Posted on 02/17/2011 7:58:32 PM PST by neverdem
To feel that something is tired in the idea of Black History Month isn’t, despite what one might hear from some quarters, racist. When Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week in 1926, he hoped that the need for such a celebration would gradually recede. For the week to morph into a month did not exactly bear out his wishes, and today, even black people brandish an array of objections to Black History Month. Actor Morgan Freeman wonders why the history of his people must be relegated to a single month. Others more recreationally inclined consider it suspicious that February is the shortest month. Is it perhaps time to let Black History Month go?
The question is not whether black history is important. It is whether America still needs to be reminded of that fact. What would an America sufficiently aware of black history look like? Suppose, say, the organizers of a centennial commemoration of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo decided to highlight the racially discriminatory side of the original event. Or suppose a traveling museum exhibit of slave ship artifacts reportedly got record-breaking attendance at every site that it visited. Both have happened, both suggest an America that “gets” black history—and both occurred ten years ago, at this writing.
Just a year later, Washington State Representative Hans Dunshee, who is white, agitated to have Jefferson Davis’s name removed from a Seattle highway and replaced with the name of William P. Stewart, a black Civil War veteran from Washington. Meanwhile, white Underground Railroad buffs in Ohio were the most vocal critics of various historical distortions in a planned Cincinnati National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. In modern America, things like this are ordinary: I chose among countless possibilities. If this isn’t an America ready to heed Carter G. Woodson’s advice, then what would be?
How about fast-forwarding to last year? Isabel Wilkerson’s chronicle of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, was one of the most ecstatically received books of the year and will likely win a Pulitzer. Another of the most popular books of 2010 was Rebecca Skloot’s chronicle of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cancer cells researchers harvested without her knowledge; the story will soon be an HBO film. On Broadway, the hit musical Memphis depicted the rise of rock and roll amid a violent response to an interracial romance. Another musical, this one about the injustice perpetrated in the 1930s upon the Scottsboro Boys, was brought from Off Broadway to the Great White Way despite highly mixed reviews, because its (white) creators and backers thought it too important not to be more widely seen.
And we also live in an era when history textbooks are dedicated to chronicling slavery to such an extent that critics decry the decrease in space devoted to other aspects of history, and when university leaders consider it more important that an undergraduate know what institutional racism is than what the Munich Agreement was. All of this is why a month dedicated to black history now feels like a month dedicated to seat belts. Both are now part of the fabric of American life, with black history almost as insistent on any wakeful person’s attention as the pinging sound in a car when you don’t buckle up.
It can be strangely hard to admit that a battle has been won. But especially considering that the typical white person isn’t exactly a walking encyclopedia of “white” history, it’s time to admit that America knows its black history as well as anyone has reason to wish it to.
John H. McWhorter is a City Journal contributing editor.
Embrace Black History Month! My son’s 4th grade teacher gave him a choice of doing a paper on MLK, Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson. Instead he chose Herman Cain and Alan West, having watched their speeches at CPAC. The teacher had not heard of either one of them. But I assure you, when he is done presenting his report in front of the class, she will, and so will the 12 black kids in the room.
Awesome....take the fight for true Liberty to them by not letting them dictate the ground rules.
Wonderful. Give him an A from the FR for excellent work.
That’s what he’s talking about. LOL!
LOL! But they haven’t stood for much else besides national security and a fair amount of crony capitalism until the modern conservative movement got started.
Herman Cain and Alan West, can’t do much better than that. IIRC, Cain is the only one who has actually announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination.
How about a setting aside a month - or even a day, starting small - to talk positively about the great White Americans of the past like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson or George Washington?
We can do this with Pocahontas, Harriet Tubman, Cesar Chavez, George Washington Carver ... why not for European Americans? Shouldn’t they be encouraged to take pride in their ancestors?
That’s what the multiculturalists want for every group in the world with one notable exception.
Of course even to broach the subject is to be hounded and tarred and feathered as a “racist” and “white supremacist” - because the definition of a “racist” is no longer hatred or aversion or discrimination against “people of color,” but merely having a positive view about Western culture or pre-1965 America.
You can literally show up at a campaign rally with an Allen West campaign button with your black wife and a sign that says “I LOVE Black People” and still, and still, you will get called a “racist” by the likes of an Al Sharpton.
Of course we could get rid of all the race based set asides and caucuses and television channels and museums and perks in the federal budget.
But then the special interests would howl with outrage like they were being assaulted by the Ku Klux Klan itself just like the public employees unions are doing over their entitlements up in Wisconsin right now with the Scott Walker/Hitler signs.
this may surprise most here but while i oppose. MLK day i think a special recognition for true black heroes or accomplishments. is reasonable
Climate change: Galileo moment for GOP (agitprop alert!)
A lost cause: The high-speed rail race (WaPo whacks Obama again!)
Selective use of science ‘as bad as racism or homophobia’ (war against "bad" science)
Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.
u really should read up on King...the myth has. become the reality but its still a lie
do you think you know better than Buckley....Reagan...and Goldwater who were there?
ill take their word for it....just for starters King supported our enemies in a time. of war....no different than Fonda...cept he got a holiday
no
Is he being funny when he says, “typical white person”? Isn’t that what Bambi called his typical white grandmother?
What about the Indians? If ever a group got screwed it was them. Black have MLK day—what do Native Americans Have? Thanksgiving? The Mexicans have Cinco de Mayo, Irish Saint Pats, Italians Columbus Day,Chinese—the Lunar New Year. Blacks should have a day—but that’s it.
Black History Coupla Hours should be more than sufficient.
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Thanks. My wife and I can't afford private or homeschooling right now. So we've decided to arm our 9-year old with the Constitution, 'Liberty and Tyranny' and FACTS; and told him he should question everything he is taught that does not conform to those facts, and let the chips falls where they may.
“Yeah, I thought this was a post-racial society.”
It is. The Ministry of Truth has so decreed.
What's special about 2014?
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