Beyond Black History Month
by Josh Rivers
Black History Month is the annually-sanctioned month to acknowledge the lives, contributions and perspectives of Black people past and present, and I know I’m not the only Black person who finds it a rather tedious month. The tedium, of course, has nothing to do with Black History Month’s ongoing importance and purpose; it’s how we are too often called upon to offer more than we already do the rest of the year, and as if our lives begin and end in October.
While Black History Month can be an important vehicle for discovering the vast expanse of Black people’s contributions to the world, conversations about our joy, tenderness, vulnerability and awakening are often missing. Our voices are required, and in limited ways: to speak about the ills of racism, discrimination and violence, for example, and not the quotidian and very important ways we choose to sustain ourselves and those we care about in an anti-Black world.
In industries, workplaces and media narratives largely dominated by white people, how do we ensure that Black History Month is for Black people, too? Maybe a better question is: how do we ensure Black History Month is a fulfilling, generative and productive addition to the lives we lead the other eleven months of the year? To answer these questions, I turn to two conversations on my podcast, Busy Being Black.
My conversation with artist, author and legal scholar Olave Nduwanje speaks to the ongoing considerations we make as we figure out who we can be and want to be in the world. Her own journey required she committed herself to imagine, inhabit and embody a Blackness that is proud, expansive and capacious – one that accounts for our shared and varied histories: “I had to come to love Blackness and that meant embracing Blackness, not as a negatively-affected condition that I had to transcend, but as something that is beautiful, that I’m proud of, that I embrace. And that meant loving Black people in all of their manifestations.” And in one of her more provocative moments, she points to an important reality: “The construct of Blackness is inherently and primarily a white supremacist project. As we lay claim to it, what do we do with it? We must do something with it.”
In a mind-expanding conversation, activist and poet PJ Samuels troubles the pursuit of freedom narrative and says joy has been the more productive pursuit: “When I function in pursuit of joy, I am more likely to extract freedom from a situation that was not meant to be free. If I’m not finding joy in it, I’m going to find another way, which then frees me from the situation that was oppressing me and getting in the way of my joy. The pursuit of joy, for me, automatically creates the pursuit of freedom.” Within and outside of our conversation, she writes poetry that celebrates Black women in the many ways they show up in the world, poetry that speaks to a steadfast refusal to accept the negative perceptions of Black women hard-baked into white society.
The benefit of spaces like Busy Being Black is the target audience, and therefore the gaze, is our own, but these two examples offer insight into the more existential questioning and reckoning taking place beyond the bounds of Black History Month, which – to my mind – too often centres learning for organisations that should already be taking initiative. With an organisation-centred approach, we lose the very human experience that Black History Month was designed to amplify and reinforce. Conversations about what Blackness means for Black people and what joy-finding looks like for us are precluded, not only because spaces are often not safe for this type of exploration, but because there isn’t room. And if spaces aren’t safe and if there isn’t room for us to show up beyond whatever advice we can offer about diversity and inclusion, how can we possibly answer the call to show up as our “authentic” selves? (The diversity and inclusion of Black people is not a Black people problem.)
The hope is that the conversations and organisational proclamations that abound during Black History Month have resonance and result in action; and my feeling is, if the beautiful breadth of our lives was a meaningful enough consideration in the first place, workplaces would be better placed to take action and make space for us, without us doing the heavy lifting. Until then, I’ll keep advocating for a Black History Month for Black people: one designed for us to enjoy, learn, connect, refill, relax and recharge. A month which, in acknowledgement of our varied routes to the present, centres the lived experiences of Black people and employees in ways that lift us up in the ways we do for so many others, and which account for our lives outside of organisational targets and bottom-lines.
