Every February we celebrate Black History Month here in the United States, and every February like clock work we hear people attacking the very idea of Black History Month, which often morphs into complaints about HBCU's, BET, and any other organization or celebration that focuses on Blacks as a group. And sadly for me some of the loudest complaints come from my conservative brethren. So today, I am going to explain to you why Black History Month still matters, and why it is so important to all of us...and especially Blacks.

When Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week, America was deep in the throes of Jim Crow segregation. Blacks were never taught that they had any history besides one of alleged barbarity in Africa and deprivation as slaves and share croppers in America. The Harvard educated Woodson knew better, not because he had been taught about it at Harvard, but because he had done his own research and found out that Blacks had much more to look back on than slavery. There were great kingdoms in Mali and Ghana, great university cities like Jenne and Timbuktu, glorious rulers like Mansa Musa and Menes, great cities like Menefer and Kilwa that no school was teaching to its Black students. So Mr. Woodson, seeing this appalling lack of knowledge of the history of Blacks in society, took it upon himself to set aside one week every February to teach that history to anyone who wanted to learn it and to make sure those Blacks understood that there was glory in their history and not just misery.

And the same lack of knowledge that so appalled and inspired Carter G. Woodson exist to this day, in spite of the morphing of Negro History Week into Black History Month. Sure, all throughout February there are school lessons about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and now I am sure that Barack Obama will be included in the pantheon of heroes as well. And there is talk of Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods as well and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem lies in the fact that even now Black history is either largely ignored, or is taught in the same tired timeline...slavery to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement to the election of Obama. Period. But that is not all that we are.

I have found that the people who regularly frequent this space are some of the more intelligent people out there, so I want to ask you a few Black history questions in an attempt to make my point...feel free to use a reply post to answer the following questions:

1. What is the significance of the year 1482 in Black history?
2. What is the significance of the year 1619?
3. Who was Mansa Musa, and what was his importance?
4. Who was Menes and what was his importance?
5. What is the significance of the years 1803-04 in Black history?
6. Who were the Moors, and what is their significance?
7. Identify Benjamin Banneker and list one notable accomplishment.
8. Who was Jean-Baptiste DuSable?
9. How many Africans fought in the Revolutionary War, combined?
10. What did the Constitution of the United States say about the slave trade?

That's ten simple questions, and I would wager right now that the majority of the people who respond to this little quiz, without the aid of the internet, would likely fail. And not just White folks, but Black folks as well. And the reason is that we are not being taught! It is not some covert conspiracy to shut Black history out of history curricula, it is simply that the same incomplete history is taught from generation to generation and becomes the accepted history. And it happens at all educational levels and at all types of schools. I am a history major at an HBCU, have taken all of the prescribed African American history courses, have gotten A's in all of them, and in only one have we looked at the history of Blacks extending from Africa to the present. The rest followed the same time line that I laid out earlier, with a few extra details added in for flavor.

But it is during Black History Month that we get the opportunity to have a broader horizon of Black history opened up to us, when we really take the time and have an opportunity to get deeper than just a surface view of the subject. And until the accepted history of Blacks in America can be revamped, and curricula are changed to offer a more holistic view of Black history then Black History Month will continue to be needed. You see, Black History Month isn't just for Blacks. It is for all of us to be able to take a closer look at history and to see where Blacks come from, to expand our horizons and knowledge base, and to gain an appreciation that Blacks have a history beyond slavery and Jim Crow. It allows us to appreciate the history of the Moors, of Askia Muhammad, and Richard Allen and to share that history with the entire American society. It allows us to all come to the realization that Blacks have just as rich a historical heritage as the Italians, Greeks, or English and that history is just as wonderful. It allows us to get a sense of where Blacks come from, where we are, and how we got here. It is not to shut out anyone, but is an invitation for you to join in our celebration of our unique history.

Black History Month remains important because it is not just for us Blacks, but is an opportunity for all of us to learn, grow, and appreciate one another. And that is why we should all happily celebrate Black History Month.

