Today’s important for a few reasons. It’s Wednesday, which means the week is half over; it’s my roommate’s birthday and, because nobody reading this has thought of it, it’s the last day of Black History Month.
It just seemed to fly past, didn’t it?
I hope you’ll forgive my cynicism. I don’t think Black History Month is a bad idea. It’s valuable to point out the contributions of a people to a society - black, white or Eskimo.
What angers me is Black History Month misses the point of race relations in America. Discrimination isn’t based on the idea that the achievements of blacks haven’t gone toward creating our nation, and having a month devoted to erasing the assumption is a waste of energy.
At its heart, racism in America is founded on our attitude of individuality.
Boy, I bet you can’t wait to see where I’m going with this, huh?
From the first farmers of Chesapeake Bay, America has been a place where a person’s roots weren’t supposed to matter. It didn’t matter where you came from, or whom you were when you left; once you got here, you had only your character and labor to bring yourself up. We were, above all, a nation where the sins, poverty and reputation of the fathers were not to be visited upon the sons. It’s a lot of baloney, of course.
The rich came here and stayed rich, and the poor came here and stayed poor, but what’s important is the supposed character of America - that ideal stored in the National Archives - is one based on individual accomplishment.
This creed has yielded a few successes, not least among whom is the hillbilly son of a single mother who just lately stepped down from the presidency. But it’s resulted in a nation with the character, foresight and long-term memory of a goldfish.
Because in a nation founded on the belief that you can leave behind the circumstances of your birth, there doesn’t have to be any respect for history. More importantly, there doesn’t have to be any remorse for the injustices of ancestors. The tragedies of the past don’t matter, because if the descendants of the victims can escape the injustices into which they were born, the descendants of the tyrants can escape their guilt.
It’s this belief that has led our country to the fantastically racist point at which it now sits. True, we don’t have many cross burnings - but there is within our country a pervasive lack of compassion.
There is within our country the belief that, since history doesn’t matter, the generations of black Americans who live in poverty and prison choose to do so. There are two consequences to this idiotic conclusion: First, apathy toward the racial problem and second, the thought the culture that would choose poverty and prison is so fundamentally different from the mainstream that it constitutes a strange and separate nation.
Anyone who has ever been to the library or a cafeteria can vouch for the separate natures of MSU’s black campus and its white campus. Anyone can comment on the degree of activism for racial equality. Anyone can see we have a racial problem in America, in Michigan, at MSU, and I assert it’s because of our blindness to history.
Well, history does matter, and it is important to the state of our nation today.
These are the facts: In August of 1619, a Dutch man-of-war offloaded 20 black slaves in exchange for food. Slavery in the United States would not end until general emancipation in 1864. For 245 years, people were imprisoned and regarded as property, forced to work until they died.
Why should we care about this now? Why should we care about this 150 years after slavery ended? Because it’s your country now. Because although slavery may have existed in a 100 other countries for thousands of years, we were supposed to be different.
We were supposed to be the place where everyone was equal; where men were born with inalienable rights. We were the Noble Experiment. And we enslaved an entire people for 300 years and then had the audacity to wonder why they weren’t as enthusiastic about the promise of America as we were.
Why should we care about this now? Because people have died for those ideals; people have given their lives for the sake of that dreamed Noble Experiment. Because if we are ever to continue with pride in our nation or confidence in our values, we need to recognize that we have in the past poisoned those values.
I bet you’re wondering why I care - me, in particular. After all, my family didn’t even come to the country until 1978. On top of that, I’m brown. I’m home free, right? I have no reason to care about what this country did before I got here, especially when it wasn’t people like me who did it.
But here’s the thing: No matter when I got here, I’m an American now. I’m a citizen; as I claimed the rights, so did I claim the responsibilities. I am the latest in a line of Americans who held dear the idea of human rights even as they betrayed it. I live in a country plagued by problems that are the result of things done before my time, and I must work to fix them, because it’s my country. I am part of American history and I cannot be exempt.
So that’s why I don’t like Black History Month. Because it doesn’t do enough. Because if we’re ever going to fix the race problem in this country, we have to start by making everyone aware that all history matters.
You can’t escape the past. Sometimes you have to work to fix something that you didn’t break.
Rishi Kundi, State News graduate columnist, can be reached at kundiris@msu.edu.
