Is Black History Month the problem?

Columnist for The Root DC, Clinton Yates questions the effectiveness of Black History Month in his piece “Whither Black History Month? The problem isn’t the month, it’s the history.” Check out his account:

[divider]

…Back in 2005, Morgan Freeman famously declared the month as “ridiculous” during an interview on “60 Minutes.” Others have argued that, as a now-“post-racial” society, the month brings more division than integration. But the problem is not with the month, it’s with the history. At this point, with all the television ads, cultural programming and so forth that I see, February might as well be labeled “Ancient Black Civil Rights History Month.”

Black America’s history is more than just Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., obviously. But those are the names that I continually hear in the context of the celebration. I asked two educators what they thought about the month and how it could be updated.

Sharon Harley, associate professor of African American studies at the University of Maryland, thinks the move away from figures some might call “contributionists” is underway.

“Today, the programming and the scholarship focuses on women as well as men; prominent figures and the working class; the politics and culture of multiple groups of  people of African descent in the U.S. and globally,” Harley said. “In speeches and presentations [I make] to a wide range of people and groups, I am often impressed by the large number of people who turn out, and their enthusiasm. I discover that when people are exposed to the diversity, richness and complexity of black history and how it intersects with the history of whites, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans in the U.S. and globally, they are often compelled to know.”

Which is all well and good, but revisiting the same old stories as a matter of course is not really progress. Leslie Hinkson, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgetown University, thinks the message might have been lost on some of her students, who, admittedly, are in a different class profile than most blacks in this country.

Read more from The Root DC.

[divider]