By Molly Hiro
This first week of February marks the beginning of Black History Month, a time when we remember and pay homage to figures such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. But this year, the African American most on our minds is from the very real present, not the past: our newly-minted President, Barack Obama.
Obama's rapid ascension to the presidency has become a focal point for debates on the very existence of things like Black History Month.
For some, having a black family on America's highest political pedestal makes the work of those such as Rosa Parks and Malcolm X seem even more worthy of honor and celebration. For others, Obama's success (along with his mixed-race status) marks the beginning of a post-racial era.
According to this latter perspective, if a black man can be elected president, then the dream of a color-blind America has been realized, and so we should no longer even separate off "black" history from American history by giving it its own month.
As a white scholar compelled by questions of African-American history and identity, I side with the former of the above two perspectives on the continuing commemoration of black history. As many have noted, it's untrue to the legacy of Dr. King's convictions to interpret his famous "I Have a Dream" speech as calling for simple color-blindness. And in an age when black Americans are still living in poverty, dropping out of high school, and charged with crimes at much higher rates than average, Obama's election, while enormously symbolic, can't be seen as signaling the end of racial inequities in the U.S.
Yet the existence of Black History month need not be understood as dividing or atomizing the country between African Americans and everyone else.
When Dr. Carter G. Woodson founded what was then called "Negro History Week" in 1926, he called for emphasizing "not Negro History, but the Negro in history ... not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate and religious prejudice."
Indeed, when I study and teach African-American literature, I'm always struck by the simultaneous particularity and universality of the themes that emerge. On one hand, black-authored texts dramatically render historical realities.
Just a few examples: Harriet Jacobs's personal narrative captures the painfully narrow set of options for a young female slave; Zora Neale Hurston's works sing the folk traditions of the black South; Richard Wright's "Native Son" dramatizes the bleakness of the Jim Crow era in Chicago ghettos.
In these cases and many others, literature can enrich our sense of the particular struggles and successes of black Americans.
On the other hand, however, the thoughts and feelings associated with these concrete historical realities are themselves sometimes universally applicable. So, for example, while few of us, black or white, have actually taught ourselves to read in the way that Frederick Douglass did, his struggle to gain literacy (and thus freedom), articulates metaphorically many of our own personal struggles to assimilate a certain power structure.
Likewise, W. E. B. Du Bois's description of "double consciousness," of that peculiar sensation of seeing yourself always through another's eyes, so poignantly gets at that sense of a "split self" that most people deal with at some moment of great self-consciousness. And how many of us, of whatever race, have listened to a classic jazz or blues tune - both genres originated by black artists - and felt that it perfectly expresses a particular feeling that words can't quite describe?
To me, then, African-American literature - as well as African-American history and culture more broadly - matters to all of us.
It's valuable to be reminded of the dark and painful histories of slavery and segregation, but it's also inspiring to celebrate those remarkable figures, black and white, who struggled against those same institutions.
Last week I had the opportunity to hear the eloquent Dr. Cornel West, a leading black public intellectual, speak about his perspective on the "age of Obama." As West argued, being concerned about racial justice isn't about "phenotype," but is part of a larger quest for truth, and "the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak."
So this February, let's remember that celebrating Obama's victory and memorializing those on whose struggles his successes are based can and should go hand in hand.
