Whose History is Black History

Many years ago I attended a lecture called Whose History is Black History.  One of the things that struck me was when the speaker said something surprising to me about Crispus Attucks.  As I recall she said that many schools in the country, in Black neighborhoods are named for him but he fought for the wrong side in the Revolutionary War.  You see the thesis of the talk was that so much of American History's view of African Americans was from a White perspective.  She went on to say that there were many more people of African descent who fought for the British and many of them went free after the war.  At the same time George Washington didn't want black people in the Continental Army.  It is ironic that one of Washington's slaves from Mount Vernon was one of the men who joined the British, after the war was free.  Harry Washington went to Nova Scotia with many more freed people from the colonies and later moving on the Sierra Leone, where he used not only the agricultural knowledge he learned in Mount Vernon to produce more crop, he led a revolution about the British company and leadership that he was working for based on what he learned from the American revolutionaries.  

i think it is important to think about this. The speaker was saying that we don't learn enough about black history in this country because we don't listen to black people who write it, we read history books written by white people.   In the last few months a lot of white Americans learned about parts of our history that didn't make those textbooks.  It took an HBO series about a DC comic adaptation to inform many people of the attack on Tulsa, OK's Black Wall Street where literal bombs were dropped on a section of an American city to destroy the business district of the highest concentration of black wealth in the country.  It was a racist attack that people were never fully held accountable for.   There was also a significant number of people who never heard of Juneteenth.  Both of these stories which are important to American history for many reasons are often ignored because they are relegated to what is called Black History.  But today those artificial boundaries should come down and I think they will.  But there is still such push back.  The President was amazed to learn about Juneteenth.  That is criminal level ignorance, not only because he had planned to schedule his rally on that date but that the rally would be in Tulsa.  What is also funny is that every year the White House mentioned Juneteenth in a message to the nation.  He just never seemed to care about it enough to learn until it became a problem for him.  And that is the issue with how we have dealt with the segregate history in this country.  Important dates, events and people are moved out of view in favor of a more generic and white view of the country.  It has led to systematic racism and a long standing ignorance of the vast importance people of color have brought to the develop of our nation.  I believe we have met a new milestone and we will not go back. 

The country is being forced to face the systemic racism that is part of our past there is outrage.  Outrage that Confederate monuments put up to intimidate black people during the Jim Crow era are coming down.  Outrage that companies who have had racist icons for products are changing their company image.  Outrage that companies are looking to better understand who they have benefited from that racism and undo their past sins.  And outrage, at the highest levels of government, that a sports league may have been wrong to punish those who tried to race the very issue that has set this sea change in motion.  

All people have trouble facing their own sins.  We work to justify, look to deflect, and sometimes just ignore or worse blame others.  We as a nation can no longer do that.  We must learn what we don't know of our past, listen to those telling us what is wrong right now and work together to bring about a future where we are all truly distinct and together.  Western culture is not a monochromatic one and really never has been.  We are a tapestry but we have allowed some of the threads to be hidden, let's bring them out into the daylight and where they are frayed or broken, let's fix them.  One way is to learn.  Many people more educated than I have taken the time to write about what was left out of the history books, or set aside out of context for a few sessions in February.  Social media and by extension several informative websites have been filling in the gaps in our knowledge sharing first person stories of today's plights and of a history that is richer than you can imagine.  Look for them.  Educate yourself.  Expand your knowledge base.  You will be surprised and delighted and maybe even a little angry about what your formal education lacked.  But you will be a better person and we will be a better nation.  Bigotry of all forms is a disease and knowledge and experience is the medicine that fights it.  Take your medicine.