fbpx
Search
Close this search box.

Black History Month: A Comment

Ultimately, ‘history’ is, as many things are, a power struggle. A struggle over airtime and validation. Whether or not a particular narrative has basis in reality is irrelevant; the most profitable and seductive constructions of the past are meticulously chosen, culled into easily digestible pieces, and spoon fed to the masses.

Sadly, and with cold-blooded intention from the upper echelons, most individuals constituting the masses are too preoccupied with surviving poverty, racism, wanton violence, and a web of other gauntlets to thoroughly regurgitate the venom we have all been nursed on.

The histories of people who were forced to act as a society’s soil often receive particularly vicious dismemberments. In the United States, Indigenous people and African-Americans have served as the nation’s soil; trampled upon, used as dumping grounds, riddled with venom and forced to sprout cane and cotton from blood-drenched land—these actions were an unjustifiably pyrrhic necessity for this nation’s fruition. Founded on the dual tragedies of enslavement and genocide; a historical examination of the United States containing a thimbleful of integrity must consider these realities unflinchingly—devoid of mock horror and sentimentality.

In this era, with our increasingly advanced and sophisticated communication technologies, access to knowledge discrediting popularly accepted narrations of history is more readily available than ever. Communities, organizations, and vast networks have been established to hasten the proliferation of revisionist histories.

Despite some people’s unwillingness to accept it, Black history is American history. While it is important to locate and differentiate the particular realities of Black people from those of others, this must be done in a manner which incorporates Black history into this land’s broader historical oeuvre. While never having been that syrupy ‘melting pot’ it is often assumed to be, making light of the cultural amalgamations that are the United States’ backbone would be, to speak with restraint, equally insensible.

Regarding Black History Month specifically, it has never shocked me that Black people in the United States have officially been given the shortest month of the year to celebrate our history. This fact, in tandem with narrations of Black history which expunge the long history of Black people’s painstakingly organized rebellions against remarkable injustices, have been the source of a private corrosive bitterness.

Seeing Black history characterized as little more than the accomplishments of a small smattering of charismatic, typically male, leaders from the Civil Rights era enrages me. As it currently stands, and has stood for centuries, an incautious parroting of celebrated articulations of the past are capable of rendering the contributions of legions, and geniuses, invisible. What of Fannie Lou Hamer? Dr. Dorothy Height? Bayard Rustin? Why are so many of our brilliant allowed to fade into oblivion?

As I grow out of my juvenile years, and mentality, however, bitterness and rage consume decreasing amounts of my interior wanderings; rather, these days, I am more enamored with creation, excavation of historical archives, and the dissemination of information. Honestly, spending my personal time perusing the vast archives of Black history, of Black artistic and cultural production especially, is exhilarating. The sheer depth and range of Black people’s participation in our nation’s every sphere is simply breathtaking; militaristic endeavors, affiliations with the Communist Party, communities of formerly enslaved people who fled bondage and erected homeplace in the wilds—the range of Black people’s involvement in every sphere of our society is nearly unfathomable.

If Black history were to be taken seriously by educational institutions and communities in the United States, the myth of Black inferiority would no longer have basis to exist. In my personal explorations of history, time and again, I continually find evidence of Black people’s ability to endure, and even, at times, blossom, in a society dependent upon our living in a state of ignorance and servitude—akin to lotus flowers blooming from basins of poisoned mud. Extraordinarily durable; yet dazzling.

by Malik Thompson

Recent News