#bhm2014

Black History Month 2014 Photo Series

What is the significance of those moments when cultural heritage rather than sociopolitical status make a difference in how one understands the self? How do middle class African Americans navigate the tensions between Africanness and Americanness as well as between blackness and middle classness? How do individuals themselves label these varied experiences of racial and ethnic identity? Is Black a sufficiently potent signifier that it can encompass each of these constructions and intersections of identity as the first student suggests? Or should we follow the lead of the second student by unpacking the nuances and related experiences of the different categories employed by people of African descent? In this month of Black History, people celebrate both the culture of African Americans and the triumphs of Black people despite the disadvantages of our sociopolitical status. The assertions and questions of the two students cause me to wonder if the proper label for this month should be Black Histories Month. Are we telling one history or a multiplicity of narratives? How does my southern Black history compare to a third generation Ghanaian American’s Black history? Should we pay more attention to the ways in which national origin, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion make a difference to how history is interpreted and given meaning by an individual? Or despite our diversity, are all those of African descent in this together—bound tightly and irrevocably by our shared African heritage and sociopolitical status as Black? Does the symbolic power of blackness within American culture mean that we all drink from the same well of Black history and culture albeit in various ways and with different consequences? Do our similarities as people of African descent, as Black people, trump our differences? Was the first student correct that we can use a one-size-fits-all label and just celebrate Black History month? I wonder.