Why Has RBG Street Scholar Chosen to Design and Entitle a Zine
“Black History Month 24 / 7/ 365?”
Anyone with half a brain knows that there has been a commercialization of black history month. For example during the Super Bowl this year we were reminded that February is Black History Month. Coca-Cola ran 30-second spots cycling through a timeline of achievements by the black community. This "revere" for Black folx comes only seven years after the company agreed to the largest-ever settlement ($192 million) for a race discrimination lawsuit. So now we're suppose to believe that Coca-Cola is a changed man. So as to the question, “Why has RBG Street Scholar chosen to design and entitle a Zine Black History Month 24 / 7/ 365? To counter the rapid commercialization of Black History Month as it is the wrong meaning and direction to a noble subject (history). The Zine is an effort to correct. Efforts to investigate and understand the world around us are invariably dependent upon the information that is made available about the world's reality.That means knowing the history. The truth about every current "shit-uation" is rooted in it's history. The establishment is trying to co-opt our use of history as a weapon and make us believe everything is stright now. So history is censored in our public schools and is told from the prespective of our oppressor everyday. They give our childern, youth and adults information that constantly undermines our efforts to understand, to predict, and to act - leading to white supremacy/racist upholding inferences and misguided efforts at real socio-political change.
“Negro His-Story Month” is slowly but surely transforming the opportunity for our real education into a perfunctory corporate whore. The value and substance of our history can’t simply be paid off with TV spots and the same features in newspapers year after year. Just like 40 acres and a mule, it’s simply not enough to address 500 years of slavery, suffering and death; superimposed on our ongoing political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation and socio-cultural degradation.
The reducing of our rich and painful history of resistance and struggle for freedom, justice and equality, which we as a people still have yet to achieved, to a celebration of trivia pursuit is disrespectful to Dr. Woodson's contribution and the sacrifices of our ancestors. Corporate sound bites one month out of the year are another trick to co-opt ahistrorify and minimize the Black Power of history. We have been duped into thinking that the most instructive subject of all should be relegated to February cheerleading. Dr. Carter G. Woodson envisioned Negro History Week as an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of African-Americans and to demonstrate to the world that people of African descent in American had made significant contributions to history. For it to be necessary to do such speaks volumes to the racist sickness of the white people of that time. It tells us that they were invested in systematically hiding the truth from us, them and the rest of the world to maintain our de-Afrikanization, dehumanization and inferioritization. Of all the disciplines of study history is best qualified to reward all research. When you know the history of a topic / subject or people you understand that topic/subject or people best in their current manifestations. Why is this RBG? Because there is no true separation between the past, the present and the future. What happen yesterday determines what we see and experience today-positive and negative. Eighty-one years after Dr. Carter G. Woodson was inspired to establish Negro History Week, which was later expanded to what we know today as Black History Months we have lost sight of the intent of his work and the progress we have made resultant to it. Dr. Woodson did a great thing given the racist nature of America in 1915, but today that we designate a specific month to celebrate the contributions blacks have made to society at the expense of drawing lessons from the deep well of activism and scholarship year round is convoluted at best and white brainwashing at worst. Our history should be a part of our daily instruction, focused on a search for the answers to the problems that we continue to face today. Is it not our responsibility to expand on and evolve the trailblazing contributions of our ancestors in order to continue our development as a people, rather than simply romanizing the past for 28 days? Everyday is Black history day, every week is Black history week and every Month is black history month. So I say let us leave the celebrating to the shortest month in the year and be about the business of making a Nu Afrikan history everyday. Let our history of struggle and resistance be our weapon and educational guidepost.
The "Black Studies Movement" has worked to include courses on the African American experience in the curricula of American colleges and universities. Beginning in the late 1960s, they began one of the most important endeavors in American education: the creation of departments, programs and courses in African American studies. In their efforts they have continued the work begun eight-one years ago by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. Now many of them have been watered down to humanist-integrationist inbetweenity, ie multiculturalism. RBG Street Scholars Think Tank is offered without the restraints of traditional academia, as for the most part they too have escrowed any real use of our history to being about revolutionary change for the people. Except for very few, they treat the subject as an objective sterile discourse with no relation to using it as a weapon to fight. At RBG Street Scholars Think Tank “Black History Month 24/7/365 means we must use history to fight for our freedom 24 hours a day, 7 days a week , 365 days a year.