The first issue I have with BHM lies in the title: Black History Month. A good starting point for this debate would be to remove the word “month” from the notion of celebrating black history over 31 days each year. What we need is awareness: an awareness of black history then, now and in the future and for black history to be part and parcel of everyone’s history – all the time, not just for a month.
It is not helpful to see black history through the myopic prism of a single month. The history of civilisation cannot be talked about by marginalising the history of 12.9% of the world’s population in terms of ethnic groups, reducing it to token gestures for a month each year.
I grew up in Jamaica where the idea of a month where black history is celebrated would be laughed at, simply because our history is part of our everyday existence, it wraps around us in everything we do, from the food to the music to the struggles of making it through each day. It is a rich history that has been informed by its ties with Britain, just as Britain has been enriched by its historic links with Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, as well as Africa.
Britain has long exhibited a history of dishing out morsels to the marginalised and misdirected, pacifying them with worthless slogans and legislation as a barely disguised apology for its own history that has been less that accommodating and welcoming to its former colonial allies. BHM is such a gesture. In short, black history month is a pacifier, a sop to make those who are duped into a sense of inclusion by token gestures feel better.
How do you embed topics / themes / ideas into your lessons over Black History Month? We don’t. Instead we recognise that the history of black people in this country deserves more than a cursory glance of something that is part and parcel of Britain’s own history.
Black history should be taught as part of history, without the unnecessary dissection that can only lead to division and resentment. Imperial history is still the dominant consideration when drawing up the curriculum. In the words of Dawn Butler, the Labour MP: “At the moment, history is taught to make one group of people feel inferior and another group of people feel superior, and this has to stop,” And in the words of Jeremy Corbyn: The best atonement by the British might be, “…to start teaching unromanticised colonial history in British schools. The British public is so woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples.”
The challenges that we face in schools and colleges – in fact, in society - is bringing this topic to the front and centre of education. This can only be done by ditching the disingenuous notion of BHM altogether and for schools and other educational institutions start teaching history without glossing over the facts in an insulting and dismissive way, and by starting to pay attention to the rich history and contribution the black population here and abroad has made to the enrichment of the United Kingdom. Only then can we really begin to open the debate about what diversity, equality and fairness means in modern Britain.
Black people are likely to be paid less than their white counterparts. Black prisons have become the new plantations given the disproportionate numbers of black inmates compared to white inmates. You are more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black. I have been arrested, locked in a cell and accused of smoking cannabis and shoplifting. I was, of course, completely innocent of these charges, but became a victim of police victimisation. In the United States, black women experience
unacceptably poor maternal health outcomes, including disproportionately high rates of death related to pregnancy or childbirth. These are just some of the many, many unequal consequences of being black in societies that continue to marginalise. BHM does not help remedy this. It is a poor attempt of using sticking plaster to address the many imbalances in what is pretending to be an equal society.
Black history is more than one month long.
- Anonymous
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