I wish I could join the throngs of people queuing up to slag off Black History Month. Four weeks and more on the transatlantic slave trade, the Underground Railroad and the Empire Windrush… enough, already, again. As the declining sun shines bright over crisp October days and the harvest is being celebrated or forgotten, I get ready to reap the crop of predictable requests in my overgrown inbox. “Could you speak at this Zoom event?” “Would you offer us a comment?” “Do please write something witty and original for our erudite left-wing journal.” I’m sure many people would want, in a quiet moment, to put a stop to it all. Sometimes I am among them. Most times, though, I am not.
I love Black History Month. Harriet Tubman, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, I enjoy hearing those names again and again. After all, history is about recitation – the return of past events still relevant to the present. It makes no sense to hear about something only once. History is not news. Listening to the lush orchestration of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor or the virtuosity of the scoring by Chevalier de Saint-Georges, I consider what more I can do to support the Chineke! Orchestra and its fabulous work. The fruits of the talents of so many Black musicians, artists and writers are gathered and displayed in an exquisite exhibition during this most poignant season. What’s not to like?
In fact, I am so constantly moved by the wonders of Black History Month that I think there ought to be a White History Month as well. Maybe in November. In the wake of that superb Mexican festival, the Day of the Dead. Of course, here in Europe, we call it All Saints but it amounts more or less to the same thing. With either carnival or solemnity, we could start a whole month of the history of Britain with non-White people airbrushed out of it.
