It was over a decade ago that I received my first invitation to keynote an event for Black History Month. If memory serves, it was a UU Church in Kennebunk, Maine. At that time, Americans of all hues were awakening to the painful reality that despite having our first Black president, injustice still ran rampant when it came to Black Americans.
In fact, during the Obama years, we saw at times what felt like a nonstop stream of Black American lives being cut short at the hands of law enforcement or white vigilantes.
Remember Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice?
While their names became household names and rallying cries for a moment, for every name we heard there were the names that we didn’t hear: Willie Miller of Chicago; Yvette Smith of Bastrop, Texas; George King Jr. of Baltimore, Md., and the list goes on.
For a brief decade, we rallied around the reality that Black lives actually did matter. As a result, for a while, emphasis was put on not just the somber acknowledgement of unjust Black death, but on honoring Black life and celebrating Black history and the proud declaration that Black lives matter.
However, that time has passed, and instead Black History Month is rapidly morphing into Black Harassment Month. In the past year, I have written extensively about the shifts that have occurred since 2020. At times sounding like a broken record, but only because we have done a full one-eighty when it comes to race in the United States since 2020.
Companies, organizations, and community groups—whether through fatigue or short attention spans and no doubt aided by growing white grievances that are fueling racial pushback—have all pulled us back away more robust celebrations of Black History Month. A quick peek at any social media platform and you will notice that you barely see any mention of Black History Month. Black content creators have openly lamented the lack of work at a time when Black creators used to be busy. Personally, January and February used to be my busiest season of speaking engagements and training but that came to an abrupt end last year.
Initially, I thought it was just me. Perhaps my work was no longer appealing. Until I spoke with other Black writers, speakers, and trainers and realized we were all experiencing the same thing.
I am represented by a collaborative speakers bureau and most of us are simply not booking work. I haven’t been booked for a project in months, and any projects that have come my way are through personal connections, often with people who have prior experience with my work.
Trends come and go, and apparently Black folks were just a trend that has gone out of style.
What hasn’t gone out of style, though, is racial targeting and harassment. Earlier this month, I wrote a piece for the Maine Morning Star, which led to the founder of a regional white supremacist group emailing me and posting about me on Gab, a white supremacist social media platform. What has also happened is that my organization, Community Change Inc., aka my day jobm has been receiving the most vile, nasty racist emails in our general information box. Last week, it got pretty bad.
This Black History Month, I have been called all manner of ni**er and worse. I have had to put time into dealing with how best to configure our email system to deal with this onslaught of hate.
If that wasn’t bad enough, last week I received an email that was forwarded by a fellow resident on this island that I live on, where someone who lives here said that they think I am making much ado about nothing over the threats that I receive—that because there are many white people who do support my work, despite the fact that I have written “hateful” things about white people, I must be fine. That my suggestion that much of what we saw with the support of Black Lives Matter was performative, was mean.
I don’t know, but given the current state of race relations, one could say that my skepticism in 2020 was based on the historical data, and that the current moment has played out as one could pretty well predict.
Maybe it’s just that with one of my degrees being in African American Studies, I am well versed on how race plays out in the United States. Reconstruction literally gave rise to Jim Crow, which ended five years before I was born. Which meant that my parents, grandparents, and many of my relatives experienced serious and violent white backlash personally. Unlike white Americans, I and most Black people do not have the privilege or luxury of being racially ignorant and pretending things are getting better.
As I write this, I just received notification that a Black colleague is also being targeted by white supremacists.
Just this past weekend, there was a video circulating on social media of several young white teenage girls with an adult woman in tow—presumably the mother of at least one of the teens—who stood and watched as the teens used the makeup testers at Sephora to create blackface and who then ran around the store making monkey noises.
Lest you think this occurred in some small backwards ‘burb, it took place at the Sephora located in the Prudential Building in one of Boston’s well-heeled and tony neighborhoods.
No one from Sephora intervened. The only person to speak up was an external vendor who was in the store. If you have ever been to a Sephora, you know they are busy. I have been to the Sephora at the Prudential on many occasions; it is a very large and almost always busy store. Which means that many people were comfortable enough with young white teenagers in blackface making monkey noises that it simply didn’t register that anyone should say something.
In a month meant to celebrate Black history, to be inundated with reminders that far too many still see Black people as subhuman is disheartening. Especially as I spend my days struggling to keep the doors open at Community Change Inc. and keep this beloved platform of mine afloat as I hemorrhage patrons and as social media has decided that race is too political, thus stifling the work of anti racists on their platforms with shadow bans and sometimes outright bans.
While many have turned to support our brothers and sisters in Palestine and around the world, it is important to realize that oppression continues here on the homefront. White allies and friends need to understand that they must do more, otherwise the white supremacists fueled on white grievance will succeed in turning back any progress we ever gained on the racial front. Black folks are still facing rampant injustices and now, as we were decades ago, those who dare to speak out are being targeted and harassed. Black Americans are no strangers to struggle. For those like myself, who are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans, we carry the blood of those who managed to survive in spite of white grievance, hatred, and injustice. Just like our ancestors, giving up was never an option and despite how we may make it look, it does take a toll on us. Let us never forget that Black lives matter and recommit to honoring and celebrating Black people and history.
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Image by Kayle Kaupanger via Unsplash
