Hello readers. You may have noticed that we are in the middle of Black History Month. I was going to post some words on why the existance of (or, more accurately, the need for) Black History Month (and Women’s History Month, etc.) bothers me, but Renee at Womanist Musings has already put it so well:
Black History month gives people an excuse to claim tolerance and understanding without doing any real work to change the ways in which the races interact. For a brief 28 days of 365 that make up a year, people will briefly acknowledge the contributions of blacks and then return to privileging whiteness in every single social institution. Even while we are in the middle of said celebration, whites continue to complain about how racist Black History month is. “Imagine if you had a white month”, is what gets repeated continuously during the month of February. The fact that every month is white history month gets ignored.
The ironic part about the above statement is that black history month is indeed racist but not because there is no equivalent white history month. It is racist because it turns blackness into a mockery. If Black History and accomplishments were truly appreciated we would not need a month to celebrate them; it would be integrated into our lives in the natural course of events. Black history month continues to exist because of racism.
I could not agree more. If we were living in a post-racial (hah!) society, Black History Month would not be necessary. Black history would be taught as part of regular history classes, with the history of all other peoples. Currently, black people’s history is taught in a manner emphasizing their Otherness. It’s also taught in some mind-blowingly stupid, offensive ways.
The story of “Cotton Picking Day” was brought to my attention by Renee, as well. Yes, you read that correctly. Students at Lillie Burney Elementary in Mississippi were invited to come to school “dressed as slaves,” but the day’s theme was nixed after some parents complained to administrators.
It’s bad enough that kids are asked to dress as pilgrims and Indians to celebrate the mass slaughter of native peoples Thanksgiving. This dressing-up-as-slaves business makes a mockery of slavery and insults the memory of slaves and their living decentants. Homeschooling looks better and better for me and my hypothetical future children, because if they’re educated in our system I’ll have a lot of re-teaching to do anyway.
This clip from The Soup perfectly demonstrates the mixed messages we send about minorities in this country.
For our readers who can’t watch or hear the video, Joel McHale juxtaposes a Vh1 commercial featuring a wide array of black faces, in celebration of black history, with a collection of clips from Vh1 programing, which depicts black men and women in a rather… negative light.
Black History Month is lip service.
I am in no way questioning these extremely valid points about the inadequacy of the study of black contributions to American society.
To play devil’s advocate for a second…when you’re creating a teaching curriculum, it makes some sense to do things in cycles, right? I’ve got a lot of American Indian ancestry, and it used to irritate me that we only studied Indian culture in the fall. But when you imagine the average K-12 history period, it’s what, 45 minutes to an hour? and it usually just follows a general timeline of (Western) history (which yes, should be better integrated with all kinds of culture).
If we could achieve more balance within the curriculum’s subject areas themselves, I wouldn’t have a problem with picking a month to focus on individual cultural histories, the same way I don’t have a problem with focusing on each season in turn. But that’s a huge if.
@mkp-hearts-nyc: I would tend to agree if black history month was limited to a basic curriculum in schools thing. But TV stations do “Black History Month” PSAs and stores do special promotions and even the company I work for is sponsoring Black History Month activities through our HR department (film series and book club, which is a vast improvement over last year when they offered salsa dancing classes for Latino history month).
@SarahMC: Thanksgiving does not celebrate the mass slaughter, per se. It supposedly celebrates the time Indians shared a meal in peace and brotherhood with the white man. Y’know, the calm before the genocide? Although certainly if I were a Native American I’d want to celebrate the holiday by mixing some rat poison into the stuffing.
Sarah, I thought about that clip when I was reading your post, so I was happy to see it when I scrolled down.
MKP, I get what you’re saying, but I think that the issue here is beyond having time to study African American history and indigenous cultures. I think the problem is that we think of American history as being divided that way in the first place.
