Black History Month 2024: A Call To Action
As we kick off another February of Black Excellence and Joy, I must admit from the jump that I feel out-of-sorts. The world is quite complicated these days, with global conflicts, climate change, the ongoing minimization of diversity efforts, and another pending presidential election that feels simultaneously like the plot of a Star Wars trilogy and a Tubi flick that nobody’s watching. It’s wild out here. And if the present wasn’t bad enough, I’m now also listening to Michael Harriot’s Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America on my morning commutes. I highly recommend it (Michael does too!), but it certainly can put a dampener on your day, depending on the topic (today was the organized terror known as lynching, which occurred in the thousands for all kinds of reasons including keeping Black people away from the polls, retaliation for Black Excellence, and a basic denial of Black peoples’ rights to exist).
So, in a nutshell, I’ve been asking myself maybe more often than I normally do, “what do we do with all of this?”
It feels like there’s more at stake this time. And while we have the capacity to do more, to leverage our resources and opportunities for a far greater good than the simple incremental gains we’re often led to believe are so far off, I fear that we don’t have the will, nor the attention span, to actually get it done. I’m naming this not to put my pessimistic foot forward, but to make it plain, and hopefully sound whatever alarm makes the most sense to you and bring forth action. (This is also a foreshadowing for my future piece on how what we’re now calling “AI” will probably figure out that we are our own worst enemy, and the planet’s too, if it hasn’t already).
What stuck with me today from Harriot’s book was the idea that even in the aftermath of mass lynchings and other terroristic scare tactics, Black people organized and persevered. What has not been done to us? What have we not had to overcome? And yet, here we are. Still dreaming eternal dreams.
My hope is that the students I get the privilege to work with — on campus, in the classroom, and through TEJP and Higher Learning — stay inspired to go beyond society’s expectations and create new possibilities for us to be enriched in the many ways that enrichment can happen. We deserve that. But we can’t wait on it. We have to take it. That’s what history has shown me thus far, and what the world reminds me daily. This Black History Month — all 29 days of it — learn something new, reflect on past lessons, connect with people, and commit to making the kind of history that can save us all.
