Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Friday
Black History Month, which begins tomorrow, takes on a special significance this year given rightwing America’s attempts to erase Black history from our national consciousness. First there was the Air Force removing video materials about the Tuskegee airmen (as well as about women service pilots), although they’ve since been put back in the curriculum following a hew and cry. Now we get word that the Defense Department’s intelligence agency has paused observances of Black History Month, as well as observance of Pride Month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, and other cultural and historical annual events.
None of this should come as a surprise. For years we’ve seen MAGA go after such works as Ruby Bridges Goes to School and Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.” And then there’s the wholesale assault on Toni Morrison that has been underway for decades.
The erasure of history is an ongoing theme of George Orwell’s 1984, which increasingly appears to be describing our reality. The Party’s slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” appears to have been unofficially adopted by Trump. What he wants is an eternal now in which he defines reality. Or as Winston explains it to Julia, “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
I’m struck by the contrast between Orwell’s pessimism about totalitarian regimes reshaping history and poet Lucille Clifton’s optimism that history wields a power unto itself. In “i am accused of tending to the past,” written around 1990, she sees Black history growing up as it remembers faces, names, and dates. “When she is strong enough to travel on her own,” Clifton writes, “beware, she will”:
i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.
I wonder if Clifton regarded Black History Month as being a necessary mother, required to nurture a History not yet strong enough to stand on its own, much less travel. In any event, MAGA appears to heeding Clifton’s threat—“beware, she will”—and is taking every measure to ensure it never grows up. The attacks on DEI have essentially become Jim Crow 2024, an attempt to reinstate our racial caste system following a half century of significant progress. An historical knowledge of what African Americans have endured and how they have resisted and sometimes triumphed is therefore essential.
It is therefore encouraging to learn about instances of Black history being taught in weekend programs—such as this one in Florida—to counteract MAGA assaults on school history curricula. Literature, meanwhile, has its own vital role to play, one that is particularly important given the ability of stories and poems to capture the complexities of race in America. As authors like Clifton, Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and all those others make clear, the experience of being Black and White in America is so multidimensional that no single perspective can do it justice. While the Trump administration would certainly like to end an awareness of our tortured history of race, to a certain extent Clifton is right: it’s currently traveling on its own more than it ever has, despite attacks. As one who learned Tennessee history from a segregationist teacher in 1963—Fred Langford barely mentioned slavery—I can see the difference.
Every year on the Sunday nearest Martin Luther King’s birthday, Episcopal churches (and other denominations as well, I suspect) sing James Weldon Johnson’s inspiring “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” You can read the whole song here but for today’s purpose I excerpt the lines referring to Black history:
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
When confronting renewed attempts at oppression, nothing is more powerful than knowing that one has triumphed over oppression in the past. Only when one succumbs to the timeless present that authoritarians desire does one lose hope and give up.
