BLACK HISTORY MONTH, A NECESSITY FOR WHITE PEOPLE

by Ruth Sheets

I appreciate “Black History Month.”  It provides a kind of relief for all of us from the other 11 months of whiteness, mostly white maleness (this includes the months dedicated to the history and contributions of other groups like Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous persons since their months have gotten little recognition and support so far, unfortunately). 

The challenge, many white men, particularly those in power, simply don’t acknowledge the fact that it is they who encompass most of the stories and people of US history classes with the rest of us nearly always on the periphery.  Their ever-presence is just assumed.  White men were/are the stars of every show while everyone else place supporting roles if even allowed on stage at all.

I suspect every white person in power can name 3 prominent African-Americans from the past, usually:  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglas, so “why do we need Black History Month, we’ve got it?”  Well, Can they identify 3 things each of them has contributed to this nation?  That is less likely.  I bet every Black leader in this country could name a whole lot of white people in American history beyond George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Abe Lincoln.  And, they can name more than 3 significant things about each. 

Right now, white folks, particularly “conservative” ones, are scared.  Until around 1955 and the beginning of the Montgomery, AL bus boycott, white people just assumed they were America and everyone else served as extras in their movie of life.  It was OK to treat Black soldiers, Marines, and sailors as inferior and the white officers constantly did their best to put them in a place far below white members of the services despite their extraordinary contributions and Truman’s move to integrate the military, something not done since our War for Independence.  

Black actors played servants, criminals, or workers in minor roles unless it was a “Black movie” or play.  Black musicians were popular but could only be heard by white people among other white people in segregated venues in most parts of the country. 

I had read of people in many areas of our country who had never seen someone who was Black (in person), by the time they reached adulthood.  I found that hard to believe until I went to college and met several.  A friend in graduate school in the 1980s had seen a few at a distance, but never met a Black person until he came onto our campus.  He had met Native Americans, being from South Dakota, but white people were all around him, all the time.  He told me there were rumors of a couple of Black students in his undergraduate college, but he never had a class with one of them.  That was the 1980s!

White Americans have a long history of mistreating people of color.  That is part of our history and continued over time because even our government saw it as acceptable.  Anyone who believed the nation should be able to do better was put down, silenced, even killed to stop that from happening.  Attacks on Black communities were permitted as was lynching, both terrorist actions to keep Black people in an inferior place subject to the whims of white people mostly men.  White women participated too, calling rape on Black men and youth because they liked the power they had to destroy the life of someone beneath them, possibly the way people harm animals because they can. 

As I said, white people in power are scared.  They may have an inkling that their ancestors, perhaps even their own parents and grandparents have done terrible things to harm Black fellow citizens.  They stole their land (hey, they did that to indigenous persons and so many others too), kept them enslaved, beat them for not doing tasks as fast as the whites thought they should (even though those whites couldn’t have begun to do that level of work, then stole their wages).  They took away their vote, drove them out of communities, set up “sunset laws” which made it illegal for a Black person to be in a town after sunset, destroyed Black-owned businesses, and so much more, yet despite all of this, Black people are rising.  They have not yet reached parity, or even close to it yet, but there has been progress.  Too many white Americans fear (for no reason in reality) that Black people, and other people of color will take charge, “steal” their jobs and relegate white people to the poverty, discrimination, and violence white people have subject Black Americans to over the years.

We see this mind-crushing fear in the actions of Ron DeSantis (a relatively recent immigrant family, who should know better) and several of his fellow Republican governors.  Those guys seem to be able to get their mostly-white state legislatures to bow to their will, passing all kinds of laws to try to put Black people back in the box those white “leaders” want them to stay in.

Then, there’s the ongoing police attack on Black Americans that has been part of life for generations.  We hear about its frequency now because we have body cameras that are supposed to be turned on during on duty encounters with community members.  There is nothing new about the beatings, choke holds, “no-knock” warrants, planting drugs, murders, lying and cover-ups perpetrated by police on members of the Black community; we just get to see it now and allow ourselves to rightly be horrified by it, that is, when we aren’t thinking either “He must have done something to deserve that” or “the cop really didn’t have a choice; he thought his life was threatened.” 

It has taken a while, but now, more white people are assisting their Black fellow citizens in stopping the anti-everyone-but-white-men actions, but not yet enough.  Those Republican-led state legislatures are passing laws to make it very difficult for Black people to vote, intimidating Black voters with threats of arrest for voter fraud they didn’t commit, and shoving through other laws that primarily make life in general difficult, even dangerous for people of color.  Equally problematic is that to a great extent, our courts are going along, often making up interpretations of the law that permits such unamerican actions against fellow citizens.  

