Well Glory and Hallelujah

Well saddle up kids.  It's Black History Month time once again!

Of course Black History Month has come to be completely meaningless to me.  I will admit, as a child in grade school, Black History Month wasn't all that important to me either.  Even learning about Black people, Black history, Black achievement in school, which is good, meant little to me.  It never really moved me.

It wasn't until late high school that I understood Black History Month to be as meaningless as it is meaningful.  I'm getting ready to leave my college prep school and be Black in a real world.  It's at this time I realized I had been lied to.

As an intellectual, Black History Month is meaningful for a slightly perverse reason.  It's an opportunity to take a real shot at American education and the American memory of historical events.  History and the American memory of historical events are two very different things.

As an adult now, removed from the naivete, apathy, and ignorance of school children, brazened and emboldened by a tumultuous initiation into adulthood, I have come to understand the process through which I was lied to in all my years of expensive, American education.  The unlearning is coming undone.

The history is false.  The biology and chemistry are hidden.  The art is surpressed and made dumb.  The intellect is frowned upon.  They'll jail you and nail you for not participating in this fanciful facade.

So we have this month to spend as we wish educating or not educating ourselves on not just Black History, but on the history of all people of color, who are connected and made family by the comprehensive brutality of these White aliens.  Yeah I said it.

I have always found it to be some kind of insulting irony that they give us a month to reflect on a false history that covers a true story of suffering, resilience, intrinsic strength and blessings.  Why not just call it Black Celebratory Month?  So we can just pick what it is we want to celebrate.  It's as if to taunt us.  Black History Month...for a people whose histories were drowned in a middle passage centuries ago...whose futures was cauterized by an invasion and stability infected under the disease of colonization -- slavery on site we should call it.

It's Black History Month.  If you don't pick up a book to read, select a movie to watch, pick a place in which to volunteer, or anything else the spirit of the month moves you do to for Black people -- if you'd rather not participate in those activities, just slap a few aliens a day.  That keeps colonization away.

Happy Black History Month. ;)