Why I Loathe Black History Month

Why I Loathe Black History Month
I dread February.

I didn’t always. Though I make my living writing about race, Black History Month made about as much an impression on me as Arbor Day or a one-month anniversary with a new boyfriend who didn’t know that his days were already numbered. It’s all much ado about nothing, a purely symbolic exercise. I maintained a respectful silence about BlackHistory Month since so many others were pretending it mattered.

So I used to be able to just ignore it—it barely penetrated my consciousness—but then I had kids. Now, they’re at the age where their teachers are required to tell them about Black History Month (“That’s when Dr. King let all the black people ride the buses”) and I’m facing a crossroads. How long will it be before my oblivious,white-looking biracial children notice that their militant black mother has no use for Black History Month?
"Black History Month is just too easy"
Black History Month should be significant. It just isn’t, and for that, blacks have only themselves to blame. The month should be more or less a combined State of the Union address and battle plan when, at best, it’s dressing up in the clothes of those whoaccomplished so much more for us against much worse odds. At worst, it’s the ritual excoriation of white people and history itself. Stentorian, facile condemnations of the past, and crowing over marginal, atypical victories like blacks in high office, take the place of forcefully enunciating racism’s modern contours, and most significantly, formulating specific agendas by which those contourswill be redrawn.

Black History Month is far too much about the perfidy of whites and far too little about how blacks have faced up to the challenges, however monstrously unfair and difficult to surmount. Beginning at the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. DuBois (the inventor of urban sociology) and Carter G. Woodson (the father of both black history and Black History Month) did their part at greatpersonal sacrifice. What about us? Black History Month is just too easy. It’s like bragging about how often you visit your elders in the nursing home rather than taking care of them yourselves.

Yet Black History Month, just like those shut-in elders, must not be abandoned. They’re both relics that should be honored—however willfully cut off from our daily lives—because every now and then,some few of us will be caught unawares and actually driven to live up to and enlarge the history we’ve inherited.
Teaching our children to expect and embrace failure
Nearly a decade ago, I obediently suffered through an interminable Black History Month oration at an inner-city black Catholic church in honor of its newly formed diocesan basketball team. I held my peace while a 50ish black layworker offered up pathetic McNuggets of black history. (“Who invented the stoplight? A black man, that’s who! White folks don’t want you to know that.”) It was the heaping side dishes of black bigotry I couldn’t stomach. His hatred of whites was so virulent, it contorted his very features just to speak of them; looking around this room of Christians, the only consternation I could see was my own.When he happily told that group of adolescents to “expect to be cheated and to lose most games they played against the white churches,” I almost fell out of my folding chair. He was luxuriating in the hopelessness of any encounter with whites and teaching our future to do the same—he was advising them to expect and embrace failure! Much as I was used to hear this kind of “guidance” from my elders,for some reason that day, I reached a breaking point. I had to know what my inheritance truly was, so sure was I that this was not it.

I raced home and finally dove head first into that stack of books blacks quote out of context every February and swear we’re going to read some day (outside of excerpts in college survey courses)—books like The Miseducation of the Negro, The Souls of Black...