February is Black History Month, for white Americans, Black Appreciation Month too, when We the People of the United States start to seriously learn what has been done to our fellow Black citizens by our fellow white citizens, and determine that we as a nation need to make amends.  We need to appreciate the amazing things our fellow Black citizens have done to help make this nation a world leader in so many areas.  Black History Month is a perfect time for every single white citizen to consider our own prejudices, even unconscious biases, and think about how our own actions have negatively impacted Black Americans.  Then we need to think about ways we need to work to lessen or even eliminate those prejudices/biases, becoming allies with Black Americans to work harder toward the founders’ dream of always working to make ourselves “a more perfect union.” This means making sure all citizens over 18 years of age can easily vote for  the candidates of their choice just as the Constitution demands, and have their votes counted.  Reformation of our police departments is essential.  This will require communities to redefine who should be police in the community, the kind of training they will need to be true servants of the people rather than community bullies.  Black people must be at the center of any changes made since they have been harmed most by traditional policing in this country.  Our judicial system from top to bottom needs to be composed of fair, talented, diverse judges and justices who actually care about the law, judging on the facts rather than their own unexamined or dismissed prejudices or donations from rich white people and corporations. 

When state governors try to take away people’s rights:  to read books they choose, to teach and learn Black History, to vote easily in every election, to have bodily autonomy, to be on streets and roads in the state in safety related to gun and police violence, to have clean air and water, and the rest, everyone, white, Black, all people of color, all genders, need to stand up and say “STOP!  We all deserve better and we demand it!!” 

February is a time for white Americans to listen carefully to Black Americans discussing the beauty and depth of African-American history and culture.   As all of us learn more about this narrative, we must ponder how we can more fully incorporate that American story into what is taught as American history, then make sure it is there.  It certainly is time! 

GOVERNOR DeSANTIS, SCARED OF BLACK HISTORY?

By Ruth A. Sheets

Ron DeSantis, what’s with this waging a campaign in Florida to get rid of Black history classes in schools?  I understand you have no problem with Italian culture classes (perhaps to raise up your heritage and your right to whiteness), French and Japanese culture classes too (Japanese I suppose to prove you’re not racist), but not Black history which is the heritage of a large number of people living and working in your own state.  Well, Ron, I know just why you have a fear of white kids and adults learning about Black history and I will lay some of it out for you.  However it can be stated in one sentence that will need only a little clarification.  The cruelties done by white people in this country against Black Americans are horrific beyond comprehension and the ancestors of many of the white folks in good ole Florida participated as did the ancestors of white folks all over this nation.

“What are some of those horrific cruelties,” you ask. Well, this is a challenge because the cruelties were and are so many and RATHER widespread.  Do I mention the most heinous or the most common, physical or emotional or some of each?     

Governor DeSantis, I know you don’t want to know these things because you are scared of what such knowledge might do to you even though your family was only present for some of the cruelty even if they were not directly involved, something only you and they would know.  It’s too bad you can’t imagine what such awareness could do for you, a white Christian man.  Maybe it would help if you try for a fraction of a moment to imagine the following were happening to you or people you love.  OMG!  I just realized, conservative white people in power have a hard time with empathy, even in its most basic form.  Well then, pretend it is a movie and you are one of the Black actors and see what you think.  I probably need to begin with perhaps the most difficult first.   

Africans in the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries did not choose to come to America.  They did not even pay for steerage tickets as your immigrant ancestors and most Italian immigrants did.  They were captured and sold as commodities.  That word was SOLD.  Their treatment on shipboard was so horrendous, even your movie wouldn’t be able to show it believably.  Then they were auctioned off the way one might auction off a painting or piece of furniture, men, women, and children, the survivors of the voyage and later the children of those survivors.

Life for those enslaved people was not sweet and pastoral as you probably were told in school; it was beyond inhumane yet the owners claimed to be Christians, followers of a man who was not violent, hateful, or a user of fellow human beings.  How did they justify it, they claimed they were training savages, rescuing them from a terrible life in the jungles of Africa.  They lied to themselves, and kept it up for 250 years until a war finally ended it.

The war, however, didn’t end the suffering of those Africans who over time had become Americans by virtue of their being here and the 13^th and 14^th Amendments to our Constitution.  Southern white folks just couldn’t bear those “less-than-human” former enslaved persons being free, so worked their hardest to push as many as possible back into some form of slavery by trumped-up charges to prison:  farms, mines, road-building and more, where slave labor was and is still permitted.

Then, there’s the lynching that targeted any Black person who dared to challenge a white person, talk to a white woman, or expected the rights of citizenship which were guaranteed to them in the 14^th Amendment.  More than 3,500 murders have been documented mostly throughout the South, but even in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois, states whose troops had fought to free the enslaved people.  Oh, by the way, neither Federal nor state governments intervened to stop the violence and white officials often participated.

Then there’s the massacres of Black people while their communities were destroyed by white people who were angry that Black people might have anything white people didn’t approve of them having:  Wilmington, NC, East St. Louis and Chicago, IL, Greenwood in Tulsa, OK, Rosewood in Florida your own state.  The ancestors of at least some of your current supporters participated in the violence.

