On “Contributions”
It’s a question that has long been on the minds of dough-faced men sitting in very large pickup trucks, wearing tight angular sunglasses, and staring directly into the soul of their phone's front facing camera.
“If we have Black history month, then why not white history month?”
For most of my life the answer to this question has been as simple as it is irrefutable.
“Because every other month is white history month.”
Black History Month began in 1926 as Negro History Week. It was the project of Black historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called the Association for the the Study of African American Life and History or ASALH), which Carter founded. Contrary to school yard myth, February wasn’t chosen because it was the shortest month but because Black Americans had already been celebrating the February birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass since the end of slavery.
A significant goal of Negro History Week was to provide counterprograming to the Lost Cause historical revisionism quickly pervading segregated white schools. The ink hadn’t been fully dried on the 13th amendment before white America decided to rewrite the history of chattel slavery into a bucolic tale of honorable southern gentleman, delicate southern belles, and the faithful Black servants who were treated more like family than property.
Family that literally came with a receipt.
In this way, Negro History Week had a specific and seemingly attainable goal. To preserve a very recent history of brutal oppression and struggle as well as present a version of Black history that people could take pride in, so that future generations of Black Americans would not be lulled into accepting a permanent place of subservience in an American culture unwilling to see them as anything other than the help. Woodson sought to counter the prevailing attitude held by his white colleagues and professors at Harvard: Black people had no history to speak of. To be a people without a history is to be a people in need of modernization, that is, the forced assimilation into civil western society at the point of a gun named colonization. To be without history is to be considered a child in need of tough parenting by a stern and uncompromising master. And because we live in a capitalist world, payment for this service was to be made in gold, labor and blood.
Negro History Week was more than a history lesson. It was a targeted ad campaign for a growing Black working class, imploring them to believe that they had a history worth knowing and a place of value in this American project. Its ultimate goal wasn’t just to give kids a sense of history as experienced by the Black people helped shape it, but to grow a national racial identity out of purposely mismanaged soil. This was echoed by influential pan-Africanist activist Marcus Garvey and one time friend of Woodson when he said: “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
In 1970, Black students and faculty at Kent State decided to expand the week to the entire month. And in 1976, Gerald Ford became the first in an unbroken chain of U.S. presidents to officially declare February to be Black History Month. There is a case to be made that in the face of a resurgent far right conservatism trying to resurrect the lost cause myth for a new millennium, Black History Month is as necessary as it was in 1926. But I’m not here to make that case.
I’m here to tell you that Black History Month is a psyop conducted on Black America to make Black history more palatable to a grander narrative of American exceptionalism and in the end, preserve the capitalist superstructure most responsible for marginalization of the negro.
I’m really fun at parties.
Psyops or SupaFlyops?
Negro History Week originally wasn’t much more than an organized effort to coordinate history lessons in segregated Black schools. Teachers would take the time to teach kids about people and events that weren’t covered in textbooks produced by white authors. Local communities would organize lectures from historians and other influential figures. And this has pretty much been the basic formula ever since. In our modern media flooded world, Black History Month has long since escaped the classroom. We can find it in commercials, sports broadcasts, tiktoks, long Facebook posts by your aunt, “Celebrate Black Voices” media collections on your favorite streaming platform, and so on.
While the modality has changed and diversified, the substance remains largely the same. Every year since its inception Black History Month has had a theme that is announced by the ASALH. It is an interesting exercise to look at these themes throughout the years. The vast majority of them are extremely broad but occasionally the title of the theme will seem to reference contemporaneous political currents. For instance, in 1940 when the labor movement was growing and A. Phillip Randolph was developing the idea of a march on Washington, ASALH’s theme for Black history was “Negro Labor”.
The word “Labor” would not appear in any Black History Month theme until the announcement of 2025’s subject “African Americans and Labor”.
We could end this critique right here: Black History Month does not focus nearly enough on labor and class. And readers who are already firmly on the left would nod their heads solemnly, while others who are skeptical of the left would balk at the seeming imposition of purity politics. But to end here would be a disservice to both this critique of Black History Month and Black History Month itself.
I will fully admit here that referring to Black History Month as a psyop is a purposely provocative choice. This is because the term originates from the military and it’s the name given to military operations geared toward persuading enemies and allies alike into acting in the interests of America. The average American will reactively condemn the notion of our government using messaging with subtle (and not no subtle) psychological manipulation to influence the behavior and opinions of its citizens. That is of course when they perceive the manipulation to be in service of a political position they are against. Most of the propaganda we ingest as cultural consumers comes from private corporations trying to convince people that the newest model of their phone is worth upgrading the perfectly fine model they already have because the corners are square instead of round.
Similarly Black History Month is about much more than preserving and imparting history. It’s a purposeful attempt at socially engineering the Black community away from a negative self perception imposed by a white supremacist hegemony and toward a culture of aspirational pride. Woodson’s goal was to provide a substantive historical basis for African American advancement and self determination. A proof of concept for Black excellence that other Black people could emulate. Such historical evidence for white American exceptionalism is ubiquitous within the American historical canon, hence the idea that every other month is white history month.
