Adam Mansbach

With Black History Month -- the shortest of the year, it is often pointed out -- drawn to a close, we bid a fond adieu to public radio tributes to African-American icons, and gaze one final time at heartfelt billboard salutes from car manufacturers. In grade-school classrooms across America, timeworn photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver and Jackie Robinson are being removed from bulletin boards, tucked away to slumber for another year.

And as winter gives way to spring, and the nation girds itself for the dizzying one-two punch of National Return the Borrowed Books Week (March 1-7) and Young Inventors Awareness Week (March 10-17), the absence of a month that might make all the difference in this racially stratified nation is more glaring than ever.
White History Month.

I speak not of a period of celebration, but one of excavation. White people are everywhere, but whiteness itself -- as an identity, a shared set of assumptions, a state of economic and institutional empowerment -- is perhaps the largest uninterrogated concept of all.

If the initial image conjured by the idea of White History Month is one of white supremacists rallying around their lack of melanin, it is only because whiteness remains so unanalyzed that hate-mongerers have been able to claim it virtually unopposed.
Whiteness has no form of its own; it is simply normative. Like an object thrown into the water, we measure the weight of whiteness by what it displaces. We speak of ‘minorities,’ but no American has ever checked a box labeled ‘majority.’

On the simplest level, consider how easily ‘black’ leaps to the tongue -- it is the first adjective any white person is likely to employ in describing an African-American. Now consider how many times in your life you have heard a white person choose ‘white’ as the first adjective in a description of a member of his race.

The courage we once had in confronting race has waned, rubbed out by a few advances, an overwhelming white desire to believe they are sufficent, and an ever-increasing identification with the cultural artifacts of blackness. Appreciating black artistic genius is as American as baseball, but with appreciation comes the temptation to trade action for identification – for whites to absolve ourselves from responsibility for the oppressive conditions from which so much black art springs, simply because we relate so strongly to its truth. But our tastes do not dictate our access to power; our whiteness does. I say this as one reared, artistically and politically, on a diet of hip hop and jazz.

Even as cultural crossover increases, the space for honest dialogue shrinks. ‘Race’ and ‘race man’ and even ‘race novel’ have become anachronisms. Any suggestion that the skins we’re in represent the central issue that cripples and divides Americans -- as it was fifty years ago, in the aftermath of Brown vs. the Board of Education, and one hundred and fifty years ago, as the country hurtled inexorably toward civil war -- dates the speaker as surely as a dashiki, a pair of bellbottoms, and an 8-track player.
Affirmative action is being dismantled; incarceration and conviction rates for black defendants are nearly double those of whites for the same charges. The New York Times reports that forty percent of young black men in New York City are unemployed, and that seventy-one percent of new HIV cases in the United States are black women. And yet race has faded slowly into the ether, like the disembodied embodiment of Ralph Ellison’s famous, nameless protagonist.

If race is the elephant sitting unseen in the middle of the room, then whiteness is the ethereal jockey straddling its back. We need White History Month because white people, just like our black brothers and sisters, need a time to contemplate the nature of our identities. We must grapple with the legacy of slavery, of Jim Crow, of lynchings and inequality and oppression, that we have inherited – and which benefits us still. We must accept the pain that flows from the psychic wounds this history has inflicted upon us. The air in America is redolent with a violence that has savaged us all, inflictor and inflictee alike.

We must have time, also, to consider our own moments of bravery, solidarity, and empathy -- the moments when race has been eclipsed by humanity. Who would be the icons of White History Month, the faces to be tacked up on elementary school walls when King, Tubman, Carver and Robinson come down? Who are the men and women who have struggled most profoundly against what whiteness, in the absence of critique, has so often become?

White people do not come naturally to the double consciousness so aptly described by that other mainstay of February bulletin boards, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois: the ability, born of invisibility, to know both ourselves and the Other. Nothing in American life encourages us to think about race, and thus we live secure, serene, secluded, as silent as the halls of power. In this regard, every white family might as well live in a tiny gated community all its own.

For the next generation of civil rights victories to be won -- victories both practical, in the justice systems and schools and loan offices of America, and emotional, in all our hearts and minds -- that complacency must be cast aside. We must step willingly into a dialogue which is certain to make us feel guilty, angry, defensive, even clueless. We must deconstruct and consider that which would be easier to ignore. Until we confront whiteness, we can never be whole.

This is why we need White History Month.

Let’s make it the longest month of the year.

Adam Mansbach’s race novel, Angry Black White Boy, or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay, was published today.

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