132. BLACK HISTORY WITHOUT TEETH - On The Potential Epistemic Deficit of Black History Month

Criticisms of Black History Month tend to fall into one of two camps. Either:

1. A month is not enough for black history, and black history should form a permanent part of a school curriculum each of the 12 months of the year, not just be limited to October (UK) or February (US). In its current form Black History Month is tokenistic and not meaningful.

2. Black History Month is too much focus on one specific group of people and either ignores all the other excluded histories we don’t cover, or makes too much of only marginal contributions to history simply because of somebody’s skin colour.

The second criticism is easily dealt with, coming as it does from a place of ignorance. To celebrate specifically black history is not to ignore the contributions of everyone else (any more than saying ‘black lives matter’ is denying that other people’s lives matter too). It is simply to acknowledge that for much of our education in the western world, black people’s contribution to history has been largely ignored, distorted, or focused purely as a set of negative events, such as slavery. It is to shine a light on that blind spot in many people’s education and remind us we need to do better. That there is a lot to learn; a much richer history than the parochial one we have been relying upon. The objection arising itself serves to highlight the importance of doing better with the stories we tell about history: it is correct that other histories have been excluded from the conventional narratives too (women, LGBTQ+ people, other ethnic groups, etc.) and that they also ought to be highlighted. There are eleven other months in the year and we could be shining specific historical spotlights during each of them to redress the balance stemming from generations of historical negligence. In terms of the ‘white history’ of the conventional teaching narratives, to add black or any other history to the story is not to erase the accomplishments we once celebrated, but to give those accomplishments a more accurate context, as well as to redefine our very concepts of ‘accomplishment’, ‘historical significance’ and ‘greatness’ in the first place, and allow a broader church which lets in those people and voices traditionally marginalised and erased. Even in the dominant narrative of ‘white history’, historians like Howard Zinn have shown us that the story changes once we let in the voices of ‘the people’ and not merely the voices of those who rule over them. If ‘history is written by the winners’, then we acknowledge that the ‘losers’ have their own narrative which might paint a very different interpretation of events. All Black History Month is doing is reminding us that, for far too long, it has been black contributions and black voices which have been excluded from the conversation. If that also reminds us of other excluded voices then more power to us: we need a revolution in the way we think about, and teach, all people’s history.  We need to acknowledge that it matters who tells the story and who sets the terms of importance.

Which brings me back to the first criticism. Which I believe is a more serious objection. For as someone entirely sympathetic with the project of Black History Month myself, it still seems clear to me that the intention isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, to marginalise Black History to tokenistic gestures limited only to a single month of the year. Proponents of Black History Month would agree that every month should be black history month, with the contributions of black people given their proper permanent place amongst the stories we tell of our past every day. Black History Month should be the start of a conversation, and not it’s final word, and at some point in the conversation one might even, rightly, ask if a distinct month of celebration is needed anymore due to black history being so deeply embedded into the way we talk and think about our collective history. The ultimate success of Black History Month might be its own eventual obsolescence. However, it seems clear to me that we’re still nowhere near that point in our conversations right now, and that part of that continuing need for a Black History Month is the fact that, so long as Black History Month is perceived as merely a tokenistic gesture, it will, sadly, remain one.

Much of the conversation in education today, at least in state schools in England, has centred around curriculum planning and the impact of the lessons of neuroscience on the way that students learn and teachers should teach. Conventional wisdom (always dangerous, I know) would tell you that you need to build up foundational schemas of understanding in a child’s brain before they can extend that schema to incorporate more complex domain-specific knowledge in any field. It would say that repetition is needed to cement core concepts, the frequent practicing of information retrieval, and a long-term interleaving of topics so that students keep on returning to vital ideas, adding to and building on their ever-developing schemas of knowledge. But in many schools, where Black History Month becomes merely a superficial October tick-box, this is certainly not happening for black history.

Consider - to do Black History Month justice, there are some foundational questions which need answering:

1. Why has this person/event/topic/perspective not been covered before?

2. Why is there a need for a special Black History Month in the first place?

3. Is there a larger problem with the conventional curriculum and it’s associated exam specifications that has prevented black history from finding its place on the curriculum before now?

To answer those foundational questions, necessary for framing the new learning around black history, we need to first address with students core concepts like structural racism, white supremacy and white supremacist thinking, historical constructivism, critical race theory, colonialism, ideology, education policy and curriculum design. Without that, it will be very hard for the students we teach to place any of what they learn during Black History Month into a meaningful, long-term schema of knowledge. Each of these core concepts need time to be embedded first as the necessary epistemological foundation on which a meaningful black history can then be taught.

