I would learn about Dr. George Washington Carver as the inventor of peanut butter, but his doctorate title and further work in peanuts being used to make different products ultimately stimulating the south’s declining economy would be left out. Par for the course.
This Black History Month I am going to lean hard into still celebrating how we as black people were able to fight through the darkest, deadliest, most diabolical institution of slavery and not only continue to live and continue to fight but continue to feel joy, continue to feel pride, continue to evolve, continue to grow, continue to uncover and discover, continue to create, continue to feel love after all our ancestors have been through. After all we are still going through.
Some of our ancestors could never even imagine where we are today and though we are still, STILL fighting for full equality, we have made leaps and strides from our painful past and this world wouldn’t be nearly the same without us. We are our ancestors and we are forging a new path for the future.
