History, Liberation, and the Fight to Remember

Commentary by Salim Muwakkil, host of the "Salim Muwakkil Show" on WVON 1690 AM, journalist, and community activist.

Enslaved Africans and their descendants have been America’s bottom caste since our ignominious arrival as enslaved chattel and slavery’s legacy is easily discernible in patterns of poverty and community dysfunction. Not only does this legacy include racial barriers to socio-economic inclusion, it has also socialized us for subservience, ensuring we’re dependent on our oppressors for our sustenance.

Thus, it’s not just racist exclusion that stagnates and destabilizes our communities, it’s also the lack of access to what I call "cultural capital”, i.e., culturally transmitted behavior traits that boost social success and civic wherewithal. That intangible wealth includes attitudes of mind and relational rituals that are best accumulated far from the edges of survival. Unfortunately, Black Americans are disproportionately wedged on survival’s edge where that capital has less value.

We’ve sought to generate some of that necessary capital through varied strategies, and one is by adopting months as celebratory opportunities. Black Americans have officially appropriated February and June as Black History and Black Liberation Months, respectively, to commemorate our struggles and reinforce our sense of agency in the face of ongoing white supremacist assaults. One observance honors our historical achievements, the other shifts that focus from history to the ongoing struggle for political, economic and social agency.

Black History Month, of which we are now more than halfway through, evolved from Negro History Week, established by Carter G. Woodson in 1926. He designated the second week in Feb. to mark the birthdays of both Frederick Douglass (Feb. 14) and Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12). The week was expanded to a month in 1976 as part of the nation’s Bicentennial commemoration.

Black Liberation Month is a recent innovation, largely triggered by the designation of Juneteenth as a national holiday in 2021, and its unofficial designation as Emancipation Day. Beyond just a celebration of history, the liberation month agenda encompassess a much wider scope and can include actions like organizing against mass incarceration, police violence, economic inequality, or any of the other problems disproportionately plaguing Black America. The 7-day, year-end Kwanza celebration is an allied observance, pushing an agenda with wider, liberatory implications.

This need to boost our cultural consciousness is especially acute as we weather the current administration’s attempted erasure of Black Americans’ role in history. From removing the names of prominent Black folks from varied historical monuments, prominent sea vessels, and national exhibits, to excising Black-themed observances from federal schedules, to many other examples; the administration of Donald Trump has transformed the acronym of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) from initials offering equal access into a curse.

Instead of designing a compensatory strategy to atone for past injustices, the Trump administration seeks instead to multiply those injustices -- a strategy flagrantly designed to erode the progress made in civil rights and social equity. Guided by a kind of racist nostalgia, this approach strenuously rejects efforts to even acknowledge, much less offer compensation for, slavery’s damaging legacy. As we sink deeper into Trump’s fetid tenure, most African-Americans' adopted celebrations have essentially been federally delegitimized.

Those celebrations added context to our presence that will be lacking without them. Millions of Africans would end up in America only because they were kidnapped to fill the needs of a slave economy. The process had many ramifications, one of which included forging a new people; a people who became American by necessity and included 12 generations of chattel slavery. For nearly 250 years, American culture dehumanized those it enslaved and, more insidiously, socialized generations of African-Americans for enslavement. The nation's economic reliance on slavery mandated a rigid and pitiless racial hierarchy.

The century of official Jim Crow segregation that followed slavery’s abolition did little to end African-Americans’ social isolation or alter reigning cultural biases. Because of this unrelenting social hostility, the hyphen that connects African to American connotes dueling as well as dual identities. Slavery’s damaging legacy includes the social implications of that internal duel.

It is this history of our enslaved status, rather than racial identity, that accounts for the disadvantages accrued by the progeny of enslaved Africans -- us. Our historical observances make that point with unrelenting clarity, and that’s why they remain necessary. It is hoped that an understanding of this history can clarify the culpability as well the redress; placing blame clearly on the forces that created and abetted it -- the U.S. government.

Were Americans humble enough to receive the messages of our hopeful historical observances, the planet would be unable to contain our shine.