Let me make an analogy with sexism, and the erasure of women’s voices from the history of philosophy. It is all well and good for me to show my students the name and ideas of a marginalised historical female philosopher such as George Eliot or Mary Astell, but they might (and do!) want to ask me why this person is worth learning about if they are so marginalised? Shouldn’t we just study the historical canon of ‘great’ thinkers, they ask, without worrying about people not important enough to be included in most textbooks? Some of whom aren’t even ‘proper philosophers’!

To understand why the woman is not named in the textbook, or why they are still a ‘proper philosopher’ even if they do not work in a philosophy department or write ‘philosophy’ books, you have to first understand what patriarchy is, and the various historical ways in which women have been excluded from formal education and, certainly, from formal philosophy. How this has meant many female philosophers have done their work outside of the academy and perhaps through literature or art instead of in the context of lectures and academic argument. Some women, just like Socrates, did their philosophy only through conversation, but the value of their words, as a woman, were not always deemed important enough to record for posterity. Which does not mean the fragments of their words we do have do not have value, only that their value has been frequently ignored.

If a student doesn’t understand the sexist and biased assumptions and structural obstacles against women that go into historically determining the formal ‘canon’ of ‘great’ philosophers and excluding female voices, they cannot necessarily understand the worth of hearing about women from fields outside of formal philosophy and accept them as ‘great’ philosophers in their own right too. They do not have the intellectual tools to fit the new thinker into their schematic of what a ‘good philosopher’ is. So too with black history: the fight every year to have to explain black history’s importance and defend its right to exist to both students and colleagues shows only our failures the other eleven months of the year to properly prepare our schools‘ students and teachers for Black History Month.

Imagine any other complicated topic on the curriculum for which teachers give none of the necessary prior learning for students to make sense of and which, after teaching it, they  then completely ignore for the rest of the year. Quite rightly someone analysing the effectiveness of such a curriculum might ask if that teacher really expected their students to understand that particular topic and see it’s importance and place within the subject being taught? Certainly the evidence doesn’t seem to suggest that they do.

Because it is not just students who need those initial schemas of understanding to recognise the importance of something like Black History Month, it is teachers too. The people expected to deliver the lessons and plan to meaningfully educate a new generation about something they themselves were seldom effectively educated about. The people who are never properly trained in black history, it’s importance, or any of the core underlying ideas required to truly make sense of it (the people told, in fact, by the Department for Education that some of those ideas shouldn’t even be taught in schools). If a teacher doesn’t understand structural racism, white supremacy and white supremacist thinking, historical constructivism, critical race theory, colonialism, ideology, education policy and curriculum design themselves, then how can they facilitate their students understanding it either? How can they be expected to recognise the importance of Black History Month as anything more than a tokenistic gesture one month every year, when they have not previously been involved the other eleven months working hard to diversify and decolonise their curriculums?

Black History Month is not just something for schools to celebrate. It is meant to be celebrated across the country, by all of us. But a public also not properly educated about structural racism, white supremacy and white supremacist thinking, historical constructivism, critical race theory, colonialism, ideology, education policy and curriculum design - whether in schools or not - is a public also far more likely to be unsympathetic towards the point of Black History Month and lacking in the tools to properly understand either its role or importance. And it is from this very same public that our pool of classroom teachers, and our students, are drawn.

Last week I delivered a webinar to students for Black History Month about social critic, bell hooks, and her thoughts on education. In her powerful work, Teaching to Transgress, hooks reminds us that ‘the classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility’ but is serious about the challenge that comes when attempting to realise those possibilities. ‘Accepting the de-centring of the West globally, embracing multiculturalism,’ she says, ‘compels educators to focus attention on the issue of voice.  Who speaks?  Who listens?  And why?…If the effort to respect and honour the social reality and experiences of groups in this society who are non-white is to be reflected in a pedagogical process, then as teachers – on all levels, from elementary to university settings – we must acknowledge that our styles of teaching may need to change.’ I believe hooks is right. And until we open up our classrooms to the possibility of real change, until we give one another the necessary intellectual tools to understand exactly why Black History Month is needed, and to properly understand the black history that we teach, then Black History Month, though necessary, desirable, and alive with possibility, will continue to fall short of its liberatory potential.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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