Why I Don't Celebrate Black History Month...

Hi all,

I hope you had a good weekend. It’s always good when my 49ers make the Super Bowl — time to take out the Kansas City Swifties!

We’ve got another Black History Month coming our way and I thought I’d share my thoughts on it with you:

Upsetting the Oppressor’s Agenda

Carter G. Woodson, the father of Negro History Week, wrote: “If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself.”

The same man also wrote: “If you teach the Negro that he has accomplished as much good as any other race he will aspire to equality and justice without regard to race. Such an effort would upset the program of the oppressor in Africa and America.”

The America in which Woodson wrote those words was a harshly segregated one where folks like my own grandfather, born to ex-slaves, could only rise to the level of a truck driver despite possessing the brilliance of an Ivy League professor. While my grandfather never allowed himself to be stigmatized as racially inferior, there were many blacks who did, and Woodson sought to liberate them with examples of black achievement.

Never would he have imagined that his Negro History Week would morph into a corporatized Black History Month, corrupted by noblesse oblige from privileged whites and blacks invested in upholding the white-oppressor and black-victim dichotomy.

Every February, we partake in the empty ritual of opening Black History Month emails from corporations advertising social justice messages that can be summed up as: “There is more work to be done.” The lie here is that this “work” does not lead to freedom or a better society. The “work” here means labeling “equality and justice”—the very values that Woodson saw as the key to freedom for all—as vestiges of white supremacy that must be dismantled along with other American principles. 

The tragedy of today’s America, Black History Month being only one symptom, is that so many of us have fallen into the trap of seeking our own inferiority. For those of us who refuse this path, Black History Month has no meaning because we have “upset the program of the oppressor” by seeking to become fully realized Americans. 

Aside from this, I am nearly done with a short documentary on antisemitism that will be part of the larger white guilt documentary. I’m not sure how the release will go but I will try to provide a sneak peek here somehow. Will keep you posted.

Until then, stay warm,

Eli