Why I’m Thankful for Black History Month

In Ohio public schools (at least in the late 90s), there were a series of tests you had to pass at the end of the Eighth grade. I wasn’t worried about showing competency in math or English, but I was worried about social studies, or as the test was called: “citizenship.” I had just moved to the Ohio, after spending all but one year of my childhood in Western Canada,¹ and I was very concerned that I wouldn’t have the necessary cumulative knowledge to pass the test. So I paid very close attention in my first American Social studies class.

I looked forward to one particular historical event with eagerness: the War of 1812. In Alberta, I had learned that this war was a source of great national pride. I learned that the land hungry Americans tried to take over our fair nation, and not only were they rebuffed, but the Canadians retaliated and burned down the White House. I was shocked, then, to read that my American textbook dubbed the war “The Second Revolutionary War”, and described it as still-bitter Brits trying to take back America after having lost it a few decades prior. At the time my early adolescent brain simply considered this new information to be outright wrong. Now I recognize it as my first encounter with different “histories.”

Selective Storytelling

John Lewis Gaddis, in his book ‘The Landscape of History’ compares the historian’s job to that of a cartographer trying to draw the British coastline. The only way to do an exact map of the British coastline would be to make a 1:1 map, which wouldn’t be a map but a recreation. Instead, mapmakers pick and choose which details to include to try and make the most faithful summary of the coastline. Historians, then, collect more information than they are able to gather and tell a story as faithfully as they can, while leaving out facts that are redundant or unnecessary in telling their narrative. This is why the fact that the exclusion of the crucifixion of Jesus from Roman histories doesn’t disprove its historicity – it simply shows us that it was an event that wasn’t particularly meaningful to the Romans.

History isn’t a precise discipline where right and wrong answers are given. It isn’t a “hard” science. Sure, there are dates and times and places, but once those details are sorted and put together into a narrative, “right” and “wrong” get a bit more fuzzy. A better assessment of a historian’s work would be “faithful” or “complete.”

The thing is, we need history to help us understand who we are as individuals, as people, as communities, as nations. The way we tell stories and the stories we choose to tell help us inform ourselves about how we got to where we are. So even though it isn’t always a matter of right or wrong, it is important that histories are complete so that we properly understand where we have come from and how we got here.

“The Wrong Side of History”

Sometimes we talk about history being written by winners. But that isn’t entirely true. Especially when “losers” have access to the ability to write their own narratives as well. Just look at the differences in how the American Civil War is discussed in different parts of the country. But most people, especially those in power, like to write their own histories as if they are winners. Or at least, as if there were always on the “right side of history.”

Which is another dubious phrase. The idea of a “right” and “wrong” side of history comes from the notion that humans ever march towards a more and more virtuous and good world.² “You’ll find yourself on the wrong side of history” is a threat that assumes that if you don’t get on board with this progress, when history books are written you’ll look like the bad guy, like the Christians who fought against the abolition of slavery.

I have mixed feelings about the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice (as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described it). Christian faith clearly leads me to believe that the very end of the story is a good one, but I think this Whig interpretation makes us leave out a lot of stories that don’t fit ideas about American exceptionalism.

Black History Month

This all leads me to why I am thankful for Black History Month. I am increasingly aware that the history books I read in that first social studies course, and the ones I read to prepare for my A.P. United States History exam, were incomplete. They weren’t wrong (the things that they say happened did, in fact, happen), but there is an important stream of American life that was underrepresented. I remember hearing about the Emancipation Proclamation, and a war fought over slavery, but I don’t remember hearing all that much about reconstruction. I heard some about Jim Crow, as a long past event, but not much about redlining. I read about Martin Luther King Jr., but I didn’t hear about Fred Hampton getting shot in his sleep by the FBI. I didn’t hear much about just how many churches argued and advocated for the continued practice of slavery.

I don’t think this was intentional, as if the writers of these textbooks had sinister intentions to leave out Black History. But history builds upon history, and so when your country spends 250 years enslaving a people, 90 years enforcing Jim Crow, 60 years creating “separate but equal” spaces, and then another 35 years living out a subtle racism with policies like redlining, then the country has spent a lot of time ignoring and silencing stories from one sizable part of its population. And so those stories don’t make it into the first editions of mainstream textbooks, and then the next edition of that textbook continues to not include that story. We don’t need a White History Month, because there has never been an institutional ignorance of white stories.

(Or, at least not every white story. I appreciate books like J.D. Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, which told me a story that I hadn’t heard, a narrative that was lost underneath majority history.)

I should add, no American story is my story. I am a second generation North American. My grandparents on both sides fled Crimea in the 20s and settled in Western Canada. I immigrated to the United States in the 90s. But inasmuch as I am a part of this country now, the stories that have led it to be the place that it is are of extreme importance to me. How can I live in the suburbs of Chicago without learning about white flight? How can we talk about the Dakota Access Pipeline without knowing about the Trail of Tears?

The lessons of February should extend through the whole year and towards all sorts of forgotten narratives. The fact that people now seem to look back favorably on Japanese internment means that we haven’t done a good enough job of telling people that story. There are a lot of histories that have been left out of our textbooks that we need to be telling, if we want a more accurate map of our nation’s coastline. It will probably mean taking a tough look at what we have, and taking storied heroes down a notch. But you don’t do our country a service by pretending that it has a flawless past. You do it a service by wanting it to embody the ideals that it was founded on, and exposing all the ways we have failed to embody those ideals in years past.

Black History Month reminds me that the work of historians isn’t infallible, and that vulnerable people who are easily forgotten and dismissed in real life can easily be dismissed and forgotten by the stories they have told. But in order to understand who we are now, and how we got here, we have to be willing to look back and tell a more complete story.

If you are looking for a more poetic example of what I am talking about, check out this video.