Remember the McDonald’s commercials that used to air during black history month that said black history is American history? That’s true of every group that lives in America. It doesn’t make sense to study black people’s history (or anyone else’s) in this country at one appointed time when we did not live separately and when the things that happened to us were intricately connected to the other historical events we study. Again, this is also true of other groups of people who immigrated here.
But the reason we’ve come to think of it that way is because discussing all of our interwoven histories the way they happened isn’t because of time constraints– not to point the finger at you in any way for bringing that up– but the way we think of American history. To discuss our histories as interwoven is to highlight the exploitation of a lot of this country’s inhabitants, the flaws of its founders, and the inequities people continue to deny exist. We learn a mythology of American history, particularly in elementary and middle school, and to talk about the roles black people, indigenous people, Latinos and Asians have played in the way we’ve developed shatters that myth completely. It’s easier on those who want to pretend that racism/imperialism/classism only occur as isolated incidents, and hell, even to the rest of us who have a hard time explaining to small children why adults are such assholes, to talk about it slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement as a separate part of history instead of an intricate part of how our society and economy have developed. You can’t just attribute it to a few evil people anymore. It then raises questions about how a lot of otherwise ordinary, even good people, benefited from it and continue to do so.
We don’t even talk about those things during black history month. We learn trivia. I don’t give a shit if a white person can tell me what black people have invented if they don’t learn that other stuff, if they don’t understand privilege, etc. Individual cultural histories aren’t separate. They are a part of the whole. The solution isn’t to figure out a way to incorporate individual histories but to quit telling children this white-washed convenient version that we tell them now.
“We learn a mythology of American history, particularly in elementary and middle school, and to talk about the roles black people, indigenous people, Latinos and Asians have played in the way we’ve developed shatters that myth completely.”
Right on, RNS. Incorporating the histories of non-white people into History Class (TM) would require telling the truth about this nation’s founders and “discoverers.” It would require telling harsh truths about whites as a class and the privileges we enjoy to this DAY due to racism. To avoid that, we just devote a separate month to teaching black history so not to make ourselves uncomfortable w/ our mess of a past.
@robot ninja spy, @SarahMC: I studied US History 4 different times before graduating from high school (3rd, 5th, 8th and 11th grades, I think?), and was shocked and dismayed each time at the degree to which the previous telling had been a lie. And that was only in relation to the next telling. After leaving school and doing some “research” of my own, it was clear that the actual truth was much more complex, rich, deep and many ways shameful than we had been led to believe. I really wish that we could stop feeding children outright lies and propaganda in place of actual history.
That being said, I do think that having Black History Month/unit/whatever in class is better than nothing. But I also think that it tends to turn the focus on Black students as well, which can be incredibly uncomfortable, particularly in schools with only one or two Black kids per class.
Unpossible, have you read “Lies My Teacher Told Me?”
Very good point about the effect BHM has on the students. AFAIK it didn’t happen during BHM, but recently a teacher tied up two black girls in her classroom and had them lie under their desks or something to “feel what it was like” on slave ships. Yeah.
Good point, Unpossible. And that last part never occurred to me since I always went to predominately black schools anyway. And I was very lucky in middle and high school to have social studies teachers who told us as much of the truth as they could possibly get away with– and my white teachers were no exception.
In fact, in high school, our AP History teacher told us the first day that she was assigning us four different books because the text she was supposed to teach and all the other ones our school system used were full of shit. Ms. Powell was awesome.
And as much as I dislike my uncle, I’m lucky he made me watch documentaries. He took responsibility for making sure I learned my damn history because he wasn’t about to leave it up to chance. And as an adult, I share a lot of books with my godfather who’s in his 70s and he’s always telling me how he knew he was being bullshitted as a kid but none of them ever really knew where to start in correcting that and finding the right texts but now that this stuff is more widely available, he reads everything he can get his hands on. So that’s pretty awesome.
