Welcome, to a topic that will soon be on us when our summer holidays have finished. (About which next week’s blog will be the last until 18th September). I hope might be helpful for churches in thinking how they use BHM. Meanwhile, if you find these blogs interesting or helpful do please encourage others to subscribe. do we need Black History Month?
Why do we need Black History Month?
As we approach this October’s forthcoming BHM this question can be heard ambiguously. Heard negatively it asks if all the fuss over BHM is really necessary. Heard positively it invites us to list the reasons why - in schools, churches, across an ever-growing list of other institutions – it is something worth giving energy to. In this blog I take the latter approach, but also add some ‘buts’, expressing concern about ways it can misrepresent or trivialise.
1. We need to celebrate the overlooked.
At its most basic BHM is simply a riposte to those who think that black people have no history worth recording or repeating. In a superb article in the Guardian before last year’s BHM (24/09/2022 available online), the writer Zadie Smith records: ‘It’s incredible to think of now, but by 1999 I’d gone through fifteen years of formal education, including a three-year English degree, without ever being given a book to study that made any reference whatsoever to the presence of individuals like me in the country in which I was born. Not a novel. Not a history book. Nothing’.
An important part of what has been overlooked is the story of the migration of people like her mother, who faced all the challenges of entering the unknown, bearing with and facing down intense racism, establishing community structures and pathways in a new land. Pioneers, migrants – in any continent and in whatever direction – tell stories that are bracing and that deserve respect. The children, grand- and great-grand children of people like Zadie Smith’s mother ought to have the everyday, unheroic struggles of their forbears celebrated.
Much further back the histories of black people, largely before or without white people need celebration. The history is not a blank black slate that only comes alive and takes meaning when white chalk is written on it. Whilst some of that story is quite spectacular – the widely dispersed Benin bronzes are an obvious example – much of it was ordinary people doing what for them were ordinary things, yet expressing cultures that were unique and of value. The Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta paid tribute to the peace and security he encountered in his journey through fourteenth century (in western chronology) Mali. ‘Of all peoples the Negroes are those who most abhor injustice. The Sultan pardons no one who is guilty of it. There is complete and general safety throughout the land. The traveller here has no more reason than the man who stays at home to fear brigands, thieves or ravishers’.
Historiography has moved well beyond the telling of great people, great events and great wars on to attending to what it was like for ordinary people living everyday lives but often facing environments and developing cultures very, very different from our own. It is that history that BHM should open our eyes too.
BUT, Black History Month therefore needs to realise the dangers of trying to make black history spectacular, in a society that too often only gives attention to the spectacular and the star studded. Focussing on ‘celebrity’ black people, especially entertainers and sportsmen, says too little to the overwhelming majority who will not achieve celebrity status. BHM’s tendence to promote hero-worship has been criticised. Too often today’s heroes are found to have feet of clay by tomorrow. Do the planners of this year’s theme on the achievements focussing on black women now regret fronting it with Diane Abbott?
Similarly there is a danger of over-hyping historical black achievements. Bob Marley’s ‘half the story has never been told’ too easily gives rise to conspiracy theories that stories of black achievements have been suppressed. Discussing BHM on the footballer Troy Deeney’s television programme on the need for greater focus on black history in education (see blog # 76 ‘A Tale of Two Education Approaches’), the world heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua spoke as though there have been a cadre of great black scientists we had never been told about. There haven’t been. At times I have felt uneasy and suspicious about the presence in BHM programmes of Afrocentrist histories lauding the achievements of pre-1500 Africa, for example by Cheikh Anta Diop. (See Professor Stephen Howe: ‘Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, 1998; for example ‘The nature and extent of pre-colonial formal education in Africa has also been the sign of extravagant assertions of Afrocentrism’ (p 150), referring, for example, to the Koranic school of Timbuktu.)
2. We need white people to know black history.
Quite rightly black people resent their portrayal as only enslaved, helpless victims – a complaint that has often been voiced by critics, as Troy Deeney in the tv programme above. Therefore the positive emphases mentioned above are important. But black enslavement in the Americas – both its intense brutality, its cultural destructiveness and its profitability – is a central element of the last four centuries, and needs focussing upon. One of the positive consequences of Black Lives Matter has been to shift the dial to much greater attentiveness so that the rightly inspiring story of Abolition is set proportionately against the greater and overwhelming iniquity of the slave trade and enslavement. Whilst the debate over Reparations – why, in what way, to whom – is not solved by emphasising the iniquities of the past, nonetheless widespread popular awareness of the evil is essential to proper debate.
BUT the danger that BHM ‘ghettoises’ black history therefore needs recognising. In fact what we should really attend to is ‘black and white’ history. The actor Morgan Freeman has said ‘I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history’. Emphasis on ‘black history’ risks turning black people into a special case: a group of people in need of special attention, even – to use a word with an explosive history – remedial attention. The reasons above provide proper reasons to justify that attention, but equally we need to be constantly asking why ‘black history’ has to be a special case, rather than simply an aspect of world history or British history. Troy Deeney’s programme saw the ‘month’ as a confining concession rather than a genuine widening of the syllabus. And, as black history becomes a part of the general syllabus, ought there to be an exit strategy for BHM?
