| I was flipping channels on the television the other day and landed on the Daily Show which I very rarely watch. The thing that made me put down the channel changer was the show host's guest who was Neil Degrasse Tyson, an acclaimed and popular astrophysicist. My nose opened like a teenager in love without the benefit of Breathe-Right strips. At nearly 58 years old, I was captivated by the image and presence of a Black person in an "unexpected" role, and this is precisely the point. No role should be "unexpected" and our expectations (black and white) need to be shaken up and nothing shakes things up better than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Black History Month reminds us of the (to borrow a line from Paul Harvey who I'm sure borrowed it from someone else) rest of the story. Neil Degrasse Tyson is deep. He took three minutes to explain the origin of the universe in a way that I nearly understood, and that's saying something for a person (me) who used to argue with his elementary school teachers about their bland and illogical explanations of gravity. Thank you to Carter G. Woodson for Negro History Week that gained recognition 81 years ago in 1926 and gradually grew into Black History Month. Negro History Week is the seed of the expanding consciousness that will someday be an integral part of the inevitable recognition that we are of one species, one race. But that day is not today unless we generalize the experience of giving blood at a Red Cross donation site or receiving blood in a hospital where red is the only color of interest. The potential for at least discussing the universality of human experience was not part of the education I received in public schools in New York City in the '50s and '60s. "Separate but (un)equal"; was the motto tattooed on the nation';s brain. I remember being in the second and third grades, and beyond, and trying to shrink underneath my desk when the topic of the history class turned to slavery. The history text books showed people who looked like me who were reduced to chattel and not one teacher hinted as to the abject wrongness of the characterizations. Concerted efforts were devoted to brainwashing me into believing that Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were the only two Black people in the history of the world who had made any positive contributions. Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra in the movie of the same name and Othello the Moor was made famous by a very White Lawrence Olivier in blackface. I wondered who had problems with racial identity. Fortunately, I was pointed in the direction of scholars like Ebony Magazine Emeritus Editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. who wrote "Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America" and others who provided essential other perspectives on history. Black History Month continues to be an important cause for recognition and celebration. Why? It is important for us to see ourselves reflected in the world outside our homes in positive ways that testify to our value and the unique quality of glue that we contribute to keep this model of America together. This may seem irrelevant to those who are accustomed to having the overall culture of America reflect them, but quite another matter for those of us who are painfully aware of our underrepresentation in key aspects of this culture like home ownership and land ownership, business ownership and wealth, and overrepresentation in distasteful crevices of our collective culture like populating jails and prisons. Black History is like throwing a stone into a quiet pond and watching the many concentric rings of water widen then blend into one another. There is the Black History that the Black person experiences in the context of his or her family that is extended to include aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and others. Then there is the Black experience that exists outside the familiar confines of home that can include the sometimes alien environments of school, work and the other institutions that we participate in. The circle expands to include the experiences of other Black people in the country, then other Black people in other parts of the world, then the juxtaposition of all the races that share the world's pond. It is hard to see where you are in relation to the rest of the world. For example, my awareness of the world outside of Harlem, where I was born, and the housing projects on the lower east side of New York, where I grew up, was very slim. I did not know how "legal" housing segregation colored my world. All I knew was that one day I looked around the projects and everybody looked like me. We all (Caribbean folks, once-rural Black folks, people from Poland, Germany, Italy, China, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hungary, Yugoslavia and other places) worked hard and tried to do the right things and followed the written and unwritten rules and some of "us" seemed to have been secretly slipped the map showing all the exits from the project maze, while others were deprived of this essential information. There was an overground railroad that some were not given tickets to and the only observable criterion for "worthiness" seemed to be skin color. One of the escape routes from the projects led to Levittown, New York that started out as about 2,000 rental homes for returning soldiers and their growing families in post-war 1947. Levitt and his sons turned to building homes for home ownership in 1949. Over 17,000 homes were built by 1951. Black people were prohibited from living in Levittown and this would remain the case until fair housing laws were enacted in the middle of the next decade -- perhaps an insignificant historical tidbit unless your family had been "legally" denied housing because of the color of their skin. When the mirror of America is held up I want to see my reflection -- not in the way prison inmates in adjacent cells use mirrors to facilitate communication, but I want to see myself at the helm of the ship of prosperity and peace of mind. We continue to need Black History Month, and Ralph Ellison's prologue to his novel "The Invisible Man" reminds us why: I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. See me during Black History Month and the other 337 days a year. |
| Simple things/ Lang Kenneth Haynes Visible Man |
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