Sarah, a friend of my old roommate said that during black history month, they posted pictures of basketball players and rappers in the hallways and served fried chicken and watermelon in the cafeteria. I used to wish I’d gone to more diverse schools, but I’m damn glad I didn’t go to one where there were so few of us that shit was allowed to fly. Oh. My. Gawd.
robot ninja spy, that is the worst story I have ever heard. there would have been protests at my high school if that had happened.
@SarahMC: YES! Amazing book.
@robot ninja spy: Your teachers sound awesome. Mine usually meant well, but were often too tired to try and work around the system. I have a good friend who is currently getting her teaching credential, and one of the classes she’s taking right now is about diversity awareness. She says that the class is so remedial it’s shocking, and even more shocking is the number of her fellow aspiring teachers who don’t seem to get it.
@Unpossible: It’s a daunting task, but also they were probably afraid of being accused of being “too political” and jeopardizing their jobs. My principals were always very vocal about what kind of school they were running and how they thought we should be taught and they were lucky to work in a district where the parents were on the same page.
“Lies My Teacher Told Me” was actually my history class’ textbook at one point in high school, so I eventually got the truth out of my school system… but that was at my private school, and studying from “Lies” only made me more upset with the rubbish I was taught when I attended public schools.
I think my school did well with history in general, actually; the 6-year series of courses was pretty strictly chronological, starting with Australopithecus Afarensis. It really countered the “other countries? what other countries?” idea that I found in my public education, and made self-satisfied America-centrism pretty impossible, since we didn’t even make it to American history for several years, and when we did, we spent a semester on the native cultures of the Americas first. The specific ways my teachers taught it also really stressed the idea that history is sort of a continuous intertwining struggle, that the next thing is always in response to the previous thing, etc., which made trying to separate just one group’s history, well, nonsensical. The literature lined up well, too; we read a lot of Yoruba folk tales, and creation stories from a dozen different Native tribes, and we laughed at John Smith’s ridiculous “I totes killed 200 savages! No, wait, 300!” stories, and so on. When we made it to American lit, we read things like Black Boy, the Yellow Wallpaper, and similar feminist and/or anti-racist literature, in addition to our culturally-mandated parade of old white guys.
And WOW, that’s a lot of nostalgia. It proves that it IS possible, though, to teach even young(ish) kids a history that is true and encompassing of all people. There’s no need for this essentialist rubbish.
Oh– and did anyone else notice that in the video, all the people featured in the “White History Month” spoof were women?
I think it’s a little extreme to call Black History Month as a whole racist and to say that it makes a mockery of black history. The exclusivity that happens the rest of the year makes a mockery of the history of our country and white people who want their own month are racist.
Where I grew up in N.C. we did learn about Crispus Attucks, abolitionists, the civil war and the black civil rights movement as part of the regular curriculum. During February we had a special focus on black figures in American history, mostly male. I don’t know how common of an experience this was. We learned little to nothing about the history of Asian Americans, Native Americans, women, the Irish. As an Asian American woman I wish I had a whole damn month! Can I get a week? It’s great to point out inequality. Let me be clear that it SHOULD be pointed out, but with the perspective that I want what you’re complaining about.
@HanaMaru: I hear you and I agree something would be better than nothing. And I think your education sounds common and think it’s lame, lame, lame, that the only thing we got about Asian Americans was a blurb about Japanese internment during WWII and, if we were lucky, maybe an excerpt from “The Joy Luck Club” in American Lit.” But I really wish there would be a complete overhaul of our history and American Lit books, you know? How hard would it be for them to talk about the waves of Asian people who migrated to America in chronological order and how and what they contributed the same way we learn about the conditions under which various groups of Europeans came over? How hard would it be to seek out American writers of Asian descent and put them in the damn books AND not send the message that those are optional to include in the curriculum, for super dedicated students to read on their own, or for teachers to cover “if they have time”? It’s bullshit. Because I think Asian history month would be even more trivialized than black history month, because how do you condense the history of an entire continent full of various cultures, you know? Again, I agree it would be better than nothing, but while we’re hoping, we can think huge.
