If you don’t know your past, you won’t know your future
YES, IT’S February already. It seems like just yesterday I was under the Christmas tree, cussing and opening yet another pair of novelty socks-ina-can and wondering why Santa can’t learn to spell PS5. Next year, I’m sending that old buzzard a photo, an Amazon website link and a thinly veiled threat that I work in law enforcement and can easily find out where he lives.
Yes, we are one-12th of the way through 2024, sadly relishing the remnants of last season’s Christmas breeze, yet happy and relieved that the longest payday of the year finally arrived. This last January felt just as festive as last year’s – South Africa has sued Israel, Russia continues to bomb Ukraine, France has appointed its first openly gay prime minister and Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination – despite being indicted on four separate criminal cases and charged with 91 felony counts. But that’s another story for another time. Back home, 65 murders, another corruption scandal and the oncoming political silly season are all vying for the title of newsmaker of the month.
LOOKING TOWARDS FEBRUARY
February surely has its work cut out for it but one good thing that we can at least count on this month is the annual celebration of black history. And yes, I know that Black History Month is an American tradition. Given that country’s deep racial divides which still exist even today, it’s easy to see why such an occasion is worthwhile. But given how closely we here emulate American traditions and customs, it is surprising that we haven’t formally adopted the celebration with the same kind of enthusiasm and fervour as we’ve done for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Black Friday deals. After all, the last time America sneezed, we caught COVID.
Perhaps the simple answer is that, unlike the predominantly white US, we are a mostly black nation and so the concept of a black history month is a bit redundant. In other words, our blackness is deep and so obvious that it’s probably not worth celebrating.
SLAVERY NOT SO DISTANT
But lest we forget, the atrocities committed against our West Indian forefathers were not very much different from those against our North American brothers and sisters. After all, one man’s cane planter is another man’s cotton picker, and one man’s ‘Backra’ is another man’s ‘Masa’.
Consider, however, that the last known slave to die in America lived until 1971. Let that sink in. Then there’s Daniel Smith, the last surviving child of a former slave, who died in 2022. While you gather yourself, consider too that quite possibly, the last US slave owner may have lived well into the 1960s. Slavery doesn’t seem so far removed now does it?
These startling and sobering facts make us alive to the reality of slavery, but there are more present, yet not so easily obvious carryovers from those days, that live with us and permeate our society daily.
THE HERITAGE OF SLAVERY
For example, slavery existed as a wicked and violent reality for over 15 million people for over 400 years. In other words, from the moment we were wrenched from our homelands and forcibly packed across the Middle Passage, ‘til when we landed here to be worked, whipped and robbed of our humanity, we were fed a steady diet of blood, violence and pain. How then can we not be violent today when it’s all we’ve ever known? When men were routinely ripped from their wives and their children to establish breeding farms, how can we not have a problem with fathers who abandon their children?
When sexually depraved slave owners repeatedly raped black men to bring them to heel, how can we not have such high levels of homophobia? When we were taught that our polygamous African heritage was an abomination to God, why do we wonder why black men and black families struggle with monogamy? When so many would-be slave uprisings were crushed by weak, pathetic and spineless house negroes who sold out their brothers for a warm bed and first dibs at their master’s scraps, is it any surprise today that “snitches get stitches” and “informa fi...” well, you know.
And when ‘Backra had us living off his crumbs, beholden to his generosity and dependent on him for food, clothing, shelter and life, is it any wonder that we still struggle to shed the handout mentality that defines our relationship with government and so much of our politics?
NOT AN EXCUSE
Let me be very, very clear. None of what I’ve written is an attempt to whitewash or justify or excuse our destructive behaviours today by blaming it on the sins of our enslaved past. Rather, what I’m trying to say is that we will never be able to truly address and correct many of our societal ills if we do not address their deepseated socio-cultural and historical origins. It’s a well-worn cliché but it’s very much true – If you don’t know your past, then you don’t know your future.
It’s one of the reasons I have become more aware and more cautious of the hidden dangers of too heavy a focus on STEMcentred education in our schools, and the possibility of it unwittingly driving us away from a deeper understanding of our history, thereby preventing us from devising appropriate solutions. But that’s another story for another time.
What I’d like to see this Black History Month is for us as black people to start having real, meaningful and impacting conversations about how we can begin to correct our enduring problems, through a more nuanced and detailed prism from our colonial past.
Even if it doesn’t offer up immediate solutions, at the very least, it may force us to accept certain truths and insist that perhaps we need to simply devise ways to recontextualise our reality. Anything else is just kicking the can down the road.
And you know how I feel about these novelty cans.
Major Basil Jarrett is a communications strategist and CEO of Artemis Consulting, a communications consulting firm specialising in crisis communications and reputation management. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Threads @ IamBasilJarrett and linkedin.com/ in/basiljarrett. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com