What happened to Black History Month?
We’re more than three-quarters through February — what happened to Black History Month?
Is it that impeachment hearings, coronavirus and caucus debacles just overshadowed everything else?
Maybe, but Black History Month just seems to suffer from a celebration deficit.
Think about it: Hispanic Heritage Month brings to mind women joyfully twirling their multicolored folkloric dresses, the many flags of Latin America and images of people dancing or playing instruments.
One of my Facebook friends felt the same way and encapsulated the shortfall thusly: “If y’all celebrated Black History Month like you do Pride month, s—- could be different but non-POC [people of color] HIDE during this month.”
It’s so true.
I attended and marched in Chicago’s LGBT Pride Month parade last summer for the first time, and there were hundreds of thousands of people — many as straight as an arrow. They clogged city buses and trains, lined the streets in their best rainbow attire, and otherwise showed they were ready to attend a massive, blowout party.
The joyous nature of the colorful Pride month festivities is why so many corporations have glommed on both to support LGBTQ people in their journeys to become fully accepted and respected members of our society and to make money.
Black History Month, however, is neither in the middle of the summer like Pride, nor in early fall, like Hispanic Heritage Month. It happens in the middle of winter to commemorate the birth month of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
But just think what Black History Month could be if it occurred in fairer weather and not in the shortest — and one of the dreariest and coldest — months of the year.
One of the major TVnetworks could televise a parade, along the lines of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day event. It would be chock full of historically black college and university marching bands stepping in gleaming uniforms, floats highlighting not just Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks but also lesser-known heroes like civil rights activist Ella Baker, blood-bank inventor Charles Drew, journalist Ida B. Wells and others on The Undefeated’s recent list of the “44 African Americans Who Shook Up The World.” (Don’t miss this: https://tinyurl.com/han52q4.)
Can you imagine the show Beyoncé would put on? The float, alone, would be an engineering marvel!
And fairer weather would make it more bearable to participate in slavery-escape reenactments and simulations.
Have you heard of this? There are outings you can join that will put you in the shoes of fugitive slaves attempting to escape their masters. They sometimes include having actors portray hunters who rattle chains and call out in order to create the “real” feeling of being pursued on a journey of escape.
They’re not without controversy. In his New Yorker article, “Can Slavery Reenactments Set Us Free?” Julian Lucas recounts his interpretation of Colson Whitehead’s “Underground Railroad” in which “the novel’s fugitive heroine finds a job on free soil as a ‘slave’ in a museum diorama, raising the question of whom the slave-narrative renaissance really serves. Do fugitive lives belong to everyone, as models and martyrs of democracy? Or are they victims of appropriation, their stories warped by repetitive reconciliation myths and kitsch entertainment? Can ‘embodying’ the past empower the living, or does it trivialize history and traumatize its inheritors?”
If we lived in a world where people of all colors truly grappled with this, and other visceral issues of race and power, it’d be a better world.
But my fantasy of a betterweather Black History Month will probably never materialize, so there are other ways to connect. Reading
Whitehead’s award-winning book is a great start.
I highly recommend the books “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” by Robin DiAngelo, “The South Side: APortrait of Chicago and American Segregation” by Natalie Y. Moore, “Becoming” by Michelle Obama and “WeWere Eight Years in Power, AnAmerican Tragedy” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
If you’re looking for something free and easy, listen to “The City: Six Stories of Rubble. AMillion Stories Underneath,” an investigative podcast by USA Today. It’s a fast, gripping narrative that underscores how systemic racism in urban housing, building codes and politics harm people of color.
If you can’t read a book about the black American experience, listen to one. Or read an article, or do a Google search of “Black excellence.” Just don’t let Black History Month 2020 pass without making a personal connection. After all, celebration comes in many different forms.