HanaMaru, I don’t think BHM has a whole is racist. It exists *because* of racism.
@eloriane-Yeah, I did notice that all the shameful images from VH1 for White History Month were women. I was going to say it’s because Daisy of Love hasn’t aired yet, but there should be enough damning footage from Tool Academy at this point. The Soup is not always feminist-friendly.
@rns-I agree with you that American history needs to be integrated all the time, like it was with black history where I went to public school. I was talking about my elementary-middle school years before because I was in public school and I think that’s more relevant to a national dialogue, but I went to a small charter school for H.S. where we used A People’s History among other wholly inclusive texts, which is why I know how simple it could be to teach in a way that includes all Americans.
AHM, in an American classroom wouldn’t need to be the whole history of the continent. It would make a big difference to have learned about Asian American history and highlight historical activists and leaders for even one month in public school and public life. You said above that you don’t care if white people know about black inventors and such if they don’t know understand privilege. I def. agree that most schools could do a better job of teaching about racism and privilege, but it seems like all history in public school is treated like trivia, unconnected to society today.
It is a really big thing to see that people of your own race have accomplished things and shaped history. If you didn’t have that to look to, and if white people were ignorant of all the accomplishments, or even the existence of your race, I think you would wish you had it. Black people and white people ask me “What are you?” all the time. That’s what othering means to me.
@SarahMC-I object to what Renee said because it isn’t the cause of insufficiently integrated history. BHM exists more specifically because it was invented by a black professor as a way of correcting racism. Saying that BHM itself is racist and that *it* makes a mockery of blackness seems as misguided to me as when the self-titled equality feminists say it marginalizes women to talk about our inequality.
The extent to which we still need BHM is a real shame, but setting this month aside, in the meantime, has been a good thing.
I understand that, HanaMaru; you are still misrepresenting what I’m saying. BHM is not racist. It exists because of racism.
Sarah, I’m sorry. I was not clear with my meaning. I was going on about my disagreement with Renee’s ideas. When I said “more specifically…”I was building on your statement. I think we are more or less in agreement.
Gotcha, HanaMaru.
“AHM, in an American classroom wouldn’t need to be the whole history of the continent. It would make a big difference to have learned about Asian American history and highlight historical activists and leaders for even one month in public school and public life.”
I agree; what I meant when I referred to trying to cram all the different Asian histories together, what I meant was that, with African American history, we’re just talking about one ethnic group, but with Asian Americans there are several so if you’re cramming all the various Asian American migration experiences and contributions into a month, then everybody gets less than a week. It would be nice, but it would be even better if that area of study was considered American history and taught alongside all the other important things we learn.
But thanks for the point about the trivia. You’re right that I probably would see it differently if there was no such thing as a black history month. I just think that, to a lot of people, the accomplishments of the black people we celebrate during black history month are great, but they see great black people as exceptions to the rule and still subscribe to stereotypes about the rest of us. Kind of like how, in the early stages of the election, there was so much “My, Barack and Michelle are such together and well-spoken black people. How new!” Like they’re a novelty. It’s like, “Okay, for one month we’ll concede that some of you have done something and then we’ll go right back to only showing you on the TV when you something stupid. And we won’t help you look for your missing kids.”
Also, re: this:
“Black people and white people ask me ‘What are you?’ all the time. That’s what othering means to me.”
Totally; in the schools I went through for K-12 almost all of the Asian students’ families were from Laos and they would get so. fucking. frustrated when people kept asking them questions about being Chinese, Japanese or Korean. People would say to them, “I’ve never heard of that place. You’re making it up. Why are you ashamed of being Chinese?” Seriously. So when I think of Asian History Month, I think of scenarios like Unpossible pointed out where the spotlight is put on a handful of Asian children, and I think of people not taking the time to tailor the lessons to the demographic of their community and a Cambodian American child having the teacher ask them whether anyone in their family was put in camps during WWII. And then them having to explain for an entire month why they aren’t the same.