We NEED Black History Month

I've always loved Black History Month.

Spending my formative years in  a mostly upscale African American community and attending a predominantly Black elementary school, I grew up with a healthy sense of pride in who my people were. 

Yes, we learned the horrors and misery of slavery, but we also learned of the ancient kingdoms of the continent and all its people offered to the world, including math, medicine, and literacy. I learned the post slavery years, including the boom of Black Wall Street (and the ensuing firebombing of it by backward racists), reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement, a movement that would empower all other subsequent American rights movements. I learned a healthy love and pride for my people, a people who started all other peoples of the globe, a people who were the beginners, the progenitors, the teachers, the givers and sharers of mysteries decoded. 

So of course, now 30 years old, I still celebrate Black History Month, using it similarly to how I use certain religious observances; as a time for reflection on the past, observance of the present, and propulsion into the future. 

Yet there is an attack on Black History Month, and the weirdest thing is that is coming from fellow African Americans. Stacy Dash and Raven Simone haven't really help any cause or forward progression of people of color (one plays to far right sensibilities so well, she literally redefines the term "Uncle Tom" while the other doesn't want to be associated with an ethnicity at all)

So here are some of my own beliefs about this whole Black History thing:

1) We need Black History Month to remind us of the truth; While strides have been made and some progress has been hard fought, there are still too many issues on the table to clean up. 

2) We need Black History Month until people really see that certain gains, such as a Black President, in the grand scheme of ethnic relations in this country, are minor. Having a Black president doesn't remove or even acknowledge Americas publicly racist past or secretly racist present. In fact, as great as Obama has been for people of the diaspora (and, unlike what some ignorant conservatives believe, the nation as a whole), the suggestion that a Black president has moved us to a "post racial" society is at best the definition of dillusional. After all, there has been more instances of violence against unarmed African Americans in the last 3 years than in any time in my memory. We still as a nation have so far to go, but if we work together, we can make a post racial society a thing.

3) Black History will never be American History until Black people are treated as Americans. Until The Voting Rights ACT becomes more than an act but a law; until the only race that matters is the human race; until all ethnicities are appreciated and valued as integral parts of our society; until ignorance (on both sides) is no longer taught or valued as tradition; until the US comes to terms with its forced step children, acknowledge what it has done to a people and to a diaspora and consciously begins the path to actual healing instead of haphazardly dealing with the effects of something they refuse to face that they have caused; Black History won't be American history.

I'm excited about Black History, and I can be excited about Black History without down playing anyone else's History. Yeah, we still have a ways to go until this country really is as great as our multicolored forefathers believed it could be, but we as their children generations removed can all make it better for our own children. 

And Black History Month reminds us of that