Well, I’m a week late, but Happy Black History Month!

A former student of mine succinctly sums up my thoughts on the month. She writes, “Black History Month (BHM) became a bore for me a while ago, not just because of the regurgitated Marcus, Malcolm, Martin mantra, but because this single gendered “celebration” was never a call to action.” (K. King)

I wish I could say I felt that BHM was really improving the way society views race and racism. I wish I could say that the way BHM is celebrated every year allows room for diversity. I wish I could say that I even remembered this year that February had rolled around and that it was BHM.

A little Kwynne history: When I was in elementary school, my Black principal sought me out (not so hard, I was the only black kid in the school, I kid you not) and told me the wonderful story of Martin Luther King Jr. She decided that I should join her in reading “This day in history” over the PA system every morning for the month of February.

Emboldened by my new knowledge, in high school I made it my mission to educate my 99.5% white student population about the (mainly American) black history we were so desperately missing from our curriculum. It usually took a bit of convincing for the Principal to allow me (and 3 other friends) to put up a small display in the hallway (and to convince him that an assembly where a white guy dancing around in blackface was NOT ok). I also was sorta kinda a feminist (not so cool in high school) so most of my discoveries centred around the women not often found in BHM celebrations. I really bought into the “Black Woman as Queen” ideology, and put my energies into learning about Maya Angelou, Sojourner Truth, and even some Canadian Black icons, like Kay Livingstone, Marie-Joseph Angélique, Rose Fortune and Mary Ann Shadd.

By university, I was so tired of this whole thing. I was also coming out, and realized that trying to find the “gay” in BHM was asking for trouble. Although most of our noted Black Canadian writers and history makers are themselves queer (Dionne Brand, Makeda Silvera, d’bi young, trey anthony) the Canadian version of BHM relies on recycled images from the United States and is full of calls to rebuild the black nation – which is often code for reinforcing boring gender models and the patriarchial nuclear family.

I worry about the implications that BHM has for my family and many other queer and single mom familes. A case in point: Our national media station recently held a town hall, asking the question “What does it mean to grow up without a father?” After sharing staggering statistics about the number of children growing up without a father in the home (and specifically, 40% of black children have experienced this trend) the consensus reached was that young black men find themselves suceptible to violence and young black women become promiscuous all due to the lack of a “father figure”.

As uneven as these statistics are, it is not reason for the homophobia and sexism that result. Listening to this feature over the past week made me so angry. The speakers easily fell for the essential patriarchial model that claims that a young man MUST learn how to “be a man” from someone with a penis. That young men don’t know how to “father” because they themselves didn’t learn some code that supposedly and only comes from a “father”.

Why? Why, once again, are single and lesbian mothers raked over the coals, blamed for the ills of a racist, classist and sexist society? Why are we blaming women for the downfall of young men, intsead of rallying for more affordable child care, eradicating poverty or perhaps rethinking what mainstream masculintiy requires of young black men? And as a friend of mine so importantly stated, even if we do re-insert men back into families, what kinds of normalized heterosexist roles will our children learn from that? What more are we asking from these men if they stick around? Will they continue to expect mom to take on the lions share of household work and child care, all in the name of keeping a man in the house? Will we try to reinvent those historically uneven divisions of labour?

So again, I wonder about BHM and what it means when we continue to fall into simplistic bi-gendered notions of what it means to be a parent. I wonder when that “call to action” will come from my black brothers and sisters, and when we will really begin to rethink our heterosexist assumptions of family. And I want to know why every February I come face to face with this, and the histories of Black LGBT people, of families like ours, don’t count.

So now, I’m on a different mission. As a new mom, I want to build community with others who understand that a one-month-a-year token celebration does not an anti-racist make. I want to figure out how to wade out from under the scary ways racism has made its way into our lives, how it mixes with homophobia and how my child’s future could be grim without alternative views.

And in the name of pro-action (ha ha, like you could forget that long post of “re” action), I invite you to visit a tribute to Audre Lorde, feminist, poet, warrior, mother – remembering her (sometimes controversial, always thought provoking) words is definitely a reason to celebrate black history month.