What Black History Month means to me

I was in high school during the 1980s. In a little rural town in Ohio where casual racism was perfectly commonplace. Black History Month had been around for 15 years, and people already loved to complain about “Isn’t EVERY month Black History Month?”

Politicians were fighting over the idea of a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King. There were two positions: “Of course! How can we not?” and “IMPOSSIBLE! UNNECESSARY! WE CAN’T JUST HAND OUT NATIONAL HOLIDAYS LIKE KLEENEX RARRRR”

It would be an exaggeration to say I had never met a black person, but I sure could not have said that I knew any black people. My high school had two or three black kids out of six or seven hundred? Two Jewish families, one kept it secret. One Asian family? Kids who were not white stuck out.

I was a sensitive kid. I hated, I hated, I hated the racism, the anti-semitism, the misogyny we were all marinated in. I was lucky: I had an exceptional US history teacher, Mr. Jim Fuller. He deserves a shoutout. I loved history class. He showed us enough history for us to see that a lot of black history had been left out. I was able to see that black history is American history, and I was angry to see it left out. I felt that it was an injustice to us, to the white kids, to exclude black history from our shared history.

I understood that the resistance to MLK Day and Black History Month represented the desire to make black people invisible. But I thought it was just that they wanted to erase black history in order to keep us from feeling sympathy to black people, to keep us from being inflamed with outrage over the long litany of injustices against our fellow citizens. Against the injustices of slavery, of a half-assed Reconstruction, of Jim Crow, of a half-assed, foot-dragging response to the Civil Rights Movement. I thought it was just a racist rejection of empathy.

But after high school, as I continued to study history, as I continued to read, as I found black authors to read, I realized that it was much more. It was not just a rejection of empathy. I realized that the racist establishment’s greatest fear was not that white high school kids would empathize with black Americans. I realized that the racist establishment’s greatest fear is that white high school kids will find black heroes to admire. Their greatest fear is that white kids will identify with black American heroes.

I realized that they wanted to erase black history, not to keep me from empathizing with black Americans. I realized they wanted to erase black history so I would not find bell hooks, or Angela Davis, or Kevin Alexander Gray, or Cornell West, or Amiri Baraka, or Frederick Douglass, or James Baldwin, or Paul Robeson. To keep me from aspiring to be like them. So that I would not aspire to reach down deep and find the courage to think and write and speak out as incisively and as honestly and most of all as bravely as my black heroes.

That’s what Black History Month means to me.