In February, I felt the US festivities where the usual famous Black Americans are paraded out for us to commemorate in typical liberal fashion. They are commemorated, yes, but in superficial manner. Infamously Dr Martin Luther King Jr is used each month by white liberals to encourage peace and colour-blindness — completely stripping his words of their context and power.
October, however, seems devoid of such champions. In fact, we spend much of our time uncovering those who have been forgotten. It seems to be that time of month when schools, universities and businesses suddenly remember they have to at least pretend to care about the existence of Black people. A part of me wishes we had these same figures, these household names. A part of me is glad our figures haven’t been co-opted and commodified in the liberal US manner through fame and idolisation. But perhaps I focus too much on this fame. After all, in both the US and UK we have had to fight to keep our memories alive when our nations our bound together by their respective violent erasures of our histories. Is that not why Black History Month exists, regardless of its mainstream treatment? To tell our stories.
Yet I can’t help but feel disappointment in this annual reminder that we are erased, unimportant, illegitimate. Even our month is spoiled by the politically correct BME brigade. Black British History Month has come to signify empty platitudes that contribute further to our erasure whether through the inclusion of non-Black people in a specifically Black month or the companies suddenly showing off the few Black staff they’ve hired.
I would like to write a post that people would love, reminding you to behave right towards Black people or reminding you of Black British achievements despite only being 3% of the country. But really, I don’t want to and frankly I don’t care because Black British History month only reminds me of one thing — being Black and British is f*****g hard.
We’re a tiny group made up of several diasporas each struggling with assimilatory and respectability politics. Each constantly clashing. Each often struggling to retain our connection to ‘back home’. The effects of colonialism are present in our very existence. So Black History Month reminds me of the disharmonious lot we are. It makes me fearful for the future. It reminds me that we are constantly in the process of making our history and I wonder if it will all be sad, traumatic and remembered just one month per year. I wonder what the events of yesterday will mean for the history of tomorrow and if the liberatory message of celebrating and learning from our past has been lost forever.
The future always seems to be at arms-length, never quite within our reach. The question of whether it will ever be keeps it alive. The present then works towards it by working backwards. It asks what once happened to find what might be. It never truly is present for it constantly passes me by, it is only a memory. Perhaps then the past is you. An aggregate of hopes, decisions and desires that have gone and only return in memories. This is what matters about Black History Month, not the awards or commemorations but the continuity of Black life towards liberation. What I have done and what those before me have done is necessarily connected. A web of events, some simultaneous and some decades or centuries ago that create Me and Us. To celebrate Black History Month is to temporally and physically locate yourself within this web of Black pain and joy not just to celebrate or mourn our past, but also to understand yourself as a Black person so that when you reach out to that future that you can never quite touch you might offer it something better than what you had.
