The Curse of Black History Month
The Curse of Black History Month
What I learned from a Nobel laureate and the host of ‘Finding Your Roots’ when I met them face-to-face in Atlanta
When February rolls around, I often think about a family member who extracted this promise from me a few years ago: No mandatory gift-giving.
I don’t want to leave her off my Christmas list, but that’s the way she prefers it. What she wants instead is to feel valued, appreciated, and remembered throughout the year. She’d rather be surprised with a bottle of wine or an edible bouquet. Not with another charcuterie board or cashmere scarf or some other offering freighted with obligation and expectation. I gave you yours; now where’s mine?
Her request reminds me of a line from “Wife Wooing,” a story about love and sex by John Updike, which concludes like this:
An expected gift is not worth giving.
That’s how I sometimes feel about Black History Month.
Like the original idea behind the fraught commercialism of Christmas gift-giving, the time set aside to remember and honor the contributions of Black Americans is a good and noble thing. In theory, I’m all for it.
And yet, it’s a bit of a paradox. The very need to set aside a special month underscores the fact that Black people are not valued as we should be during the rest of the year.
Let me tell you about two things that happened several years ago during a speech I attended at Emory University in Atlanta.
The speaker was Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Harvard professor, noted literary critic, historian, and public intellectual. Most people these days know him as host of Finding Your Roots on the Public Broadcasting Service.
Trailer for Season 7 of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I had just placed a book with a literary agent in New York.
During the Question & Answer period, I asked Professor Gates about something my agent pointed out regarding the difficulty of finding a publisher.
We are experiencing the Balkanization of the Black experience, she said. The situation has resulted in a crowded and highly competitive market. What’s worse is that some publishers feel they can only publish a few books by Black authors each year.
Even though I hadn’t named her, Professor Gates knew who it was from the context. He commented on her observation, then offered this advice:
“Don’t let them publish your book during Black History Month.”
In publishing, February is a ghetto.
All the houses trot out the books they’ve signed by Black writers, and they mostly forget about those titles come March. If you’re Black, your book’s chances are much better if you get published at any other time of the year.
It turns out that conventional publishing is difficult for all writers, as Elle Griffin recently pointed out in “No One Will Read Your Book.” But as with everything else, from coronavirus infection rates and infant mortality, to unemployment and homelessness, the situation is even more punishing for Black authors.
Look at this list of excellent books about Black history you probably won’t hear about this month.
And although publishers became hungry for more Black voices following the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests, one former publishing insider asks why they have silenced us for so long. And whether this new interest is coming from the right place.
As Candice Carty-Williams wrote in The Guardian last summer:
The publishing world is only just starting to put the work in to printing stories by black writers, and there are still so few on the shelves.
Whenever I approach the publishing market, I find it dispiriting to be identified as a Black writer. Why can’t I just be a writer?
But I know why. It’s all about market segmentation. Writers like to get paid. Marketing makes that possible. Still, it’s dispiriting. If I were a woman, I wouldn’t want to be known as a woman writer. A writer is someone who writes. Period.
As I pull another page off the calendar this year, I can already envision the queues filling up on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook hash-tagged with Black History Month. I can see the multitude of articles and essays churned out in the press and on the web. These are good things, which nevertheless fuel the paradox.
You are a child of those centuries of lies, distortion and opportunism in high places, even among the holy of holies of intellectual objectivity.
Black History Month is not a bad thing. It’s just problematic.
The trouble with writing an article like this is that I can also envision the bigots lining up on social media with their race-hating remarks in the comments section.
See, they’re never satisfied. You give them a whole month, and they complain. Just like everything else we’ve ever done for them. They’re nothing but victims. All they ever want is a handout. Blah. Blah, Blah.
There are certainly plenty of people out there who are predisposed to dislike you because of your race no matter what you do or say. That’s what it means to be prejudiced.
I refuse to be thwarted by people like this. I refuse to let that kind of negativity into my mind even though I think it’s a good idea to be aware of it. Just like I think it’s a good idea not to reach for my wallet when approached by a white police officer.
But I said there were two things that happened that day at Emory. Here’s the other one.
I saw a tall Black man wearing a green military jacket standing quietly near a stairwell in the back of the room. His bushy hair was quite gray. In a room filled with many expensively dressed people, glad-handing each other the way folks do on these occasions, he stood in a small clutch listening to the others.
I was struck by his humility. The man seemed to exist within a deep silence like the greater portion of an iceberg. People like that stand out even when they’re trying to remain in the background.
I’ve never been shy about approaching strangers. So I made my way over to him.
“Excuse me, aren’t you Wole Soyinka?”
As it happened, the Nobel laureate was on the Emory faculty that year. I don’t remember what we talked about during that brief conversation. But I do remember shaking his hand and thanking him for the many plays and books he has contributed to world literature, not just to his Nigerian homeland.
What I most remember was his kindness. And the tranquility that surrounded him. The kind of quiet that makes you realize you’re missing something.
This was a man who spent two years in solitary confinement because of his political beliefs. Two years. His wrote about that terrible period in The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, which includes this line:
“The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”
Later I looked up his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, entitled “The Past Must Address Its Present.”
Here is part of what it says:
The purpose is not really to indict the past, but to summon it to the attention of a suicidal, anachronistic present. To say to that mutant present: you are a child of those centuries of lies, distortion and opportunism in high places, even among the holy of holies of intellectual objectivity. But the world is growing up, while you wilfully remain a child, a stubborn, self-destructive child, with certain destructive powers, but a child nevertheless. And to say to the world, to call attention to its own historic passage of lies…Demand that it rescue itself, by concrete acts, from the stigma of being the wilful parent of a monstrosity, especially as that monstrous child still draws material nourishment, breath, and human recognition from the strengths and devises of that world.
Soyinka gave that speech in 1986. Thirty-five years later, it’s still relevant as we confront structural and systemic racism, Confederate monuments, the metastasis of trigger-happy militarized police forces, and a resurgence of white supremacy.
Despite any shortcomings it may have, this is what Black History Month attempts to do. To summon the attention of the present.
This year, there will be twenty-eight days of summoning. Twenty-eight days for the present to address the past and make a concrete effort to rescue itself. Black experience will be singled out and acknowledged in a positive way.
If you are Black and publish your book this month, it may turn out to be a curse, as Professor Gates warned. Unless the protests we witnessed last summer have changed that.
But that’s not something I have to worry about this year, though I am always writing. Always. So I will take these twenty-eight days and learn as much as I can about the history that created me and the country I live in.
I will make the most of them. I hope you will, too.
© 2021 Andrew Jazprose Hill. All rights reserved.
Thanks for reading.
As always, great perspective, informative, and energizing. Thanks.