Black History Month

 

Glooscap celebrates black history month

Friend Xerxes has written in praise of Black History Month, and suggests we should also have an Aboriginal History Month.

As a fan of history, I am not a fan of “black history month.”

Black history, or aboriginal history, has not been neglected in the past. There simply isn’t much of it.

History relies on written documents, as science relies on experimentation. That is why we call the time before the invention of writing “prehistoric.” If we are relying instead on oral traditions or personal recollections, that is folklore. If we are relying on physical artifacts, that is archaeology. Both no doubt interesting fields, but not history. History is traditionally studied in the public schools, and folklore and archaeology are not.

Because African American slaves were preliterate or illiterate, and the First Nations had no writing, they had no history until contact. After contact, what records we have are scanty, and mostly written by Europeans. Their accounts are inevitably superficial.

One might want to argue that folklore or archaeology ought to be taught in the schools, as well as history. Perhaps; but then you cannot argue that the folklore of these two groups has been ignored in comparison to that of other groups. Collections of Indian and African tales, songs and poems, have been popular for generations. You probably grew up, as I did, gentle reader, playing cowboys and Indians, camping in fake teepees, watching Western movies, reading tales of Glooscap or of Br’er Rabbit, listening to rock and roll, rhythm and blues, jazz, soul, blues and gospel.

If we are going to have a “black folklore month,” or “aboriginal folklore month,” this is giving preference to these two groups; and not because their folklore has been previously neglected. It is not “reverse discrimination.” It is just discrimination.

You might want to argue that, folklore aside, blacks and indigenous people deserve special consideration in general, on this and on everything, because their ancestors were poorly treated and underwent suffering. But then what about other groups in Canada or North America whose ancestors were treated as badly or worse, and in many cases more recently: the Jews, the gypsies, the Ukrainians, the Cambodians, the Irish, the Polish, the Chinese, the Armenians, the Koreans, and so forth?

Discrimination now cannot fix discrimination in the past. You cannot go back and change the past. The actual people discriminated against are almost all dead now, as are the people who discriminated against them. All you are doing is creating more discrimination and injustice, which in turn can never be compensated for.

There is value in knowing and understanding the sufferings of our ancestors. We ought to study slavery, the Holocaust, the Great Famine, the Holodomor, the Killing Fields, and the Highland Clearances, such conflicts as there were between European settlers and First Nations, in Canada and elsewhere, and so forth. But not just one or two, and ignore the others.

The reason we study history is to learn the lessons of the past. And this is certainly one. 

Because such events are past, they are, in theory, less influenced by current politics and vested interests. This is why we study history in the schools, and why we should. We thus see human decisions and their results writ large, and learn lessons about human psychology and behaviour. We can avoid the mistakes of our ancestors. Like discrimination. We are not supposed to repeat it.

For this reason, history is all about cause and effect. What were the causes of the First World War? Of the rise of Hitler? What were the effects of the Treaty of Versailles? Of the Danegeld? And so forth. Because if a certain course results in human suffering, we do not want to do it again.

In doing history, we must rely on the written evidence. The same issues of evidence pertain as might in a court trial: hearsay is too easily falsified and cannot be examined. 

This means history is mostly about socially important people; their decisions and the results of their decisions are those for which we have documentation. This may look like bias, but it is necessity.