San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Black History Month means more than ever
Some parents at Oakland’s Chabot Elementary have raised safety concerns to Briana Ohene-Owens over the school hosting a Black History Month event considering that only five months ago, the school was flooded with racist mail and bomb threats over hosting a play date for families of color.
“Those people who threatened us over the playdate want us to be too scared to celebrate Black History Month,” said Ohene-Owens, who leads Chabot Elementary’s equity and inclusion committee. “It feels more important to celebrate now than ever.”
At a time when politicians openly deny systemic racism and pass laws that disproportionately harm people of color; when states such as Florida block accurate teachings of Black history from school curriculums, and when social progress gets openly challenged in blue states like California, Ohene-Owens is absolutely right.
Black History Month is about sharing knowledge that has been suppressed. It’s about questioning the motives behind historic misinformation and the consequences of our collective complacency when it comes to social progress.
But in a society where a large portion of the population promulgates lies, where does Black History Month fit?
The denial of systemic racism is a prevalent fallacy. Republicans have trotted it out regularly, often to vilify efforts to address past discrimination.
Former president and current GOP front-runner Donald Trump claimed that systemic racism wasn’t a problem in the U.S. during his last year in
“It’s become comfortable for politicians to come out just to say they don’t want to learn our history, and they don’t want kids to feel guilty about what happened in this country.”
Briana Ohene-Owens, Chabot Elementary
office in 2020. Never mind that his comment came at the height of the 2020 racial justice protests, when institutions were admitting systemic racism was a problem.
Before abandoning his campaign last year, Black Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott reiterated Trump’s lie. Perhaps Scott had forgotten the stories he had told about being frequently stopped by the police and how, in some of those encounters, he had been afraid for his life.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley has made a similar claim that the U.S. has “never been a racist country” despite sharing stories about the racism she experienced as a child born to Indian parents in rural South Carolina.
While these politicians are sanitizing and whitewashing their own personal histories, the same is happening to U.S. history being taught in classrooms throughout the country.
In 2022, Ron DeSantis, a failed Republican presidential candidate, current governor of
Florida and leader of a national anti-woke crusade, signed legislation to keep critical race theory teachings out of Florida classrooms. Last spring, he signed another bill prohibiting public universities from spending taxpayer dollars on diversity programs. The bills are part of a larger nationwide drive by the Republican Party to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in higher education. And the ideological foundation for this legislation — that white supremacy isn’t woven into the
fabric of a nation that was built from slavery — is a lie.
Florida’s board of education recently made DeSantis proud by voting to remove sociology as a core class at 12 public universities and replace it with its own U.S. history curriculum, which includes the idea that slave labor somehow benefited Black people because it taught them skills.
The fact that America acknowledges slavery while downplaying the necessity for reparations is just one more example of the post-truth culture we live in. Even in the liberal Bay Area, and despite clear evidence linking today’s inequities faced by Black people to the country’s original sin and the enduring legacy of Jim Crow, there are people who
deny reparations are worth supporting. It’s also this lack of understanding of America’s past or the modern plight faced by Black folks that leads to people condemning play dates for Black and brown families like the one Chabot Elementary held last year.
“You can see in parts of the country that they’re trying to erase our history. They don’t want to teach slavery, they’re changing sociology, and they want it to be a thing where future generations don’t know about the pain inflicted on Black bodies, about slavery and about Jim Crow,” OheneOwens said. “It’s become comfortable for politicians to come out just to say they don’t want to learn our history, and
they don’t want kids to feel guilty about what happened in this country.”
If the very foundation of knowledge about America’s history and the Black experience is tainted by deliberate omissions and distortions, how can we celebrate the triumphs and struggles of African Americans in their proper historical context during Black History Month?
Ohene-Owens said the event she has in mind for Chabot Elementary — which last school year was 45% white, 14% Latino, 13% Black and 5% Asian — will focus on celebrating Black history through storytelling in a variety of mediums, including music.
“All the hate and vitriol we see right now is because people just aren’t taking time to get to know other cultures. If people were just more open to learning and understanding, we wouldn’t see some of the hate that we do,” OheneOwens said, adding that the event will be open to everyone.
Truth about Black experiences throughout U.S. history may get distorted by forces hostile to concepts like diversity, equity and inclusion, but the stories of African American triumphs and struggles are already immortalized in their undeniable impact on shaping our nation.
Maybe in a post-truth society, Black History Month’s greatest strength is that it’s a testament to the ability of the human spirit to endure, to defy odds and to reclaim the truth even in the darkest of times.