Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness throughout the world.

Special Treat – In Honour of Black History Month

February 19, 2007

Your History

By Bruce Newman

The real problem is to make white Americans more aware of the black dimension of their experience. – Albert Murray

            I’ve been asked to write something about Black History Month. It’s like being asked to write about a dead relative you always gave grief about his less than sterling qualities but now glorify as the last Boy Scout. Black History Month is often seen through the same kind of romanticized unreality and therefore isn’t really seen at all. There are two things that ensure we remain clueless about things of real importance in life: Being content to think like the herd and not allowing our instincts and intuitions to develop into strong capacities that keep our common sense from becoming too common. Lacking these, fantasy is our only option because we aren’t fit for reality.

Due to this lust for fantasy my task is difficult. Not for me but for some readers. I have no problems with lobbing the grenades while giggling like an eight-year-old stealing his sister’s Halloween candy. But we live in a time when many are determined that fantasy be more real than reality and God help you if you suggest otherwise. For a current example just look at Grey’s Anatomy actor Isaiah Washington. Here’s a man, a black man at that, who has caved in to homosexual fascism like a West Virginia coal mine. My mother used to tell me that some white people used to say that black people had tails. Washington makes me think there may have been some basis in fact to the story since his is well tucked between his legs. He has breathed in too much of the toxicity of politically correct fantasy. I never write for such losers.

Black History Month was established to bring the accomplishments of black people, which for most of America’s history was denied, to the public consciousness. That’s as it should be. There’s no way the status quo of acting as if black people never made significant contributions to society could last. It would be like trying to hold a lid on a boiling pot forever. Sooner or later it explodes. But like everything initially intended for good, Black History Month has fallen prey to the familiarity that breeds contempt. It rolls around every February and we know that we will see a lot of clips of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. giving speeches and marching through southern towns. We’ll see documentaries (some not bad) and the now familiar scenes of civil rights marchers being blasted with water hoses and set upon by dogs and police. We’ll hear sound bites of information about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Muhammad Ali and others. Kids will do obligatory book reports in school on some historical black figure whose spirit they get no real glimpse of. Yawn. I’m sick of it. Because now there are a whole lot of people walking around thinking they know something about black history that really don’t know anything. But that goes for history in general as well. Herd thinkers and those content to be spoon fed by a creativity lobotomized society are addicted to fantasy at the very times they think they’re being realistic.

Any original, revolutionary thought becomes neutralized and absorbed as soon as it becomes business as usual, as soon as it becomes part of the routine thoughts of the herd that forget the reasons it was ever needed. It’s not hard to find examples. The formation of our own United States Constitution makes for some very exciting reading. It almost didn’t happen and when it did it had its dissenters, the Anti-Federalists, whose criticisms you’ll never be exposed to except by accident or you seek it out yourself. Frankly I think the Anti-Federalists (I particularly like Cato’s Letters) had the better arguments. Today the Constitution is a largely ignored document by the public, few of which have actually read it, and by our leaders who spend the better part of their time referring to it in awed tones even as they pass laws that effectively afford it less respect than toilet paper. Nobody notices. It’s been absorbed into herd thought. Because of that we can hear references to the Constitution all the time and it never really registers with us whether or not the statements are true or false even though one would think it just might be important to know how the founding document of your country was being interpreted. It’s been absorbed.

            Now when Black History Month rolls around it’s just accepted as part of the calendar scenery, hopefully translating into a day off work. The truth is that, though Black History was necessarily created so that black contributions could be recognized the goal should be to see it as seamless part of history. Because it doesn’t matter who you are, black, white or otherwise, black history is your history. Harriet Tubman wasn’t just some nice lady who led slaves to freedom. She carried a gun and would shoot the slave who lost his nerve and tried to turn back. Garrett Morgan invented the gas mask. He also invented the traffic light. What would our road system be without traffic lights? Are only black people regulated by traffic lights? No. If you can read the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass and not be moved then you’re dead. Not moved just as a black person but as a person, because his struggles were human. If you can read Black Boy by Richard Wright and not be drawn into his words as he makes you understand that he is not reporting his experiences only as that abstract being called a black man but as a human being who happens to be black then be afraid, be very afraid, because your heart isn’t working as designed. The same can be said for James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Black History Month, for those who have the vitality and sincerity to peer through the fog, is recognition of the struggles of black human beings to overcome great odds. That not only makes it valuable as a source of strength and wisdom for black people but for everyone. I’m not Jewish. But I have read a number of books by holocaust survivors that added to my understanding of the human condition, things I’ll never forget. You don’t have to be a Jew to receive from Jews. You don’t have to be black to receive from black folk. But you do have to be real. As long as you are there are no true barriers for you, racial or otherwise. Everything other humans did is yours. Because of this Black History Month can be your entry point into all history since there really is no separation. Black people didn’t do what they did in a cultural vacuum. This would be more obvious to everyone if we didn’t insist on labeling and categorizing everything.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black pilots made famous by their exploits protecting American bombers in WWII. They never lost one bomber. Their commander was then Col. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. I read his book Benjamin Davis, Jr., American: An Autobiography years ago. I was so impressed that I went to the library and hunted down Davis’s address. He was still alive at the time (1995) and living in Arlington, Virginia. I wrote him a letter and told him how much I liked his book. I asked him what he thought about a couple of things, one being use of the term African-American, which I’ve never liked. I also asked him to write me back if possible so that I’d have something to show my sons. I supplied a self-addressed stamped envelope in case he did. Well, he did. One thing he told me was that, in his view, an African-American was an African citizen who becomes an American citizen. Otherwise black Americans are simply Americans. It was very gratifying to have a man of Mr. Davis’s stature confirm my own view. He died a few years ago. I still have his letter. As literary and jazz critic Albert Murray says,

“For my purpose I go back to 1619 or whenever it was that cargo of the first 20 blacks was dropped in Virginia. Once they came here, they became Americans and you had the birth of the blues – let us say – which the Africans have no connections with. The essence of the black experience in America is in that art form, that idiom which is blues music. African music doesn’t vary. They don’t riff.”

If you understand what Murray said then you’ll understand why the static replay of Black History Month as it presently plays is anemic. It doesn’t riff.

            The whole picture I’m trying to paint here is that black history is not just a yearly historical speed bump. We have made it that way because we are very good at taking what’s vibrant and alive and stripping it down to where it’s almost microwavable. In the meantime we completely forget the reason and particularly the spirit of why any of it happened. We do that with many things. Black history is illusory if you think of it apart from general history. Perhaps we still need the official reminder of Black History Month. But even if so let each person who will hear take what has become a petrified reminder and soften it up. You can take a day old doughnut, zap it in the microwave for ten seconds and have something close to the original freshness. You can also take Black History Month in all its merry-go-round repetitiveness; add to it your sincere desire to understand and you will find yourself with a living thing, warm and fresh, participating in something that deepens your humanity because in the end that’s all any of it is really about. It was your history all the time.

Bruce Newman

rbnewman55@netzero.net