”You’re going to relegate my history to a month?”
This was Morgan Freeman’s complaint in a 2005 interview with “60 Minutes,” during which the actor openly criticized Black History Month.
I’m glad I’m not alone in my particular uneasiness with Black History Month and what I think it has come to represent.
I remember asking the person next to me waiting for the elevator, as we both read the first flier advertising it, “Do you also think there’s something weird about celebrating Black History Month?”
What I got in response was a skeptical look, and a mutter that sounded something like, “That’s kind of racist.”
But is it really? Or are Morgan Freeman and I the only people who think that we have to outgrow Black History Month?
Before I get into how and why Black History Month should change, let’s understand some of the history behind it.
According to the NAACP, “NAACP leader and legendary historian and educator Carter G. Woodson originally founded ‘Negro History Week’ in 1926, at a time when most history books simply omitted any African-American history and the central role African-Americans played in the birth of America as we know it.”
The organization continues to explain: “In 1976, Negro History Week was expanded to Black History Month. Since then, Black History Month has offered an opportunity to study, reflect on, and redefine our ongoing legacy in American history.”
Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that giving a significant portion of Americans a celebratory month makes us forget that their history and culture is embedded in all of American history and should always be celebrated, embraced and taught, not segregated and limited to a sole month.
Black History Month has, at one level, become shallow and commercialized. It’s that month where we go to the Smithsonian to see an exhibition on African art and buy an iTunes blues song with a “Black History Month” logo on it while we lick Langston Hughes stamps.
We should be visiting these exhibits, listening to these artists and using these stamps regardless of what month it is.
To students, Black History Month is that month in school where they learn about black inventors, pioneers and leaders who have all made a formidable difference in American history. Students go online, they make timelines and they have a class paper written on Benjamin Baker or St. Elmo Brady.
Then, 28 days later, these important people are forgotten, and students return to reading a textbook that has no background information about or context for the influential Americans they just studied. Students continue to be deprived of black history and culture for 11 months and, thus, are never able to fully understand or embrace it.
Carter G. Woodson’s vision is a beautiful one, but we are slowly drifting further away from his dream. Black History Month implies that it’s fine for history books contain minimal information on Africa and African-American culture, as long as we focus on it for one month.
We have to, as a people and nation, leave Black History Month behind.
As a starting point, it has done its job, providing Americans of every race with information on one of its most significant groups for decades.
However, it is time we take a step closer to integrating black history into the year, so that it becomes what it truly is: history.
edpage@theeagleonline.com
