Black History Is American History

By FRANÇOIS BATTISTE

Well, it's February, the shortest month of the year, so I suppose it's time to reflect on black history. This is our opportunity to cram and minimize an unending wealth of progress by a people that demonstrates what's possible for human life, born out of inhuman captivity, to accomplish in this society. Start the clock; we have only 28 days, or 29, depending on the leap year.

François Battiste (Photo by Chia Messina)

Recently, I visited the exhibition "Slavery in New York" at the New-York Historical Society. I walked out of the exhibit incensed. Not at what I learned, but at the fact that I'm just now learning it. Aspects of African-American history, which is a window-dressing way of really saying American history, are still coming to light. Why?

When Carter G. Woodson introduced Black History Week in 1926, it came at a time when the African-American's role in weaving (literally and figuratively) the fabric of the American tapestry was blatantly isolated from the mainstream of our nation's psyche. Slavery in America was to be an institution of the past that would only casually, if at all, be addressed in our nation's classrooms and social studies books.

Not so much has changed since Woodson's day.

Most of us are taught that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was made up of free states. No. The truth is, during the colonial period, only Charleston, S.C., rivaled New York City in the extent to which slavery penetrated everyday life. In fact, legalized slavery existed in New York until 1827. Why is it that so much of what really took place in order for us to have this great country is left out of our formative education?

Our classrooms still teach the founding of America in utopian terms. We celebrate Columbus Day, and never put in plain terms the savage extermination of the Native American people. The American colonists are to be hailed as heroes who fought for liberty against their British oppressors, but we leave out the brutal oppression practiced daily on American soil, and the fact it was deemed legitimate and just.

A society in denial over atrocities committed against its own citizens can never move forward.

Why shouldn't we teach our children that our beloved nation has been untrue to her professed principles of equality from the start—that she was founded on exploitation, hypocrisy, deception, injustice, cultural terrorism, and subjective polemics?

Why should our young minds not know that our righteous George Washington warned that if the Americans did not resist the British tyranny they would become "as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway"?

Why shouldn't there be mention that the tremendous surge of wealth in America was rooted in the fact that more than four million slaves worked unpaid from 1619 to 1865? That the United States government, well into the 20th century, was instrumental in furthering separate and unequal conditions, institutionalizing racism through American apartheid, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws?

The inestimable loss of life, identity, family, language, religion, education, and freedom still are not viewed as a national tragedy. To this day, our federal government has never formally apologized for the indelible scar created by the institution of slavery.

Carter G. Woodson had hoped the week he founded could one day be eliminated, when black history would become fundamental to American history. This still hasn't happened.

In order to get deep into our nation's veins, we must not count on our classrooms to reveal what has so long been intentionally buried. It's outside the classrooms—it's in libraries, it's in taking a vital role in our children's education, it's in exhibitions like the one currently at the New-York Historical Society that we'll get a deeper portrait of the land in which we live.

A society in denial over atrocities committed against its own citizens can never move forward. Nor can it dictate to the world on the subject of humanity.

François Battiste is a fourth-year drama student.