Over the years, Black Americans have worked to claim their rights, but white people constantly stood and stand in the way.  African-Americans were/are forced to pay outrageous rents by landlords for shacks and slum housing; share-cropped where the white landowners regularly cheated them of their share of the earnings; were redlined into narrow, poor districts and were kept there by curfews and violence, often killed or injured if they happened to be caught in the white area of town.  They couldn’t try on clothing in stores but were welcome to buy the clothes.  They couldn’t eat at lunch counters and in most restaurants and had to pick up food in the back and take it out (maybe the model for the modern take-out restaurants).  You probably also know the inhumane bathroom, water fountain, and bus ridership rules all over the former Confederacy. 

If a factory was to be built, and it was guaranteed to pollute the air or water, it was built in the Black section of town, and still is and the workers were paid wages that barely supported them and their families.  Segregation was everywhere and even permitted by law by the Supreme Court in 1896.

Ever since 1870 when Black men got the right to vote through Amendment to the Constitution, white people have been working to keep them from voting:  poll taxes, fake literacy tests, gerrymandering, voting places too far for people to get to, ID requirements with unnecessary but costly IDs, voter roll purges, and a lot more.   

During the time of enslavement, police targeted Black people even in states where slavery had been illegal for decades claiming they could be runaway slaves.  The police in many places expanded that targeting and have harassed, brutalized, and murdered Black men at far higher rates than any other group and continue to do so while the police tell us how “I was scared for my life.”  Police are rarely held accountable even when their actions have been recorded.  Juries nearly always give the police who do the killing a free pass, well, unless the officers are themselves Black as in Memphis. 

Doctors, hospitals, and other medical entities treat Black people with far less respect than they do other patients:  they don’t prescribe appropriate medications in appropriate amounts; listen poorly to patients’ descriptions of their illness; do not respond as quickly when a Black patient calls for help while in the hospital; follow inaccurate protocols assuming Black people have thicker skin and feel pain less.  Black infant and maternal death rates are higher than for any other group and seem to be rising, particularly in red states, you know the ones like yours that want to force Black women to stay pregnant putting them at significant risk of death.    

This little bit of history I have presented here is a taste of what the African-American history class you want to ban would help students consider.  The fragile little white kids of Florida wouldn’t be forced to take it, so your hype about this is disingenuous, in fact, fodder to feed the part of your base you keep stoking to be hateful and fearful of people of color, in this case, Black Americans.  That is so un-Christian in case you don’t know it.  Lying about a course you have not studied or even read the syllabus for should be beneath a  leader, but lately, Republicans have scooped up some of the most hateful, fearful, human beings and put them on the stage to whip up more hate and fear to turn it into anger against the people you have decided you don’t like or have power you think is undeserved. 

The other side of the African-American history of this country includes the men who built the Capitol in Washington, DC and most likely in the other states too, laid a lot of the rail lines and roads, carved woodwork and built furniture, wrote and published poetry, taught in schools and colleges, painted and sculpted, sang, composed,  and performed incredible music, made fashionable gowns as well as everyday clothing from sheering the sheep to processing the cotton by hand, made delicious food from whatever ingredients they could grow or find.  In short, they were masters of nearly every craft and skill in our country throughout history.

Black Americans fought in our war for Independence in an integrated army and navy.  They also fought in all the rest of our many wars, usually in segregated units that did the construction, clean-up, burials, and cooking for the troops.  Or, they were sent into the thickest of the fighting.  Black troops won the highest honor bestowed by France for their bravery and persistence in saving the French people during WWI.  In our volunteer military forces, Black soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Coast Guards make up a higher proportion of the troops than their percentage in our society as a whole.  

Governor DeSantis, Black Americans do not deserve your scorn.  They don’t deserve your dismissal either.  African-Americans deserve respect and courses that deeply look at their history and contributions.  The action you and your Education official have taken is racist and very childish.  The adult thing to do now would be for you both to apologize to Black Floridians and approve the course, although I don’t see why you should have any say in which AP courses a district offers.  Is that just another of your invasions into areas you should not have entered, right along with your insults of the LGBTQ+ communities.  I am guessing you don’t care.  I can’t help but think you lost your humanity somewhere.  It would truly be a good idea for you to go looking for it.  The apology for your bad behavior related to the African-American History course and getting out of a decision about an AP class would be a good start.

Here are a few books that could help you learn about the immense strength and persistence of the African-American community.  I am sure if you had any Black assistants, they could recommend more.  Even if you were to read them, I doubt they would change your perception of Black Americans, but it might awaken a tiny spark in your conscience.

Under the Skin, the Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation  by Linda Villarosa

At the Hands of Persons Unknown by Phillip Dray 

The East St. Louis Massacre, The Greatest Outrage of the Century, 1917  by Ida B. Wells-Barnett