I want to bring Black History Month to a close by declaring that Black history is my/our (i.e. white people’s) history, too.
I remember a white woman in Florida who was talking about Critical Race Theory declaring that she didn’t want CRT taught in public schools because “it was making white children feel bad about their skin color and painting people of color in all cases as inescapable victims.”
Her thinking was misguided, first because CRT was not being taught in Florida’s schools. Second, teaching that “Prior to the Civil War Southern slavery was America’s most profound and vexatious social problem. More than any other problem, slavery nagged at the public conscience, offering no easy solution” is not intended to make white children feel bad about their skin color.
The above quote is from The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, published in 1956 by Kenneth Stampp, who wrote, “It is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present,” and “one must know what slavery meant to the Negro and how he reacted to it before one can comprehend his more recent tribulations.” (Peculiar Institution, p. vii)
After World War II, the German people decided to preserve some of the buildings in the Dachau Concentration Camp, not to demonize their own ethnic group and make themselves feel bad but, in the words of a memorial within the camp today: “May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defense of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men.”
Germans in 2026 are no more responsible for Nazi atrocities than white folks in Florida are responsible for chattel slavery in the antebellum South, but they, or I should say we, are response-able, i.e. we are able to respond to present realities that are rooted in in the past.
Black history therefore can be my/our history because we white folks don’t have to take responsibility for the sins of our ancestors any more than Black folks should use past suffering as an excuse for not taking responsibility to be response-able for themselves in the present.
Black history is my/our history because when we white folks read Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, we can be inspired by the story of a man who was born into slavery in 1856, learned to read and write, and worked his way through Hampton Institute where he was taught the value of dignity in hard work and labor and the virtue of selflessness, values he would implement as the first leader of the new Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an institute for Black higher education.
Booker T’s story is a deeply human story as well as a Black story of overcoming.
Black history is my/our history too.
When I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1968, I was turned off by the first part of his adult life when, as a spokesperson for Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, he referred to white people as devils. I couldn’t identify with that.
But reading about that frankly racist part of his life set me up to be thrilled and inspired by his account of a haj (pilgrimage) he made to Mecca in 1964. In a letter he wrote during the haj, he described what I will call a conversion experience.
“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land. … For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors. They [the pilgrims] were of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skin Africans. But we were all participating in the same rituals, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white.”
Here I was a white Christian identifying with a Black Muslim who was having a similar experience to ones I have had, especially regarding what I refer to as a “chalkboard.” In a sense, Malcolm’s pilgrimage forced him to erase what had previously been written on his “blackboard” (pun intended).
And that’s part of what happened to me during my semester at Tuskegee Institute in 1968. Part of my “learning” there was a good deal of “unlearning,” and I could have read Malcolm’s autobiography and identified with its author here in my home in Forest Park as well as at an HBCU.
Black history is my/our history too.
We can’t help but view events at least partly through the lenses of our own culture. God bless those who take off their own cultural glasses occasionally and, to switch metaphors, walk in the other guy’s shoes for a mile or two.
