All History Is Black History →

If a people has a past worth learning about, then they also must have a future worth caring about. This is true whether one is talking about black Americans or Native Americans, Palestinians or Kurds, Roma or Tibetans, or any of the other dozens of peoples whose pasts, presents, and futures have been systematically deprived of them by more powerful peoples and governments.

At least that was the lesson I learned from Black History Month as a child. It might seem trite or even clichéd, until you imagine what impact a “Palestinian History Month” would have in Israel, or Shi’i or Coptic History months in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or a Jewish history month in Iraq or Lebanon, never mind the impossibility of imagining them in the present climate. The first rule to denying people the right to live freely on their land is to deny them their historical narrative.

So in fact, it would seem that Black History Month, which began in 1926 as the more modest Negro History Week, constituted an important milestone in the growing realisation that black people had a history - and thus a permanent place and inalienable right to be citizens - in the United States. It is certainly true, as historians Leigh Raiford and Michael Cohen write in their Al Jazeera column on Black History Month and the Uses of the Past, that the present corporatised version of Black History Month is but the latest example of how radical black voices, and the ultimately radical vision of black - and through it, American - liberation of figures like Martin Luther King, have been suppressed from the mainstream narrative associated with the month.

But if we consider how much effort conservatives continue to expend to deny President Obama his identity as a natural-born American citizen (never mind a Christian; that is, a bona fide member of the dominant cultural community), it’s clear that, if the focus and even substance of the activities surrounding the month can be debated, the need for continued emphasis on the legitimacy of black history in American society, cannot be denied.

And if we consider that Euro-American historiography has for centuries defined sub-Saharan Africans and Africa as literally having no history (as epitomised by the view of that ur-modern philosopher of modernity, G W F Hegel), the long road before us until black history, and through it black power, is as acceptable as its white counterpart, comes more clearly into view.