Reflections on Black History Month
As we are approaching the end of Black History Month, I thought I’d write down what I have been thinking throughout this month. Black history month has always been a time for deep reflection for me. Navigating the world as a Black man can be challenging to say the least. Yet, I spent much of this month reflecting on the privileges that I am afforded. I always think of how privileged I am for being born in a post-colonial era of an African nation and to grow up in the post-civil rights movement era in a rich nation.
Black History Month is a time not only to celebrate but to also confront the history of Black people past and present. At the risk of sounding too downbeat, I believe it is important for each society to genuinely confront its history. It is the case of the history of Black people. It must not be whitewashed. Black history is a history of segregation and degradation. A history of chained limbs, broken bones, breathless bodies, and stolen wealth. It is also a history of resistance, revolution, protest, progress, and ongoing struggle.
Throughout this month, I often thought of what people who looked like me were going through less than a century ago. Whether on the North American continent where they were segregated and dehumanized or on the African continent where they were subjugated to theft and plunder by colonialization.
When I think of Black history month, I think of the enslaved Africans who were working the cotton fields. I think of the Black child who had his hands mutilated for not harvesting enough rubber in the fields of colonized Congo. I think of South African students who were shot dead while marching against the apartheid regime. I think of the Black American veteran who went overseas to fight the monstrosity of Nazism and returned to his homeland to be killed for removing a Jim Crow sign. I also think of Anne Nixon Cooper who was born under segregation and lived to see the emancipation of women, the acquisition of civil rights by African Americans, and the election of a Black man to the highest office in the wealthiest and the most powerful nation in human history. I think of pain and suffering. I think of the plunder and theft. I also think of hope and progress.
This month is also a time not to look away from the pain and suffering of Black people past and present. A time to be aware that racism, in its past and present form, is a visceral experience. It is a time to ally oneself to the causes of Black folks. These causes are the fight against discrimination of Black people – be it in France, the U.S., Canada, or elsewhere. They are also the fight against extreme poverty, the fight against underdevelopment by neocolonialism, and the fight for democracy and the dignity of Black people on the African continent and everywhere in the world. I will leave you with these words written over half a century ago by the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire – words that still resonate intensely in our time:
There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the “universal.” My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.
…In short, we shall henceforth consider it our duty to combine our efforts with those of all men with a passion for justice and truth, in order to build organizations susceptible of honestly and effectively helping black peoples in their struggle for today and for tomorrow: the struggle for justice, the struggle for culture, the struggle for dignity and freedom. Organizations capable, in sum, of preparing them in all areas to assume in an autonomous manner the heavy responsibilities that, even at this moment, history has caused to weigh heavily on their shoulders.
