Honoring Black History Month Starts With Knowing Black History; Here’s How To Begin

BY : Forbes

February has been set aside as Black History month, a practice that began officially in 1976 when President Gerald Ford declared February as Black History month, “urging the public to ‘seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.’” But its origins date much further back to 1926 when noted historian Carter G. Woodsen, the Harvard-trained historian, and the prominent minister Jesse E. Moorland founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), an organization dedicated to researching and promoting achievements by Black Americans and other people of African descent, set aside a week in February to honor Black history.

As two white men actively involved in racial justice work and trying to learn what it means to be antiracist, we wanted to see how tainted our current understanding of Black history was, and what we needed to learn to be better informed.

To be sure, there is no shortage of conflicting narratives available to misinform perspectives on this topic. Everything from disinformation about Critical Race Theory – what it is, what it means, and what it’s not, to those attempting to hijack the month’s focus for political or economic gain. For example, you have leaders like Virginia’s governor Glenn Youngkin issuing an executive order to ban Critical Race Theory from places it never existed while simultaneously declaring, “We must equip our teachers to teach our students the entirety of our history – both good and bad. From the horrors of American slavery and segregation, and our country’s treatment of Native Americans…” with no tangible plans to measure whether or not such education is actually happening. Then there’s numerous examples of organizations who promised to stand for racial equity in the tragic wake of George Floyd’s murder, but whose actions since haven’t yielded much. Many organizations are hosting lunches, lectures, and events this month to celebrate some version of Black history, and honor the experience of Black people in America. But those events sometimes prove little more than tokenistic when you view them against the backdrop of the volume of information kept from mainstream conversations about actual Black history. Journalist Nathalie Baptiste offers a proactive suggestion: Cancel Black history month. She suggests,

“Black History month is increasingly being co-opted by the people who have yet to trade in their whistles for bullhorns. It has been commercialized, whitewashed and hijacked — so let’s put an end to this version of it. If, as Dr. Cornel West coined it, Martin Luther King Jr. has been ‘Santa Claus-ified,’ then Black History Month has become Christmas… Actual Black history is more important than ever, but the way it’s been commodified has turned it into a veil…to pontificate about Blackness in a way that does more harm than good. Every February, they can regurgitate the same whitewashed stories of Black people, and in turn, it’s easier to spend the other 11 months being racist and excusing it with the fact that they “honor” Rosa Parks once a year.”

We spoke with Dr. Zoe Spencer, an Emmy award winning writer, author, activist professor of sociology at Virginia State University and CEO of Diverse Relations Group LLC. Most importantly, she is a Black mother, grandmother, and freedom fighter. Given her depth of expertise in this area, we wanted to hear her views on how to reclaim Black History month to live up to its true intended purpose. She says,

“The biggest challenge with Black History month is that it perpetuates the myth that Black history began with enslavement in the United States. That’s Black American history. But that is an erasure of Black history. It allows Europeans and Americans to recreate the narrative of what Africa was before colonialism and imperialism. It erases the contributions of great African civilizations, universities like Timbuktu, the existence of great African leaders like Mansa Musa, Hatshepsut, and others. We need to keep reminding people that slave traders didn’t steal slaves from Africa. They stole doctors, teachers, scientists, writers, artists, kings, queens, philosophers, parents, and children. Their brilliance was hidden behind distorted images and narratives that Africans were savages and subhuman. And those narratives continue today.”

Photo courtesy :