Black History Month: You're history
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Black History Month really hasn't been the same since Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States.
Last year, we already had a vague premonition that things were about to change drastically. You'll recall that at the time, Barack Obama was engaged in a tough primary fight for the Democratic nomination.
It was during Black History Month 2008 that the Obama campaign began picking up speed. Super Tuesday made believers out of a lot of folks for whom the notion of a black president was the stuff of "24" reruns and Morgan Freeman film festivals.
In April, comedian Wanda Sykes hinted that an Obama victory wouldn't necessarily be the best thing for black folks: "I'm worried, because if [Obama] wins, black people are going to have to come up with another excuse," she told a reporter. "You can't blame the Man when you are the Man."
By the time election night rolled around, all I could think about while watching Barack Obama mount the stage at Chicago's Grant Park was how such a historic victory would affect Black History Month.
I'm old enough to remember Black History Month's precursor -- "Negro History Week" -- and how it was celebrated. Before Martin Luther King's assassination, black kids like me in elementary school had to settle for a seven-day celebration of all things Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and George Washington Carver.
It was an era in which the legend of Benjamin Banneker was rolled out like an artificial Christmas tree every February. By the early 1970s, Negro History Week had been thoroughly drenched in the blood of MLK, transforming it into a martyr's holiday with uplifting tales to build self-esteem served on the side.
Caught up in the bicentennial spirit, Gerald Ford -- the Black History Month of modern American presidents -- magnanimously ceded all of February to black people. Once it was expanded by 21 days, Negro History Week was immediately rechristened Black History Month.
There was a lot of excitement about black folks having their own month until someone -- I think it was Redd Foxx -- pointed out that at 28 days, it was at least two days shorter than every other month.
Like every other teenager who took sartorial advice from both Sly Stone and Julius Erving, I was too busy hot combing my afro and wearing daishikis to care.
It didn't take long for Black History Month to get all afrocentric on us in the late '70s. It happened some time after Alex Haley's "Roots" became the most-watched program in television history.
Suddenly, Black History Month went from being about Daniel Hale Williams, the black physician who performed the world's first open-heart surgery, to Shaka Zulu, the warrior chief who attempted open-heart surgery on the white colonists of South Africa using only spears.
Thus began my very complicated, though mostly bemused, relationship with Black History Month. The queasiness I feel about these 28 days in the heart of winter is similar to how I feel about those top-selling "ghetto-lit" books that dominate the African-American corner of the local chain bookstore.
They embarrass me, but there's no denying that somebody gets something out of gaudy, badly written books about sex and violence determined to push the advances of civil rights back 60 years.
There's a long-running debate over African-American sections in bookstores: some black readers and writers welcome them, others see them as regressive segregation. Count me in the second camp. I'm outraged when I see Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison assigned to the same shelves as the authors of "Tru to da Game" and "A Hustler's Wife" simply because they share skin color.
Maybe book retailers should think about placing most ghetto-lit in the romance section where it truly belongs. Talk about a section that needs integrating. Grouping these novels by genre makes a lot more sense than the way they are currently classified in most places.
Which brings us back to Black History Month. Now that Barack Obama and his family have moved into the White House, it's time to rethink the holiday Carter G. Woodson came up with nearly a century ago.
Times have changed. Even the Republicans have a black guy running the party. Maybe February can go back to being for all of us.
First Published February 6, 2009 12:00 am
