Skip to main content

Don't Adjust the Color

Support Provided By
blackhistorymonth.jpg
Mayor Garcetti honors community leaders at the African American Heritage Celebration at Los Angeles City Hall, February 5, 2015 | Photo: Eric Garcetti/Flickr/Creativ Commons

Black History Month is three quarters done, and I haven't really started thinking about it yet.

This lagging behind happens every year. Every February I flinch at the idea that Black History Month, initially a week created in 1926 to challenge the omission or distortion of black people in official American history, is still largely unclaimed by America. Yes, black history is acknowledged by all, but it's embraced by relatively few. A feeling persists that Black History Month is for black folks, that it is their holiday the way that Martin Luther King Day is for them. It's true; black people observe both things more closely than anyone, and with good reason. That's as it should be. But to cede black history and black heroes like King chiefly to African-Americans is to denigrate that history and those heroes as second-class. To give black history over to black people is to say that such history has little to teach the rest of the country, when in fact that history is decidedly about all of us. But every month we niche-market Black History and do what media advertisers call 'narrowcast,' aim a specific product at a specific group of people and no one else. The focus-group wisdom says that those people will buy what you're selling, so you don't need to try and sell it to anyone else.

History isn't supposed to be a product, but the way it's cut and packaged, its edges sharpened or smoothed out (Martin Luther King is a distressing case in point), it often feels that way. Yet try as we might, we can't make black history a product. It's too messy, too tightly interwoven from the beginning with 'regular' American history to be neatly packaged, to make a statement apart from it. You can't talk about Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass without talking about slavery, and you can't talk about slavery without talking about white supremacy. You can't talk about lynchings (if you talk about them at all) without talking about the fact they were often celebratory, picnic-like events for whites in the South and Midwest, that postcards of lynchings were mailed all over the country. The barbarity of such phenomena and what they force us to reckon with is too jarring for many nonblack supporters and sympathizers of black history, so it is minimized or ignored, albeit subconsciously. Or it is hastily subsumed into ahistorical notions of diversity and inclusion. Black history is fine, the message goes, as long as it doesn't ask for too much. As long as it doesn't try to move in next door or impinge on established levels of tolerance for all things colored . It's still expected to know its place.

Another reason I flinch at Black History Month is that it's been mushed into the modern version of integration, diversity. Over the years I've grown to hate diversity and its sometime synonym, inclusion. These terms detach from history, black or otherwise, conjuring up aspirational ideas of equality and cooperation . They suggest that we don't really need history because diversity and inclusion are their own reward: diversity/inclusion suggest a kind of conceptual utopia in which Americans, given the choice, always choose justice because, well, this is America. We're in the justice business. That's what history tells us, yes?

I did observe Black History Month last weekend by attending the Pan-African Film Festival at the Rave Cinema at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. I reveled in the atmosphere of unbridled blackness, in the energy of a creative, color-specific enterprise that attracts people from all over the city, and beyond. For black people to be the center of gravity in such an unabashedly positive way was affirming, to say the least. It was validating. And it's a rarity in that the films showcased each year collectively describe the full complexity of black history, from the ugliness of slavery and racism to the subtleties of acutely individual character studies set in the present day. Of course the subject matter is not uniformly pleasant -- not suitable for diversity -- but it is all worthy of observation and celebration. It's a reminder that art can do what politics will not.

Of course history is an art in its own right. It's a creation. For all the names and dates and factoids put forth during Black History Month, ultimately it means what we want it to mean. One of these years we'll all get on the same page.

Support Provided By
Read More
Looking west over the Heart Mountain Relocation Center with its sentry name sake, Heart Mountain, on the horizon.

How Japanese American Incarceration Was Entangled With Indigenous Dispossession

Indigenous land dispossession was bolstered by the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II — and vice versa.
Chiqui Diaz at work advocating to end social isolation | Courtesy of Chiqui Diaz

Youth Leaders Making a Difference Honored by The California Endowment

The Youth Awards was created in 2018 to recognize the impact youth voices have in creating change throughout California. Learn more about the positive work they're accomplishing throughout the state.
A 2011 crime scene in Tulare County, where one of Jose Martinez's victims was found. | Courtesy of Marion County Sherff’s Office via FOIA/Buzzfeed

California's Unincorporated Places Can Be Poor, Powerless — and the Perfect Place to Commit Murder

It's time to do better by communities that don’t even have local police to call, let alone defund.