Black History Month this year is more than a trip down memory lane
Black History Month is more important to the future of American democracy than ever. At a critical time, it offers the nation a window into its own soul -- if we are only courageous enough to look. What gazes back at us is not just the past, but a way of better understanding the political, economic and social ills that plague us. The racial disparities so terribly evident in the Covid-19 pandemic and the most divisive presidential election in American history are rooted in circumstances that can best be explained, analyzed and interrogated through the lens of Black history.
Last year's historic Black Lives Matter demonstrations proved to be the most potentially transformative social justice movement in American history. The massive numbers of White Americans who joined the protests inspired rounds of soul searching in virtually all sectors of American society. Luminaries connected to sports, technology, business, politics, and the arts publicly acknowledged the existence of systemic racism, admitted their own culpability in structures of racial justice, and vowed to do better in word and deed.
The millions of Americans from all backgrounds who gathered around the nation in support of BLM protests after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor helped to shatter the longstanding disconnect between contemporary racial injustice and the deep-seated historical roots behind our current national crisis of race and democracy.
The protests offered Americans of all generations a chance to participate in the kinds of dramatic historical moments one usually reads about or watches in movies or hears about retrospectively. The sea of White faces in the streets, often times outnumbering Black demonstrators in states such as Washington, Utah and Oregon, signaled to the nation that this time was different.
Black history spans the world, with Black folk always finding themselves at the cutting edge of human rights movements domestically and internationally. The Black Lives Matter Movement's recent nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, for instance, echoes the civil rights movement's heroic period, when a 35-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. accepted the award on behalf of the movement. Such international recognition of BLM as part of a human rights struggle has come only in the aftermath of critics who falsely labeled the group as violent, subversive and un-American.
Black politics has been transformed from the bottom up through roiling street demonstrations that have demanded accountability within and outside of the civil rights community. BLM has been arguably the biggest shaper of Black history over the past year. But as the Nobel Prize nomination suggests, Black history shapes wider domestic and international currents of political transformation.
Black history is a story of heartbreakingly stark juxtapositions. In January, racial progress could be seen in the historic victory of Rev. Raphael Warnock to the US Senate from Georgia, the first Black person elected from the peach state. Warnock's victory was orchestrated by the organizing prowess, political resilience, and indefatigable will of a Black community led by women such as Stacey Abrams. In nearly the same breath, the January 6 assault on the US Capitol showed the entire world, in stark detail, the White supremacist underside of American democracy that, historically has only been most visible to Black people.
January highlighted Black history's centrality to America's future in poignant and powerful ways. While many were stunned at the spectacle of violence in Washington, DC, students of Black history were not.
There is perhaps no better time to acknowledge that Black history is more than just a narrative of the passage of time from slavery to freedom. It is a living argument about why the struggle for Black citizenship and dignity remains the beating heart of American democracy.
That over 400-year struggle is receiving unprecedent amounts of attention in popular and political culture. Black history books chronicling the nation's brutal racial past and its connection to the present have stayed atop best sellers lists since last year. "400 Souls," an anthology described by editors Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain as a "community history" of Black America since 1619, came out the second day of this month and is already one of the most acclaimed books of the year.
A new generation of movies and actors are garnering attention for exploring the panoramic nature of the Black experience in film. From the riveting "One Night in Miami," which dramatizes the real life 1964 meet of four icons through a searing conversation between Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and a 22-year-old Cassius Clay shortly before becoming Muhammad Ali, to "Judas and the Black Messiah," the story of FBI informant William O'Neal's role in organizing the police killing of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton in 1969, the politics of Black liberation in America are receiving new and intense public scrutiny on screen. This interest has been global in scope, as witnessed by the extraordinary reception to director Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" series, which documents the Black Afro-British diasporic experience in London in stirring and historically resonant ways.
January 6's violence recalled two earlier periods marked by racial progress and violent setbacks: Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Both moments birthed new freedoms for Black Americans that were met with violent White backlash that future generations have attempted to scrub from national and collective memory.
This Black History Month is different precisely because we are in the midst of another national convulsion over race and democracy, another tortured struggle over the prospect of finally recognizing that Black lives matter.
Our reckoning on racial justice, newfound interest in anti-racism and recognition of the value of Black history and culture for the future of democracy is long overdue. Just as important is the searing self-examination prompted by our violent divisions; looking inward could potentially help us confront longstanding racial inequality by facing our history rather than ignoring or worse, lying about it.
The possibilities for renewed focus on teaching Black history in schools, the public recognition of the roots of contemporary racial division, the moral responsibility of addressing the afterlives of racial slavery (lynching, Jim Crow segregation, mass incarceration and more) make this Black History Month more than just a weeks-long trip down memory lane.
The future of our democratic experiment requires all of us to step up and into this history. Only by embracing the rough and smooth edges of that history, the joy and pain and trauma of our shared Black history, will America ever be able to go down the road toward racial truth, justice, and healing. The bitter irony of the American experiment in the 21st century is that its final hope lies in coming to terms with its original sin by excavating the totality of a national history that continues to shape our present.