Black History Month, M.I.A.

Um. Who jacked Black History Month? Seriously, where did it go?

Last week my daughter's second grade teacher asked me to compile a list of kid-friendly hip-hop tracks to be played during class time. It was part of a month-long lesson in what he was calling "Music of the African Diaspora." (I won't even comment on how I felt when he approached me with the request. I mean, I'm the only black parent in the classroom, so who else but me could possibly know anything about hip-hop, right?)

So, basically, listening to Fela and Jimmy Cliff in the background while they did their regular coursework...that would be the extent of the class' Black History Month education this year. No school-wide assemblies, no book reports, no class presentations on "Famous Black [fill-in-the-blank]."

I guess, in post-racial 2013, folks are just over it?



Is this just our school? There are only a handful of black students at my daughter's predominately Hispanic, Filipino and white elementary school. So, part of me has just chalked this up to an "out of sight, out of mind"-type situation. But maybe the vanishing of this annual "celebration" is more prevalent than that?

It's hard for me to imagine. When I was a second grader in Washington, D.C. every month was Black History Month. At my all-black elementary school, with its all-black faculty, we learned about Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Booker T., W.E.B. and the whole gang all year 'round. In fact, the only white historical figures I even really recall learning about in school were Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

And come February, black history education kicked in, full-throttle. It was a nonstop pageant filled with  Underground Railroad reenactments, an "I Have A Dream" speech redux, or two (or, three!), and an endless stream of tone deaf kids butchering a medley of Negro spirituals. This time of year, the hallways of Whittier Elementary were festooned with poorly-scrawled essays on Benjamin Banneker, Garrett A. Morgan and Marian Anderson. And every student, from kindergarteners to the out-going sixth graders, were fairly beaten over the head with "Black is Beautiful" rhetoric.

But that was then. Now, we get the half-black kid's mom burning De La Soul and Rakim tracks onto a CD-R and then we call it a day.

Trying to pick up the slack, I hit up the bookstore to get some non-fiction books to use as teaching tools at home. We started with the basics: a general MLK bio, a summary of the Rosa Parks story and a picture book on Ruby Bridges. Meanwhile, my dad pitched in a book on Ben Carson. We perused the pages together and chatted. I encouraged her to ask me whatever questions were on her mind. I even assigned her a little written report on Bridges.

You wanna know the outcome of my efforts? I fully succeeded in bumming my kid out. Instead of rejoicing in the great strides achieved and obstacles overcome, she focused more on the bigotry woven throughout the African-African experience. She had no frame of reference from her everyday life, couldn't make heads nor tails of the Jim Crow realities the books were explaining and, furthermore, didn't understand why on earth I was depriving her of her precious Lego time to make her learn it all. As far as she knew, none of her other classmates were cramming on this subject after school. And if her teacher didn't deem it necessary to teach her during the school day, she seemed to feel it was surplus.

I was, in a word, miffed. She didn't care, didn't want to care and I was beginning to wonder why it was so important to me to make her care. Gah! I'm supposed to be able to outsource this kind of problem, like with teaching her regrouping and irregular verbs! Help a mother out, LAUSD!

Sigh. Maybe she's still too young yet. Perhaps I'll try again next year, when she's (hopefully) matured a bit. And it's highly likely that, if I want her to learn any sort of Black History curriculum in the third grade, I'm going to have to be the one to kickstart it with her teacher.

Am I alone in this? Was Black History Month celebrated at your child's school? If so, how'd they do it? How did it compare to celebrations in years past? Do tell in the comments.