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Black History Month is here again, and, as usual, I suddenly have more speeches (thirty) to give than there are days in the month. Some people had the nerve to call me in January, asking if I could lecture at their particular institutions "next month." Don't they know the routine? On my calendar, February has been gone since last March.
For most black petit-bourgeois intellectuals, February is the Big Month. Among the cognoscenti, it is known as National Negro Rental Month and The Colored Folks Festival, because of all the African-American intellectuals it sends running through airports. A random sampling reveals that the
N.Y.U. historian Robin D. G. Kelley is giving ten outside lectures this month, having turned down forty other invitations. The Union Theological Seminary scholar James Melvin Washington accepted ten of forty offers, most of them from black church groups. Only gluttons for punishment -- and, of course, cash -- greet this time of year with glee.
To some of us, the fact that Black History Month is celebrated in February, the shortest month of the year, suggests a white conspiracy to keep the festivities as short as possible. In fact, the man responsible for the scheduling is one of our own -- the Harvard historian Carter G. Woodson, who founded Negro History Week in 1926 and later extended it to span the month in which Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln were born. That February also sees below-freezing temperatures in many parts of the country adds to the conspiracy theory. I've heard a few of my colleagues argue that Black History Month should honor towering black figures born in May or September, like Reggie Jackson or Billie Holliday.
The unkindest thing about Black History Month is the implication that twenty-eight days are all we need to discuss black life and culture. it's as though we can't discuss black contributions to democracy in March or talk about black cowboys in November. What's a black intellectual to do? We want America to celebrate black history -- we just don't want the celebration to end in February. And we don't want to be so worn out that it takes the rest of the year to recuperate.
-- Michael Eric Dyson
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