Black History Month diametrically opposes the thrust of Dr. Kings dreambut it helps to drag us into the sort of internal division that our current rulers love to exploit.
On this subject I feel as though I might be talking to my son in his pre-adolescent yearsduring that time you know when kids crave patently contradictory things every day. I want to play in the big game but I want to go to the air show too." Okay you can do one of thosebut not both. The air show is only going on this Saturday afternoon at a time overlapping your game. Therell be another show next year probably." But cant you tell them to move the game to Friday Daddy?
If you are an American of African descent I would ask you not to be offended at once by this analogy but rather to ask yourself honestly if you see no justice in it before your blood pressure rises. What do most people of good will desire of American society with regard to race? That skin color should not matterthat Dr. Kings dream should come true of a place where people may work worship play make friends marry and raise families without having to pass a color test" anywhere along the line. What exactly is National Black History Month supposed to accomplish? Heighten the awareness of those distinctive contributions that Americans of African descent have made to our ways and manners (distinctive" being defined not with respect to the contribution but with respect to the skin tone of him or her who made it.) Does this objective not increase our racial self-consciousness? Obviously. Is a fair society not one in which such consciousness is minimized? Such was the belief of Dr. King. Then why do we yearly undermine the objective of greater fairness by reminding ourselves that our epidermis is not uniformly tinted?
(This reminder by the why infuses its poison into every racial distinction of the American salad bowl. Black people may not realize it… but such enterprises as Black History Month latently put the rest of us in mind of less remarkable distinctions: Asian versus Caucasian dark and light Hispanic Indio" versus African Latino Semitic versus Nordic… I was profoundly shocked a few months ago to realize that todays college kids even harbor some idiotic semi-serious prejudice against redheads. Personally Ive always been a sucker for girls like the luminous russet wonder on the Wendys commercials. What is driving this sort of speciated bigotry if not the postmodern passion for triage by coloring? What could possibly be less fair more dumbed-downmore tribalthan such line-drawing? And where is this all coming from if not from such race consciousness" endeavors as Black History Month?)
Im sure that the counter to my complaint would run thus. The achievements of black Americans have been suppressed throughout much of our history: we therefore need Black History Month so that black children and teenagers especially will not consider themselves somehow inferior when they find history books to be dominated by white people. The same rationale has also been advanced to promote the ramping up" of the female presence in textbooks and cultural discussionsand the same two profound flaws obtain in both cases. 1) If blacks and women were indeed kept from occupying positions of power in the past as they surely were and hence largely denied opportunities to influence society and culture then how can we dredge up dozens or hundreds of cases where they exercised such influence? For the very existence of these cases would undermine the major premise of the special history" argument. 2) More importantly from a moral standpoint why would we assume that a young black or female child would view Thomas Jefferson or Edgar Allen Poe or Orville Wright as an alien"and achiever who remains one of them"unless we have already primed that young mind to see in such terms? I find Julius Caesars engineering accomplishments (e.g. his bridging of the Rhine) fascinating yet most of them came as he pursued the subjugation of my distant ancestors. His exploits in Gaul were nothing short of genocide. I regard Milton as an artistic genius yet several tenets of his religious faith make me squirm and his politics supported the persecution of some of my more recent ancestors.
If I can admire Caesar as an engineer or Milton as a poet why can a black kid not admire Chief Seattle or Anna Akhmatova orgasp!Douglas MacArthur as a model of some specific set of achievements or even generally as a human being? Why does a color test" have to be administered first?
We should not forget the days of slavery and Jim Crow of course any more than we should forget the indentured servitude of English citizens in early colonial times or the Irish Potato Famines orfor that matterthe Mexican governments slaughter of peaceful demonstrators in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas before the 1968 Olympics. We should teach history thoroughly and with the highest degree of impartiality possible. The risk of brushing inhumanity under the rug is a generation that underestimates the human beings potential for doing evil actively or succumbing to it passively. Then we will have on our hands a wave of voters so obtusely nave that… well that they surrender all of our lives into the hands of a wicked despot just because he claims to care about us.
The risk of singling out one historical incidence of inhumanity however and drumming upon it incessantly must be to generate a permanent awkwardness between the targeted group and the rest of society. Instead of asking Where is the black Orville Wright?" our minority child will more likely be thinking Why do they keep telling me that Josh Gibson was the black Babe Ruth and that Colin Powell is the black Eisenhower?" This child is bound to infer that the color line remains alive and wellthat such distinctions have a validity untarnished by more recent history. And if he doesnt already have a chip on his shoulder he will probably begin to wonder if this is because he has so far been duped by the oppressor. Isnt he supposed to have a chip on his shoulderisnt that why his teachers leaders and favorite TV personalities chatter about Black History Month every February? Isnt it because the racial divide between blacks and all the other races will never subside into a mere history lessonthat black history" will always have to be handled with special gloves because the American black is still and forever being airbrushed from human events?
I should footnote in concluding that I understand the sin involved in choosing black" over African American". I understand that we cannot say African American History Month" due to a factor of unwieldiness just as I understand that the NAACP cannot become the NAAAA out of regard for a rich past (along with a fear of a-a-a-absurdity). I understand it all… yet I refuse to acknowledge the sinfulness of writing or saying black". Nobody asks me if I wish to be called white" although my skin is about as white as a trees bark is green and the color white by the way is associated with coldness and cowardice as well as with purity. I am tired of being expected to circumlocute one syllable with seven: it is an extorted bow-and-scrape which I will not perform and Im convinced that it exists only and precisely to extract a tacit deferential and repeated apology. White people obsessed with fake guilti.e. with that bigotry they claim to see in other whites morally inferior to themselvesdont mind the seven-syllable excursion at all. Indeed the brief interruption of meaningful speech draws attention to their guilt and hence to their moral superiority and hence to their magnanimity for assuming a guilty burden not truly their own. For those seven syllables they become Jesus Christ. The rest of us thoughblack as well as whitehave better things to do with our time than kneel at their altar of egotism as they kneel in everybodys path decked out in sackcloth and ash.
The many decent black people I know do not need or want constant apologies from white people. They want the color test" dropped completely and for good. So do I.
Naturally this will not happen in the foreseeable future. Our somewhat-black president (a fan of the Pancatantra might call him the Blue Jackal deeply dyed in indigo) has too much to gain by turning us against each other.