Beyond Black History Month - Thomas Chatterton Williams Feb. 26, 2021

As a Black Man, I celebrate black history every day. This is an article that resonates with me. As it is long, I pasted a few sections as a summary. Styron Powers

SUMMARY

“If we care about solving the racial dilemma once and for all, we should first strive to create a society in which Black people, and by extension all other identity groups, are not considered and celebrated as different. We need to arrive at a psychological place where we no longer require a Black History Month, since we would learn about the American past in ways capacious and finely tuned enough to reflect the entirety of our shared, tragic and transcendent mongrel history.

I do not know what exact form that new history and instruction should take, but I do know from experience that when people are able to meet as equals —or at the very least with a certain floor of dignity—plenty of other tensions resolve themselves. 

As a result, race is classed, and class is raced to an extent that is all but impossible to rectify without at least some material reparation. One needn’t stretch back to slavery in search of demonstrable harm, either. Men and women of my father’s generation—and their descendants—are still living with the consequences of unequal lending practices that have hindered Black families from building and passing on wealth.

What we need instead is to find ways to rectify past wrongs and present discrimination while moving toward a society in which racial and other immutable differences are seriously attenuated, in which physical characteristics and ancestry tell us as little as possible about the various individuals we happen to encounter.

In his landmark 1962 essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (later published in book form as “The Fire Next Time”), James Baldwin waxed inspirational: “For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion,” he wrote. “And the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion,” he continued. “I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand.”

ENTIRE ARTICLE:

American society is more willing than ever before to speak out against racism and to embrace Black history, but we continue to make the fatal mistake of taking the concept of race itself for granted.

It is a useful and thought-provoking exercise to attempt to explain, in James Baldwin’s apt phrase, the “system of reality” of one’s own country to foreigners. Why, for example, do we venerate the men and women we choose to put on pedestals? Why do we memorize certain dates and not other ones? Why do we recount events from one vantage point and not another? Speaking with someone who shares few if any of your own assumptions about these matters forces you to spell things out step by step and re-evaluate much of what you assume to be normal.

In France, where I have lived for the past decade, I find myself frequently discussing America’s at turns maddening and inspiring racial history, which can seem exotic from this side of the Atlantic. When I first arrived in Paris, that meant listening happily and even haughtily to my European interlocutors as they expressed esteem tinged with disbelief at the feat of Barack Obama’s barrier-shattering presidency, which they used as an unflattering measuring stick for their own societies. In the era of Donald Trump, those conversations turned dramatically less admiring and much more perplexed and even pitying. In the wake of the international racial justice movement sparked by George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis while in police custody, and as the author of a book about the need to “unlearn” received habits of thought about racial categorization, I am now constantly being asked to make sense of legacies of oppression and to speculate about how to transcend them.

For foreigners not steeped in what the writer Stanley Crouch termed the “all-American skin game,” it can be difficult to grasp why, as many on the left now believe, the best way to rectify the corrosive effects of racial differentiation and discrimination is to find new and better ways to differentiate and discriminate...by race. At Fieldston, a $50,000-a-year New York City private school, children as young as 8 years old are segregated into racial “affinity groups.” On Twitter, viral hashtag movements encourage educators to “disrupt texts” and assign students of all ages only those authors whose complexion, gender or sexuality mirrors their own. Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley declared in 2019 that “We don’t need any more Black faces that don’t want to be a Black voice”—the implication being that even our values and ideas must fit within racialized fences.

The scholars (and sisters) Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields have assigned the term “racecraft” to the mental terrain, mores and customs of language that are produced by racism. They see racecraft—and not superficial physical differences—as the engine of America’s pervasive belief in the illusion of race. And so, especially at this time of year, another common question for an American abroad can be: What is the need for Black History Month? Why isn’t U.S. history sufficient?

Week in February 1926, in the same month as the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, its reason for being was self-evident. It was an efficient and practical way of increasing public recognition of a community that had been enslaved just two generations prior. It would be almost another 40 years before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s secured equal citizenship and legal protection for this besieged population. Following the turbulence and violence of that decade, and anticipating the cultural shift toward Black power and nationalism, Black History Month was first proposed by educators and the Black United Students organization at Kent State University in February 1969.

In 1976, some 50 years after Woodson’s initial celebration, President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month, urging Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” By the time I was a student in New Jersey in the 1980s and ’90s—the son of a Black father descended from slaves in Texas and a white evangelical Christian mother from Southern California—Black History Month felt less like a novel invention than a permanent and inevitable feature of the collective psyche.

“If you were shuttled through the American public-school system, you were likely taught that George Washington Carver invented peanut butter,” Doreen St. Felix observed several years ago in the New Yorker. She pointed out that this was just one of several inaccuracies often found in classroom accounts of Carver, whose invention of many other peanut products was an extension of his work as an agricultural scientist to prevent soil depletion on Southern farms. “It was conveyed to you that the man was a farmer who made his discovery while fumbling in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century laboratory situated in the vague geographical metaphor that is ‘the South.’ If this is the lesson you learned, I am almost certain that it was conveyed to you with the particular gravity that is used to persuade children of the ultimate usefulness of a minority race, and I am also certain that you learned it during Black History Month.”

