Do we need a Black History Month?

Editor’s Note: Nayaba Arinde is the editor of Amsterdam News, one of the oldest black-owned publications in the United States, and is an activist and radio commentator in England and in the U.S. Story highlights Nayaba Arinde: It would be absurd for black people to seek validation for the month from white people, but whites should pay attention How ironic that Africans, the Earth's first people, get ignored by revisionist Eurocentric history, says Arinde CNN — The racial issues that simmer unceasingly beneath the surface of America have rushed to the surface again and again over the past year, boiling up as recently as the Grammy Awards last week. Nayaba Arinde This hot on the heels of Beyonce’s Super Bowl halftime performance, in which she and a cadre of black female backup dancers invoked the Black Panthers for Self-Defense, Malcolm X and other imagery resonant of the racial struggle in this country and of black empowerment, as she performed “Formation.” Opting to ignore, or deny, Beyonce’s legitimate political critique, some people – mostly white people, such as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani – denounced it. Late last month, Fox News contributor Stacey Dash, who is black, dismissed the debate over the lack of black nominees for the Oscars, adding – ridiculously – that “if we don’t want segregation, then we have to get rid of channels like BET and the BET Awards and the Image Awards.” She said: “There shouldn’t be a Black History Month. For example, Black History Month is also the acknowledgment of the collective triumph of black people surviving the African Holocaust – the Maafa, a term coined by anthropologist Marimba Ani in her 1994 book “Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior.” Ani writes of the devastation caused by four centuries of enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, Jim Crowism and cultural, economic, social and economic oppression of Africans.