Black History Month

This year Black History month takes on added significance. We find ourselves as a nation experiencing what can be called a “second redemption.” Donald Trump and his white nationalist allies are working hard to undo any pretense to remedy historic racial inequality and to unravel any effort to recognize the rich diversity and complex history of this country. Ours, in their imaginations, is first and foremost a white nation. America belongs to them.

Such an effort, just as it did with the end of Reconstruction, entails active forgetting. Those who clamored for reunion had to “disremember” the actual reasons for the Civil War. Black folk had to be banished from view as a consolidated idea of “the white American” bridged the bloody chasm between North and South. “Out of the relation of slavery,” Frederick Douglass wrote, came “a peace that may be seen and felt in a prison…a peace where the heels of one class are on the necks of another.”

Abject violence and disremembering were its primary tools.

Disremembering involves purposefully leaving aspects of the past behind in order to blot out what the past might reveal. For many white Americans, struggling with the chaos that simmers beneath our sense of national identity, disremembering makes space for reunion; it allows for a retreat into the comforting illusions that affirm the goodness of America, U.S.A. despite the evils right under our noses.

Trump and his minions make no pretense to embrace the history of Black people in this country. They aim to break the back of the post-1960s consensus, where a certain story of the Black freedom struggle gets conscripted into the American story – where the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the non-violent protests of the mid-20^th century reflect the fundamental values and promise of the nation while other forms of Black protests and organizing are relegating to the margins of a declension narrative. Like when President Obama celebrated the power of Dr. King’s vision on the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington and declared that we lost our way with Black Power or like the 1619 Project that makes Black folk, no matter the broken promises of freedom, quintessential American patriots.

This liberal story, embraced by white and Black folk alike, narrowed the range of what could be considered legitimate forms of Black political dissent.

But Trump and his allies make no distinction between Dr. King and Malcolm X, between SNCC and the Black Panther Party, or between the NAACP and the Council on African Affairs. He has no interest in the story of freedom that Juneteenth represents or the horrors of Tulsa and what they might reveal about the nation. His is an effort, no matter the gaslighting presidential proclamation about Black History month, to unravel Black history from the American story.

The manufactured panic around DEI, Critical Race Theory, and “Wokeness” is all part of an effort to return to a story that predates the significant shift made possible by the mid-20^th century social revolutions. In other words, Trump and his white nationalist allies want to return to a world that made “Negro History Week” necessary in the first place.

Ours cannot be a response of lamentation as if the federal government’s embrace of a redacted account of our history and struggle is all that matters. It never was. We told our story, because the nation insisted on disremembering. We told our history to shape the imaginations of our babies and to place a crown above their heads – to get them to understand that no matter what this country said about them they were the inheritors of a grand tradition of an extraordinary people.

We are the custodians of that tradition. Not Donald Trump. Not the federal government. Not white America. We ARE. And when we tell the fullness of our story – not some sentimental account to absolve the nation of its sins but to confront America with the power of who we are and what we have achieved – we offer America, U.S.A, a different self-understanding and, more importantly, we give our babies the gift of “how we got over” and the resources for how we will survive the madness of our times.