Online discussions of issues pertaining to black history, including Black History Month, are in many ways refreshing, at times engendering critical reflections and discourse among young African Americans born after the modern civil rights and Black Power movements. Michael Eric Dyson’s recent veneration of “an emerging black intelligentsia” in The New Republic is judicious.11 Many of these social critics have creatively used the Internet to disseminate and popularize their ideas. In some respects, they have altered the black public intellectual landscape. At the same time, droves of today’s black bloggers suffer from presentism, failing to analyze contemporary phenomenon in historical contexts. This in part seems to be the case with much of the commentary surrounding Black History Month during 2016 and earlier in the twenty-first century.
QUESTIONING BLACK HISTORY MONTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Black History Month 2016 was discussed and debated for reasons beyond those identified by personal bloggers. On January 20, 2016, African American actress Stacey Dash appeared on “Fox and Friends” to discuss disgruntled African American celebrities who had recently called for a boycott of the Oscars because of an absence of black nominees—namely Jada Pinkett Smith, Spike Lee, Al Sharpton, and others who supported the #OscarsSoWhite movement. Dash denounced BET and its annual awards ceremony and the NAACP Image Awards, deeming the event self-segregation. While elaborating upon why BET should not exist, she added, “Just like there shouldn’t be a Black History Month. We’re Americans. Period. That’s it.” The prying host of the show egged Dash on by asking: “Are you saying that there shouldn’t be a Black History Month because there isn’t a white history month?” and Dash replied, “Exactly. Exactly.” Dash, who endorsed businessman and Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 election and was, from 2014 until 2017, a “semi-regular” personality on the Fox News Channel’s daytime talk show “Outnumbered,” was a hotly discussed newsmaker following her remarks. Unsurprisingly, many African Americans took to social media to criticize the former Clueless actress. Even her cousin, hip-hop mogul Damon Dash, condemned his kin’s comments, surmising that she was paid by Fox News to make such statements.
As brief and perhaps insignificant as they were, Stacey Dash’s statements spilled over onto a larger public stage. At the 2016 Oscars hosted by comedian Chris Rock, she was part of a skit in which she was introduced as being the new director of the Academy’s “minority outreach program,” an initiative that does not exist, of course. Dash announced, “I cannot wait to help my people out. Happy Black History Month.” This parody failed to make a splash with the Oscars’ primarily white audience probably because most were not aware of, or if cognizant took no particular stance toward, her statement about Black History Month. After all, some black people were the ones most baffled by Dash’s comments, not whites. While it is easy to dismiss Dash’s remarks, her brief observations did catapult Black History Month into the realm of social media and popular discourse, especially within black cyber communities. Yet, as Dash herself pointed out on her home page on patheos.com, she was not the first African American thespian to question the existence and purpose of Black History Month in the twenty-first century.
In a by now famous 2005 interview with Mike Wallace on the well-known news magazine 60 Minutes, Morgan Freeman called Black History Month “ridiculous.” Similar to Dash, Freeman whipped up the popular argument that there was not a month specifically designated to acknowledge white Americans’ historical contributions (a “White History Month”). In highlighting this, both failed to acknowledge that in US popular culture and educational institutions white American history and culture is predominantly used as the universal frame of reference, that white American historical icons are routinely venerated. As Afrocentrist Molefi Kete Asante has repeatedly stressed, notions of Eurocentric and white American universality have been largely accepted in US culture. Take, for instance, the images that appear on US currency. Though Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver appeared on US commemorative coins during the 1940s and in 2009 Duke Ellington became the first African American to be featured by himself on a US coin, history was made when it was announced that Harriet Tubman will become the first African American woman to be featured on a US paper note. A writer for the New York Times called this “the most sweeping and historically symbolic makeover of American currency in a century.”12
Black History Month, in essence, exists because it is part of a time-honored tradition. It persists by virtue of this and because of the continued lack of consistent attention given to blacks’ influence on American history and culture, especially in educational systems. If blacks’ contributions and concerns were taken up in a manner that was at least proportional to their impact on American life, then, theoretically, Black History Month would no longer be needed.
Moreover, those who bemoan the absence of a “white history month,” fail to recognize the truism that in the United States “every month is white history month” and that ten other groups of people have formally been awarded months: Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month (May); National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 through October 15); Irish American Heritage Month (March); Women’s History Month (March); Older Americans’ Month (May); Jewish American Heritage Month (May); Gay and Lesbian Pride Month (June); Caribbean-American Heritage Month (June); Italian American Heritage Month (October); and National American Indian Heritage Month (November 1990).
Why aren’t these months, and others, contested in the ways that Black History Month is? A similar trend can be noticed with the critiques on affirmative action. This now passé practice is often presented to the American public as a “black thing,” as if other groups have not benefitted from these policies.
Like others before him, and unlike Dash, Freeman called for an end to Black History Month because he believed that it denigrated the contributions that African Americans had made to US history and culture. “You’re going to relegate my history to a month? … I don’t want a Black History Month,” Freeman declared. “Black history is American history.”13 Though Freeman’s comments triggered a social media frenzy, his thoughts were not original, evoking the age-old and prevailing contributionist and patriotic tradition of black thought and historiography that dates back to the nineteenth century. Frederick Douglass’s steadfast belief in black contributionism was at the center of his consistent opposition—except at the outset of the Civil War—to the emigration and colonization movements during the nineteenth century. In his lengthy address “Lessons of the Hour” (1894), he underscored: “The native land of the American negro is America. His bones, his muscles, his sinews, are all American. His ancestors for two hundred and seventy years have lived, and labored, and died on America soil.”14 Echoing Douglass, countless twentieth-century black historians and activists argued that American history is incomplete without the contributions of African Americans. For decades, African Americans have argued that one month is “not enough” to recognize black American history. Negro History Week founder Carter G. Woodson himself knew that one week was not sufficient for memorializing the black past.
The beliefs of Freeman, Dash, and others that Black History Month segregates black people has been taken up by conservative spokespersons who see little value in the observance and create calculated arguments to jettison it. Take, for instance, an article published in the conservative semi-monthly magazine the National Review in 2013 entitled “Against Black History Month” by staff writer and author of the popular The Conservatarian Manifesto (2016). He begins by glossing over why Woodson created Negro History Week and then fast forwards to the present, marveling at how much things have supposedly changed. For him, unlike during Woodson’s