Ralph Ellison published “Invisible Man” in 1952, a masterpiece of American literature. “Invisible Man” does what literature today strives constantly to do — with wit and music, it captures the clash of disparate and converging cultures, the violence and bigotry that springs from such convergence. And above all, it remains true to the racialized subject. Ellison, like his predecessors and successors Douglass, Baldwin, Morrison or more recently, Colson Whitehead or Zadie Smith, conveys the anxiety and disproportionate out-of-place-ness to which African-Americans (and, considering Smith, black people globally) have been both quietly and violently subjected.
This essay does not strive only to remind you of those literary giants for whom history, writing and race relations have meshed so vividly, successfully and powerfully. Nor is it written as any kind of comprehensive history lesson. Rather, I hope only to have thus far provided some footing from which I can make a claim you might be hearing this month and in subsequent Februarys (since the argument’s fanbase is growing).
Let’s do away with Black History Month.
The month of February has since 1976 been legally considered “Black History Month” in the United States. The 28 or 29day vigil comes originally from a week in February which Carter G. Woodson, a historian, claimed as “Negro History Week” in remembrance and celebration of the birthdays of two great emancipators — Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Since 1976, kids across the U.S. have been taught every February bits of African-American history: the roots of slavery and America’s foundation, the causes and outcome of the Civil War, the prose and poetry of great thinkers and writers of the 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries. February, while the shortest month, has given generations of students and historians alike reason to celebrate a traditionally marginalized perspective.
This, precisely, is why Black History Month has run its course. A great segregation has been carried out under our very noses; in fact, it has occurred without much question for decades. For one month every year, American curriculum demands educators spend time teaching kids about African-American history, that they relegate an hour or two each day in February — time spent usually learning about American Revolutionaries or the Spanish American War or basic systems of government — to teach “A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” about Langston Hughes’ “Harlem,” the Harlem Renaissance, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
My education, a white male Utah education, was no different. I got snippets of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and was let to pore over accounts of slave ship crossings. Abraham Lincoln was heavily emphasized.
However, as soon as February was over and March 1 reared its windy head, the African-American history was duly sidled back to its place on the uppermost spot on bookshelves too rickety to climb.
Black History Month, as so many have said before, is marginalization at its most sinister. It allows white Americans the chance to feel reprieved from having to seriously consider the role and legacy of African-American leaders and sufferers eleven months out of the year. Morgan Freeman said it best, with velvety voice: “Black history is American history.” It should be treated thus.
A serious integration of African American history must take place. No longer should an entire cultural story be corralled to what David Olusoga in The Guardian aptly calls “a history ghetto.” With the continuation of Black History month, the risk this keeps happening is far too great.
Some may argue that it takes a month of determined celebration and recognition to reinvigorate enthusiasm for equality between races. Really, all the Month does is segregate parcels of history that should, ideally and feasibly, be taught and celebrated and honored and mourned in tandem with the rest of American history. A dual perspective of this kind would only help children and teens see the nuance inherent to the foundation of America and the troubled presumptions of “American exceptionalism.”
This doesn’t end with the integration of black history. So too should those traditionally marginalized voices and histories — Native American, Hispanic, female, post-colonial immigrant, etc. — be given greater (dare I say, equal) representation in American curricula.
One of the opening lines in Ellison’s “Invisible Man” speaks to this issue: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” For eleven months each year, this is wickedly true of the African American voice. Because of laziness or ignorance or discomfort or lack of resources and guidance, many Americans refuse to see the significance and applicability of voices cast to the margins of U.S. history. It’s time to integrate these voices. Time to let Black History Month go.