Black History Didn’t Start with Slavery
Members-Only Blog Post by Executive Director, Calvin Eaton
Feb 26, 2021
We could barely make it through 28 days of Black History Month (BHM) 2021 before white supremacy tried to stop Us from being great. Earlier in the month a viral news story began circulating about Maria Montessori Academy, a North Ogden Utah charter school that posted publicly to its Facebook page late last week that parents were sent a letter allowing them “to exercise their civil rights and have their children opt out of participating in Black History Month at the school,” as first reported by the Standard-Examiner in Ogden. I’m sure the school is predominantly white and clearly anti-black and racist. How could this even be a thing you ask?
“It’s the irony for me”
The irony in this story is laughable since it is clear just how uneducated, anti-black and racist this entire scenario is. Imagine a school designed to teach and educate children being this ignorant to the history, meaning and continued need for education about the contributions of Black people across the African diaspora and the world. The erasure and whitewashing of Black people from American and global history is by itself a tragedy and then to have the entire point of BHM being erased from the narrative at a Montessori school in 2021 no less adds insult to the injury. The school has since backtracked with a typical “we were caught being racist” statement on its website and deleted the racist post and protocol; but the impact of the harm remains.
Stories like this demonstrate why too many white children grow up to be ignorant white adults that simply do not have a foundational understanding as to the impact and contributions of Black Americans on American history. Black history is American history. This is an indisputable fact. The reason why we uplift Black history is because white supremacy has stopped at nothing to diminish, dehumanize and marginalize Us.
Yet, Black history is also so much more than the United States, the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, the Civil War, and everything that came after. This is the reason why I decided to design the class Black History Didn’t Begin with Slavery in 2017. Based on the story on the Montessori school shared above; the U.S education system has failed more than white students when it comes to teaching the full range and depth about Black people and the African Diaspora. In an interview with WXXI’s Noelle Evans from last I shared the following:
“For many of us in the Black community, that lack of awareness or understanding of our ancestry has really been lacking, this class is really positioned to help people understand that.”
The context of Black history we have with slavery, post-slavery, reconstruction, and civil rights being the dominate framing is highly problematic. This framing erroneously centers whiteness so by shifting the dominant narrative of Black history, and teaching from an African-centered perspective we can recenter Black voices, Black stories, and Black experiences into how we talk about the Black experience. An experience that is more than colonialism, more than enslavement, more than pain and more than trauma. When we center the voices of Black people we begin to get a broader and fuller perspective of the beauty and depth of Blackness that existed long before the U.S. was even a colony. This is exactly what Nicole Hannah Jones did with the New York Times, 1619 Project and what we aim to do here at 540WMain.