A little while ago I wrote post about why black Americans were slow in warming up to Barak Obama, and in it I posited that the reason was that Barak was not viewed as “black like me.” He had not gone through the same struggles that many blacks had gone through, that he was just so different from most blacks that he would have a hard time connecting with them. Since that time the worm has truly turned, and now I find myself trying to figure out why there is this sudden embrace of Obama by much of the black voting populace. Some think it is simply about his race, some think it is just the same old politics as usual, and there are I am certain other theories floating around that may or may not shed led on the subject. But what follows is my particular take on the issue.

I was in my African American history seminar class the other day, and we were having a class discussion about how blacks treat one another, how we relate to one another, and how we see each other. One of my young classmates had the view that much of what we see in the black community is a manifestation of how the rest of the world views us; that we are in essence victims of the perceptions of us that others have created. I countered that the problem is not how others see us, but how we see ourselves; I felt that many of the images that we say bother us are our own creation, so we are victims of ourselves. Thinking a little more about it, we were both right in sense and it is in the melding of those ideas that I see the traction that Obama has been able to gain in the black community, even after first struggling to gain traction with “his” constituents.

The embrace of Barak Obama all comes back not to the fact that he is simply black, but because he is what blacks want people to see when they look at us. His image, politics aside, is the image that blacks want to be associated with all of us, as opposed to the dominant images of blacks in the media. So many times the images associated with blacks is of the inner city single mother, the gangbanger on the corner, or of the “iced out” rap star. These are all negative images, and many blacks want nothing more than to not be associated with these images, as we know how negative they are. We know that the world is watching and judging all of us on the basis of those images.

Politically, the images that people have of blacks in this country by and large are dominated by people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Maxine Waters, John Conyers, and Charles Rangel. All of these people are your archetypical hardcore “Black Left” Democrats, whose very stock in trade is to garner power by appealing to what Shelby Steele so correctly called “white guilt.” Every slight is a reason to cry racism, every plan in opposition to them is a conspiracy against blacks, and every policy debate is a reason to launch another scathing attack on “institutional racism.” As much as we would like to see ourselves in the images of people like JC Watts, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, or Harold Ford, we have come to realize that since the squeaky wheel gets the media grease, the image of blacks in the political realm that are going to be publicized will not be the articulate manner of a Harold Ford, but the wild eyed conspiracy mongering of a Maxine Waters.

Into this political scene then steps one Barak Hussein Obama and he is exactly what many have been waiting for. He is tall, good looking, accomplished, educated, successful, polished, and as slick as black ice. He carries himself with pride, without looking haughty; he speaks like an Ivy League graduate, yet he retains some of the street patois that identifies him as “one of us”; he has “made it” in this world that seems like it is stacked against our success, yet he has never stopped being “down”, as the slang puts it. His is the image that we all want for the world to see and associate with black Americans, that of a man that is all of the things that whites admire and is still at home among the “regular” black folks.

And that is what concerns me about this situation, and not so much Obama’s decidedly left of center, boilerplate Democratic politics. It is the fact that we, as blacks continue to allow ourselves to be defined by what white people think of us; we internalize their views of us and spend so much of our time attempting to either live up to or escape those views that we barely are able to define ourselves. We are constantly wearing a mask to project to others what we think they want us to be and in so doing we lose sight of who we are. We allow ourselves to be seen as members of a group, whose image is wrapped up in how white people perceive one member of our race, and if that member is getting a negative reaction we all feel as if we are being viewed in a negative light. Until we are able to honestly define ourselves as individuals, until we are able to truly accept the fact that our black “brothers” are not wrong to hold unpopular opinions, and until we are able to divorce our ideas of “blackness” from the embrace of a defined set of opinions, mores, and political views we will remain stuck in our current rut.

We have the power to become Americans just like any other people, regardless of our skin color. But until we embrace those opportunities and divorce ourselves from the compulsion to group identify instead of behaving as true individuals, we are always going to be a people searching for just the right image, and just the right leader. We have to understand that we are too diverse to need a single leader, and that we are too diverse to allow ourselves to be defined by any single image. We have among us the poor, the rich, the gangbanger and the graduate; our race contains all of these things…but we have to be strong enough not to allow any one of those things to define all of us.

And as much as it may pain some to hear it, that includes rejecting the image of Obama as the image of all black Americans. His story can be an inspiration, and he can be used as a role model for people to aspire to be like. But he is no more the singular image of black Americans than I am, and we have to be strong enough to say so.

Even if it hurts.