Why Black History Month In 2022 Needs A Shift Of Narrative

Last February, I was living in southern California, glad to be near nature and in the orange heat, but dreading the months ahead. The country had voted out the last president after a summer of racial-justice marches and riots, but it still felt like there was little hope on the horizon for great change. On January 6, the Capitol siege had occurred. For weeks on end, as I went on walks around the hilltops of a park near my house, I ended up thinking about the ways in which the country could undo any liminal progress that had occurred in the past six months. The fact that it was Black History Month barely registered.

For a while now, when February has come around, or when we are well into the month, something – a corporate tweet, an ad campaign – will remind me that it is Black History Month. The idea of it has started to feel like a relic from the ancient past, of days spent sitting in my United States history class, as teachers gave a perfunctory overview of the best and most useful figures of the Black race. Start at George Washington Carver’s house, pick up Rosa Parks, wave at Malcolm X, but keep driving, and park at Martin Luther King Jr.’s church. As the US has stumbled into an awkward dance with right-wing extremism, I have barely registered the month at all. What has felt more meaningful were the Black Lives Matter protests that started in 2014, the organizing for progressive causes like Medicare for All, and the national uprising after the murder of George Floyd during the summer of 2020.

Since the pandemic started, I have been writing in different ways about the contemporary Black experience, without necessarily meaning to do so. When the wave of sickness and death flooded New York that first spring, I wanted to find ways to report on how the most vulnerable in the city were surviving: I wrote about sex workers who lost their gigs and had to adjust how they related to clients, and children who were managing dual lives as students and essential workers, and anti-violence activists and conflict mediators in high-crime neighborhoods still going out to do their work. I went back to my home state, Alabama, to report on how poor Black communities already experiencing environmental pollution were being ravaged by Covid, and over to Atlanta, a Black city that was aflame with acts of police brutality, and protests against them. Through all those stories, I could draw a portrait of how Black Americans were trying to live and care for each other before the uprising, and what we were thinking and doing in its aftermath.

What we wanted, I think, was to seize the historical narrative, as it happened. Recently, I have been writing about a Black fashion designer and the unexpected way he has resisted expectations from the fashion industry. As I researched the piece, I realized that despite a flurry of editorial mea culpas, pledges and promises, not much had changed when it came to Black representation across the industry. Similarly, with a Black poet I am profiling; her success is stark in a landscape where publishers have begun to seek out more writers of color, but the effect still looks like tokenism. But, my subjects felt free to talk about the complexity of their experiences on their terms, despite the fragile security of their success, and to put the problem of representation onto white people. Representation was a poor substitute for the economic and criminal justice reforms Black people needed anyway, and they wanted the mental freedom to focus on their art. That honesty and unwillingness to placate could be one legacy of the past year and a half, since the resurgence of the BLM protests.

It’s now February, again; Black History Month in its traditional conception is making less of a meaningful ripple than ever, though that isn’t a bad thing. History, how we tell it and what we do with it, is at the source of this country’s worst turmoils. The struggle is not new: since the end of the Civil War, the fight for who narrates what happened in our past, whose truths about what happened are legitimate, and who is portrayed as being in the right, has preoccupied everyday people and artists and politicians. What is different this time around is that people who never had the power to tell their sides of history have a greater say – from the speculative non-fiction of scholar Saidiya Hartman, which reconstructs previously ignored Black lives, to the overhauled lesson plans of school teachers who now place slavery as foundational to the country’s beginnings. These are the things I want to be focusing on this month.