Black History Month is not every black person's idea of a good idea.

Why I Loathe Black History Month

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?
By Debra J. Dickerson

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 Black History 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 who accomplished 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 contours will 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 great personal 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 lay worker 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 Folks, the collected works of Frederick Douglass and Dr. King, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, Sojourner Truth, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, every slave memoir I could lay hands on.

Our forebears couldn't take the easy way out… too bad we can
That’s when I learned that I’d been robbed of my true intellectual and moral heritage, but not by whites. It was my own people who lied to me about who I was because, post-civil rights movement, we’re too comfortable in our protected protests to put ourselves on the physical and philosophical line the way our brave forebears did. They couldn’t afford to take the easy way out; too bad we can.

Those books have stood the test of time not because they are about the evil of whites (they’re not, to my surprise) but because they’re about what is required of blacks to live in a world which despises us. They are internal critiques. These works celebrate an oppressed people’s manful responses to their oppression but, most often, catalogue the ways in which we have failed to rise to the challenges that face us; they are notable for the minimal amount of time they spend discussing the perfidy of whites. Their focus is on a love for, and belief in, their people that sets high standards for our behavior in the face of adversity. DuBois and Truth and Woodson—reaching out from across the centuries—were such a rebuke to me as I remembered sitting silently while racism was preached that I actually stopped reading repeatedly to hang my head.

Knowledge truly is power and, knowing what I now do, I can’t bear Black History Month. For my children’s sake, however, I’ll have to try. Somebody’s going to teach them who they are and I’ll be damned if they’ll quietly listen to 35 years of lies and racism the way I did. They’re only 5 and 3, so they’ve got a few more years before they inherit Mom’s books and have to offer dinner table critiques of all the pointless nonsense they hear every February.



Debra J. Dickerson is the author of The End of Blackness and An American Story.