Why a Black History Month?

Image by The U.S. Army, public domain

At the beginning of Black History Month, it’s important to think about why it’s necessary to even have a month dedicated to the history and culture of a particular segment of our population.  This is a rather complicated question, which cannot be answered in single blog post.  One possible way to think about this is identity.

Bryan Stevenson, a well-known Civil Rights attorney and author, in his 2012 TED talk, "We Need to Talk about an Injustice," observed

When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don’t actually believe makes sense.  We can get them to do things that they don’t think they can do.  

The subject of Stevenson's talk is the disproportionate numbers of people of color, specifically African Americans, in America's prisons but his thought about the role of identity and social action is quite important.

One of the functions of Black History Month is to help reshape the identity of African Americans on a social level.  Social identity is a new concept to some, but it plays a crucial role in social interactions.  This concept of identity comes from social psychology and shows how “people’s conception of who they are (their self-concept) is associated with their membership of social groups and categories” and how these memberships influence how people conceptualize the world and behave in it, as well as how they are conceptualized and interacted with by other people.(1)  An influential way of thinking about this concept is in terms of what Pamela Hays called the ADRESSING model; people’s social identities are tied up with their age, disability, religious culture, ethnicity, social class culture, sexual orientation, Indigenous heritage, national origin, and gender.(2)  Race, in this model, is considered an aspect of ethnicity and, as SMU’s Dr. Leticia Nieto points out, is a “historical attempt to limit the definition of ‘human being’ to some people and to define other people as not quite human.”(3)

A well-known photograph from Charles Moore taken in 1963, Birmingham, AL, image from http://www.dadychery.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Birmingham_1963e_CharlesMoore.jpg

Historically speaking, African Americans have unfortunately not been fully classified as “human being”—consider the 3/5 Compromise in the U.S. Constitution and the arguments for slaves as being property and slavery as a divinely ordained institution.  On the level of visual culture, consider the persistent pattern of African Americans being presented as apes through the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.  Consider the violence directed at African Americans and their white allies during the Civil Rights struggle.  This dehumanization also occurs on the level of language and was even applied to Former First Lady, Michelle Obama.  Many other examples could be cited, but hopefully these will suffice.

Dr. Carter Woodson, image from the National Park Service, public domain

Black History Month is a result of the work of Dr. Carter Woodson, one of the first African Americans to receive a graduate degree from Harvard University and a founding member of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, one of the first academic associations to study the lives of African Americans.  Starting as Negro History Week in 1926, the month was created to “increase awareness of and interest in black history among both blacks and whites”(4) and actively seeks to combat the dehumanization that African Americans have been subject to for centuries, to help create a more positive social identity for African Americans and to acknowledge their many roles and contributions in the development of America.  For an introduction to this history, watch the PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many rivers to cross which is available for streaming through Alexander Street Press and can be accessed via the library’s website.  The idea behind these efforts is that when the social identity of African Americans and all people of color is improved, the lives and opportunities of individual persons will be improved and the promise of "all men [and women] are created equal" can be realized.

Image by Wonder woman0731 from Flickr, CC BY

The O’Grady Library is pleased to participate in Black History Month by presenting displays of books on important topics of African-American history and culture and by co-hosting with the Office of Service Learning and Diversity Initiatives a panel on race on February 22 in the Benedictine Reading Room, from 3:00-4:00.  Through these efforts, we hope to help improve the social identity of African Americans and all people of color and to inspire others to work for a more equitable society.

Footnotes

1. Hogg, M.A.  (2018).  Social identity theory.  In Jackson II, R.L. & Hogg, M.A. (Eds.) Encyclopedia of identity, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412979306.n241 

2.  Discussed in Nieto, L., Boyer, M.F., Goodwin, L., Johnson, G.R., & Smith, L.C. (2010).  Beyond inclusion, beyond empowerment: A developmental strategy to liberate everyone.  Olympia, WA: Cuetzpalin.  p. 45.

3. Nieto. p. 51


4.  Goggin, J.  (2006).  Black History Month/Negro History Week.  In Palmer, C.A. (Ed.) Encyclopedia of African-American culture and history.  Detrot: Macmillian Reference.  Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3444700144/GVRL?u=olym77009&sid=GVRL&xid=ec10756e