What's the Point of Black History Month?

with John McWhorter

Every February, the United States populace is notified that Americans of African descent have a history. TV and radio stations air special programming, displays of black-authored books appear in bookstore windows, signs pop up in grocery stores and shopping malls. Anyone who so much as glances at social media or steps foot out of their front door discovers, if they didn’t already know, that February is Black History Month.

But do we really need Black History Month anymore? As John says in the following excerpt from our most recent conversation, in classrooms and the media and our daily life, we now discuss black history and black historical figures year-round. We ought to be able to celebrate the fact that Black History Month has served its original purpose, and we ought to be able to move on. Black history is part of American history. We’d be better served by integrating our understanding of black history into a broader view of American history writ-large rather than setting aside a special dispensation for it. The same goes, I sometimes think, for Black Studies as a whole.

The history and culture of my people doesn’t exist in a racially homogenous vacuum. It’s part of a larger American story. Treating black history solely as a history of domination and victimhood—the framework we so often see in Black Studies departments—is both factually wrong and profoundly minimizing. We should have classes about black history, we should have books about black history, but treating it as something wholly distinct from American history will merely keep us locked into the very damaging and deluded narratives that we ought to be working to rewrite.

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GLENN LOURY: I did detect the connection between your position on the African American Studies course, which is that if it's really gonna be indoctrination about victim studies and the US is racist and bad, then maybe it's good that DeSantis is pushing back. I detect a connection between that and the first part of our conversation [where] we were talking with Vincent Lloyd, and you had confronted him over this thing about, well then basically Black Studies, in your view, is about racism. And you want it to be more than that. You think that's boring. You think that's narrow. Am I reading you? 

JOHN MCWHORTER: And misrepresentative. Yeah. A whole lot more has gone on than those things. All of that looked like something written by somebody who runs a Black Studies department. And it's not that those things aren't respectable in themselves, but it's just such a biased coverage.

I'm gonna do another column where I write about, what are the sorts of things that you would want to discuss in addition to those things? Because I think I'm responsible for making it clear what a representative black history of the past 50 or 60 would be. Because I think a lot of people cannot imagine that it would be anything that isn't reflected by Malcolm X on the t-shirt with his fist up in the air and that slightly feral look on his face. That is not the whole of our experience. I would venture to call it half. I'm not gonna go below half, but there's more. 

And I just find myself thinking I have never read a Jewish history, I have never seen a history of Irishness, I have never seen a history of Chineseness or, perhaps more to the point, Koreanness that is so obsessed with who hurt us, who tried to hurt us, and what we did about it, and whether or not we triumphed. As if that's all there is.

There's no more articulate testimony to what slavery did to us, and then Jim Crow, in a way, and that ambivalence about saying, here's just us. Not us who triumphed over what whitey did to us, but just us. Here's what's good about us. Here are great things that we did, and there's an idea that you're not supposed to do that too much because you don't wanna detract from people being aware of the racism. That's not the history of a people.

I mean, of course, with Black America, there's gonna be a whole lot of that, especially earlier on. But for that to be all you have to say about what's happened since 1966? No, it makes us look like such hollow people, or so weak. We can never quite do it. It's like Sisyphus. There's been more. I don't like it. I really don't like it. And I'm responsible for working up a piece where I show what I would do, upon which I'll be told I'm not a historian, but you know, you can't win. 

Oh, you're gonna follow up another piece where you're gonna have a positive agenda? 

Yep. 

Okay. I'm going to confess my skepticism about the whole enterprise. I don't know if there should even be Black Studies. I don't know if there should be Black history. I don't know if Black History Month should exist. And I know I'm gonna take flack. Here's what I see. I'll be brief. I see identity politics—so my blackness becomes the main thing about my political life—becoming identity pedagogy. I mean, Vincent said this. He said it begins in struggle. It begins with student protest, becoming identity pedagogy. So now we have to teach. In virtue of the identity of the person to whom we're teaching, we have to take their lived experience on board. It structures the way in which they encounter the intellectual enterprise and then the identity pedagogy somehow being transmuted into identity epistemology.

Now there's gonna be a way of knowing that is determined and embedded in the historical experience of domination. A way of knowing a truth. It's not just narrow. It is narrow, but it is not just narrow. It's wrongheaded. It's small minded. It's a power move. And it's ironic, because the whole thing is supposed to be about power. Race, power and privilege, race, power and privilege. It's a weapon of the weak. It's a kind of a power move. And what it does to those who are on the butt end of it—the white men, presumptively anti-black racists? I'll stop. 

Well, no. I don't want to admit that I question whether there should be a Black Studies department. It would be very hard for me to say that based on what many people would be surprised my background is, in terms of who my mother was, the teacher of social work, anti-racist crusader, although you didn't put it that way then. And even a sense of group loyalty. And also a fact that I find blackness writ-large very interesting.

I think there could be a Black Studies department that did a whole lot of interesting stuff where there were exactly one-and-a-half people whose main focus was racism, and then there'd be eight other people who did other things. But the thing is, in our world, the departments could never be that way. Black History Month, I have argued more than once in the media, is obsolete. I get why it was important at a time, and Black History Week before that, but I think the idea that there's a month set aside?

It doesn't hurt anything, but we study black history in the United States now all year. The job is done. I don't think we can honestly say that the history of black people is marginalized. I have said, and gotten really dumped on in the past, isn't it time to let this go? Why do we have to have February be set aside?

It's kitsch! And it's become a marketing scheme where every retailer feels like they have to put a sign in the window saying, “It's Black History Month. We pay tribute to black people. We pay tribute to black film. We pay tribute to ...” I don't know. 

People do it all year. 

I guess it's okay. I'm not gonna fall on my sword about it, but it just rubs me the wrong way.

You end up feeling catered to rather than genuinely honored. Partly because it's not as if in July nobody's thinking about black history, especially since now June has been established in such a more resonant way than it used to be. And in the summer there's all of that. In October, are we really not thinking much about the history of black people, when it penetrates the media. Contrary to what some people say, it penetrates school curricula, even ones that southerners have problems with. Black history is no longer marginal. It's not 1972, where you have these flashcards of black heroes, and that's a rare and radical move.

Progress happens. And I'm not sure that Black History Month makes the kind of sense that it may have 40 years ago. But we're not supposed to say so. I wouldn't die on my sword about it either. I'm not writing about it now. I don't feel like pushing the point. But no. I think some things, you have to allow that time has passed.

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