I only discovered last week that we are now in the midst of ‘South Asian Heritage Month’ (July 18 to August 17) ‘to celebrate and commemorate South Asian history, heritage , and culture, and highlight the significant contribution that South Asian communities have made to British life’. There is a free showing of ‘Bend it like Beckham’ in our local library). In one sense this helpfully reduces the focus on black people as a ‘special case’ amongst Britain’s ethnic minorities, even though I don’t predict SAHM gaining as much traction as BHM, especially since it is set in school holidays.
3. We need to focus on what black people really offer.
‘History’ is really now a misnomer for the wide range of events that BHM programmes now, rightly, cover. The listing of events on the B:M website has virtually no serios history, but range over black experience much more widely. In effect they provide a proper riposte to the theme of deprivation by making an emphasis on accomplishment. Music, the area where black people have made the greatest contribution to the contemporary world, deserves and receives a high profile. Jazz, gospel, blues, reggae, rock, rap have all become constituent parts of modern life. There is a danger that - as lamented in Psalm 137 – black music becomes trivialised and exotic entertainment, when in reality it has been a major, partly wholesome and partly noxious, shaper of modern sensibilities across all sides of the ‘black Atlantic’, and much further afield. Political and social puritans can dismiss the attention to black music and other art forms as a distraction from ‘real world’ issues of political power and economic justice, and the warnings deserve serious attention, nonetheless music reaches more deeply than these things into our very sense of being human.
Music comes out of the heart of our being. The power of black music is that it emanates from a sense of beingin the world that is essentially communal. Harvey Kwiyani writes ‘Typical of cultures in the southern part of Africa, Malawians believe in the concept of umunthu (similar to ubuntu in South Africa0, which says ‘I am because we are’. Essentially, we teach children to say, ‘I belong, therefore I am’. It takes individuals to make a community, but it also takes a community to make the individuals’ (‘Multicultural Kingdom’, p121). Its ability to connect, to facilitate community, and our need for community, means that black music’s capacity is not marginal but rather a central aspect of our society.
Nor can music and a sense of belonging be detached from another area of black contribution – Christian faith. Both the importance of churches in black life, and the importance of black churches in British Christianity are widely recognised, and yet the secular mind-sets of most local authorities and national institutions means that black Christianity plays a marginal rather than substantial role in BHM. The whole range of British Christianity should be addressing the need for BHM to properly exhibit the central role of black Christianity in black life. (There is an uncertainty here – does ‘black’, following its USA origins, simply refer to the Caribbean diaspora or also include the now-larger African background population. The programmes, and I suspect the organisers, tend to reflect the former; whilst possibly seeking the higher profile given by the wider definition).
BUT there are complex issues to be unravelled here. The importance of black contributions across the music (and other arts)/community/faith nexus ought to be given high profile. On the one hand this ought not to enhance what the sociologist PaulGilroy has described as ‘the hierarchy of creativity generated by the pernicious metaphysical dualism that identifies blacks with the body and whites with the mind’ (‘The Black Atlantic – Modernity and Double Consciousness’, 1993, p 97). BHM needs to play an important role in encouraging the ‘mind’ aspirations of young black people. Lord Tony Sewell’s day job of encouraging young black people to pursue careers in science and technology is vital in encouraging them to aspire to achievement in central but unsung areas of modern life. The 2016 film ‘Hidden Figures’ about three black women mathematicians working at NASA was valuable in this respect.
On the other hand, the temptation to portray black achievements in this area as comparable to white achievement should be resisted, as in the approach ‘If they’ve got Florence Nightingale, we’ve got Mary Seacole’; ‘If they’ve got a long list of great inventors, we have the person who invented traffic lights’. Whilst I can understand the intentions of schools that present children with the factoids just mentioned, nonetheless it seems to me a rather forlorn approach, inviting and an ‘is that all’ disappointment.
In this sense we should be aiming for an increasingly integrated society where BHM might lose its salience as white people become both more community focussed and faith orientated and where black people are increasingly high achieving in scientific or business areas where they have so far been under-represented. (In this respect I appreciated the approach of the Indian film director, Shekhar Kapur, whose response to his Hollywood success in directing ‘Elizabeth 1’ was that he did not want to make Indians proud but should make the world proud of their pride. So BHM should intend to make the world proud of black people’s pride; and by extension make black people proud of the achievements of other peoples).
But meanwhile it is important for BHM to focus on what black people have to offer the world. Paul Gilroy wrote ‘Blacks today appear to identify far more readily with the glamorous Pharaohs than with the abject plight of those who were held in bondage. This change betrays a profound transformation in the moral basis of black Atlantic political culture’ (quoted in Stephen Howe’s ‘Afrocentrism, p 108). For BHM to adopt the Pharaonic, high visibility model of power is to go along with the current western model that it is worth gaining the whole world at the cost of losing your soul (Mark 8:35). BHM certainly makes good use of its potential to offer us the life affirming riches of black music. That music can enable a much-needed sense of belonging together in our society. And the roots of that music and belonging lie in a life-giving faith in God. Perhaps BHM can more consciously connect with those roots.
Related Blogs: #4 Slavery, History and the National Trust; # 70 History becomes Hot; # 76 A Tale of Two Education Approaches; # 109 Review of ‘Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning’ by Nigel Biggar; # 111 Five Paradoxes of European Colonial Expansion.
Totally disagree but enjoyed reading this.
Excellent article