That certainly was my own experience. Well before I could articulate the reasons why, I could intuit that there was something well-meaning but saccharine and faintly embarrassing about such a contrived and fleeting reverence. I remember my youthful discomfort with the way that superficial differences were highlighted and abstract identities were boxed in, cordoned off from one another. Mostly, I was aware that I did not like the way that my white classmates interacted (or failed to interact) with this instruction. A lack of attention and respect was unnerving but so too—and perhaps even more so—was an excess of patronizing feeling.

Today, it is difficult to recall that more optimistic and, in retrospect, frightfully naive moment when the election of Barack Obama momentarily seemed to herald the dawn of a new “post-racial” America. From 2008, when candidate Obama drew an unthinkable crowd of some 200,000 Germans in Berlin, until 2012, when an unarmed Black 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin was stalked, confronted and killed in cold blood by a neighborhood vigilante in Sanford, Fla., it seemed as though things really had gotten better.

Of course, not all Americans felt this way about Mr. Obama. There was also the “birther” movement to delegitimize his presidency and a profound political backlash that elected his polar opposite in 2016. But for many Americans, Mr. Obama’s election seemed to show that the “arc of the moral universe” that the 19th-century transcendentalist Theodore Parker had spoken of—and that Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Obama himself had so memorably invoked—really did “bend toward justice.”

We should strive to create a society in which Black people, and by extension all

Now, after four years of hyperpolarization under President Trump and one extraordinary season of sometimes violent protest focused on race and policing, that credulous flirtation with the audacity of hope other identity groups, seems impossible to recapture. Yet I am are not considered and convinced that we are never going to be celebrated as able to solve the fundamental, all- consuming problem of American racism different. so long as we continue to believe in and reproduce intellectually and morally bankrupt ideas of racial difference—however innocuous and justified they may seem on first blush.

If we care about solving the racial dilemma once and for all, we should first strive to create a society in which Black people, and by extension all other identity groups, are not considered and celebrated as different. We need to arrive at a psychological place where we no longer require a Black History Month, since we would learn about the American past in ways capacious and finely tuned enough to reflect the entirety of our shared, tragic and transcendent mongrel history.

I do not know what exact form that new history and instruction should take, but I do know from experience that when people are able to meet as equals —or at the very least with a certain floor of dignity—plenty of other tensions resolve themselves. To make e pluribus unum more than a platitude is not only a political task but an economic one. Distinctions of class exist in every country, but in America they are powerfully linked to specific legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.

As a result, race is classed, and class is raced to an extent that is all but impossible to rectify without at least some material reparation. One needn’t stretch back to slavery in search of demonstrable harm, either. Men and women of my father’s generation—and their descendants—are still living with the consequences of unequal lending practices that have hindered Black families from building and passing on wealth.

Breaking down the economic as well as the mental walls that divide us— even and perhaps especially when the latter are erected for prideful and not hateful purposes—would be a significant step toward an authentic antiracism, instead of the shortsighted version currently saturating the nation’s discourse. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Ibram X. Kendi argues in his era-defining book “How To Be an Antiracist,” which became a number one bestseller in 2020. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

This is, in fact, the opposite of a lasting solution. It is a recipe for the reproduction of racism ad infinitum. We are drowning in the fetishization of artificial differences, which is why the Fieldses’ concept of racecraft is so evocative. Even though our society is more willing than ever to affirm that “Black lives matter” and to speak out against racism, we continue to make the fatal mistake of taking the concept of race itself for granted. Like witchcraft in colonial New England, the Fields sisters argue, racecraft is also a system of unquestioned assumptions and beliefs firmly held by a given society and recreated daily. Like witchcraft, it is patently not based in reality.

Blackness isn’t real because whiteness isn’t real. What is real, of course, is the fact that men and women like my father have been socially deemed Black in America, and this is a category that has been used to hurt and exclude them for generations, even as it has led to extraordinary cultural contributions and forms of uplift and solidarity. We often embrace and find solace in our racialized identities as an artificial defense against real attacks on our selfhood and dignity. Unlearning race is not about insisting that the achievements of men and women who overcame extraordinary odds aren’t valuable or worthy of recognition. On the contrary, they are valuable to us all and implicate everyone, because they are part of our common humanity and Americanness. They should be taught as a central part of U.S. history, not set aside and contemplated in isolation.

Beyond the binary of Black and white, the world that we’re fast creating is one in which every conceivable identity ends up being presented as something akin to an essence—unbridgeable to those who don’t share it and frequently defined by little more than its relationship to oppression. Too many of us on either side of the color line, and all points between, seem not just profoundly uninterested in moving beyond race but positively invested in maintaining its grip over our lives.

What we need instead is to find ways to rectify past wrongs and present discrimination while moving toward a society in which racial and other immutable differences are seriously attenuated, in which physical characteristics and ancestry tell us as little as possible about the various individuals we happen to encounter.

In his landmark 1962 essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind” (later published in book form as “The Fire Next Time”), James Baldwin waxed inspirational: “For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion,” he wrote. “And the value placed on the color of the skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion,” he continued. “I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand.”

What I’m proposing may seem wildly implausible, but I remain at heart an optimist about my fraught country. If it was radical in the 20th century to imagine an entire month set aside to honor the contributions of Black Americans, it is perhaps even more radical in the 21st century to begin to conceive of a future in which such distinctions cease to be needed.

—Mr. Williams is the author of “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Family, Fatherhood and Rethinking Race” and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.