Friday, 01 February 2002
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One of the cultural realities which exacerbates racial tension in the U.S. is ignorance, especially white people’s ignorance of the stories, histories, cultures of African Americans. Of a piece with American distinterest in the world at large, most of us white folks don't know nearly as much as we should about the long experience — now tragic, now triumphant — of what it has meant to be African, to be Negro, to be colored, to be black, to be African American in the so–called new world.
A leading element of black political consciousness in the 1960s was the idea that black people had lost — because white people had stolen, forbidden, outlawed — what Malcolm X called knowledge of self. Wrenched from land and culture, separated from family and fellows, alienated from mother tongue, African slaves in the new world were as distant from themselves as from native shores. What kind of person can one be without knowing what kind of people one has come from? What sort of “I” can one be when knowledge of what sort of “we” one’s fellows were has been cut from the living memory? Many cultural and political remedies have been employed so that black people might regain that which was lost, but ignorance of those histories and stories, those triumphs and trials, affects white people, too.
Of course it affects us differently but the results are real enough. As a consequence of our deficit of knowledge, white people will never come to political or moral terms with our responsibilities and our debts to our fellow citizens until we erase that deficit, until we chase away our ignorance with the vital, life–affirming truth. What kind of fellow citizens can we be knowing only lies and quarter–truths about what it means and has meant to be an African American? How can we expect to plumb what we owe or, having taken its measure, experience our selves as gripped by its depths, unless we first know truths about those to whom we owe it? Or first know truths about the ones from whom they are descended?
Since the idea of biological race is a cruel myth, an illusion which serves only to empower the privileged at the expense of the oppressed, how can any so–called white American understand what it means to be an American at all until and unless we know what it means, even if only in part, to be African American? For in a very real sense, African Americans are paradigmatic of what can be, but rarely is best and noblest and truest about us all.
Toward these and other ends, during February Monkeyfist celebrates that curious cultural institution, Black History Month, in the limited, local ways we know best. Not because it is an unflawed institution, but because celebrating black history is a modest way to make good our own shortcomings, because it is a way to strive toward a more perfect union.
This is Celebrating Black History Month <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/810>