When we think of Black History Month, whom do we tend to think of?
One person I think of is Morgan Freeman, who “detests” this commemoration, “the mere idea of it.… You are going to celebrate ‘my’ history?! The whole idea makes my teeth itch.… My history is American history.”
He also dislikes the term “African-American,” calling it a misnomer.
“Most black people in this part of the world are mongrels. And you say Africa as if it’s a country when it’s a continent, like Europe.”*Freeman regards his skin color as only one attribute, and not one that goes very far to distinguish him as an individual.
What events and which achievers might we ponder in addition to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, other champions of civil rights, great inventors, scientists, educators, business, artists, even actors like Freeman and Denzel Washington? The list of celebration-worthy black Americans is endless.
In a proclamation about Black History Month, the new White House mentions a name that doesn’t always make the list: scholar Thomas Sowell.
Highlighting Sowell may make the teeth of many progressives itch, for he advances unconventional perspectives and reasoning about race and the real impact of racism on economic as well as other features of American life and our global civilization. He has done this for decades, especially in books featuring provocative titles, including Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (1984), The Vision of the Anointed (1995), Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), and Discriminations and Disparities (2018), often criticizing policies such as “affirmative action.”
Black history is American history — and vice versa — every month of the year.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Of course, in this part of the world, most of us are “mongrels.”
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2 replies on “American History Month”
I’m a mongrel, including having ancestors from central Africa a millennium and more ago.
But the fact remains that, because of our external appearances, Mr Freeman and Dr Sowell get put into one socially important category, while Paul and I get put into another. Moreover, researchers tell us that these categories have medical significance on a statistical level, which makes them more than just social constructs.
And, even were they no more than social constructs, you and I and Mr Freeman could not cause them to evaporate by refusing to talk about them, or by insisting that long descriptions always be used in place of labels.
Still, I’ll happily agree that one cannot take Blacks out of human history without leaving it unrecognizable, nor the rest of humanity out of the history of Blacks without reducing it to a bizarre fantasy. We should acknowledge the achievements of humans of all sorts whenever they are otherwise relevant to discussion, and likewise acknowledge the failures.
I’d recommend a deep dive into the life of Ida B Wells Barnett. Her Crusade for Justice is a wonderful testament to her journalistic and activist talents across 4 decades of American history. She crusaded for civil rights for women and blacks and was unapologetically a Republican.