So when I say that Black History Month is a psyop, that isn’t necessarily an indictment of ill intentions. It’s an advertising campaign, and the goal isn’t a bad goal in and of itself. Rather it’s a reflection of a certain set of politics that begs deeper scrutiny. And those politics become apparent whenever February rolls along and we start seeing both people and institutions celebrate Black History Month.
Great Men and Women
If you go by the most available content relating to Black History Month, that is what you will see on TV and the internet, a more accurate title of the project could be Black Biography Month. That is by far the most prevalent way that people interact with Black History. Did you know that (insert name here) invented (common technology that we currently can’t live without)? Or that in (disconcertingly recent date) (insert name here) was the first Black person to (insert achievement here)?
There are other types of historical communication of course. Retrospectives on the civil rights era are also common, as well as some broad ethnography of Black American life that mainly seeks to dispel notions that Black people were unsuited to the civility building cultural norms credited to white America. But by and large, the kind of historical content you are most likely to interact with during Black History Month is biography. No matter what the overall theme is, you are sure to learn basic information about the big guns: Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois. You will also learn a bit about the lives and accomplishments of relatively lesser known figures like Mary McCloud Bethune, Madame CJ Walker, and everyone’s favorite peanut focused mad scientist George Washington Carver.
Generally the lesson is as follows:
You are presented with a snippet of their early lives, how they were descended from sharecroppers or former slaves (or former sharecroppers and slaves themselves).
What they achieved and how remarkable that achievement was given the social and material circumstances at the time.
At the end you are told that these people used the fame and recognition (and money) from their achievements to advance the cause of general Black advancement and self determination.
In a vacuum, there is nothing wrong with the cause of making sure these biographies have a place in the American historical cannon. The problem is that mainly presenting history in this way reaffirms the legitimacy of the American historical cannon. A cannon that is constructed on a “Great Man” Theory of understanding history.
The Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle is widely credited as the father of the Great Man theory of history. In his 1840 book of lectures called On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (love the title) he lays out his thesis on how history happens:
“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”
The Great Man theory was never without its critics, but due in large part to its veneration of historical heroes, which provided a neat scaffolding on which to present historical narratives in the form of Campbellian monomyth, it was very popular throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century. It was very much a part of the academic milieu in which Carter G. Woodson was educated.
No matter how much effort educators and other supporters of Black History Month put into sharing cultural histories, or histories of struggle and solidarity, it’s always the Great Man theory that is most prominent. Black History Month presents a version of African American advancement as a series of discrete individual aspirational achievements. People who moved history forward by transcending social and material conditions through virtue of individual greatness. It’s why most people celebrating Black History Month make mention of the “contributions” Black people have made to American history. As if the principal fault of the American project was its long standing refusal to allow Black people to participate in it or acknowledge when we made contributions.
It should also be mentioned that outside of the aforementioned big names, most of the biographies are for people who contributed something to capitalist consumption: small business owners, inventors of commonly used goods and technologies, artists and athletes. For those Black people with more radical politics than are palatable for liberal and conservative audiences but whose profile is too large to be completely ignored, their subversive and counterhegemonic political proclivities are excised from the record. Martin Luther King becomes a conservative Christian imploring us for nothing more than a colorblind society, Frederick Douglass becomes a superfan of the founding fathers and documents.
Today we have a much better understanding of why a Great Man Theory of history can be problematic for understanding the past and working toward a better future. We can understand its shortcomings when posting memes branding the founding fathers as slaveholders. Some of us can even complicate the legacy of a man like Abraham Lincoln by noting that his consequential opposition to slavery was driven less by a genuine belief in racial equality but rather a desire to preserve a union fracturing over the peculiar institution.
However, Black History Month’s intervention isn’t to question the practice of viewing history through a series of white male main characters, but rather to insist that certain individual Black people be seen as the deuteragonists of the American historical narrative. Most people don’t see a real problem with this. Even if you accept the criticisms of Great Man theories of history, there is a compelling argument to be made that given America’s cultural love for heroic stories of individualism, Black History Month takes a pragmatic approach to normalizing the Black experience for white audiences.
But there is a real problem.
Remember when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States and most of white America sincerely believed that racism was over? Yea, I blame Black History Month for that.
Black Excellence or Political Demobilization
There are two main problems with biography based Black History Month and neither one has anything to do with taking place in the shortest and coldest month of the year.
First, it gives the impression that individual achievement precedes structural social changes. We are encouraged to see change as propelled through the representation of Black excellence. What drives Black social advancement and self determination is a matter of individual fortitude. A fortitude forged in centuries of abuse and marginalization. Individual fortitude is a very important part of the history Black people and our fight for liberation. It takes people with real courage to push back against entrenched hegemonic norms. But that’s far from the whole story.
Black history is not the story of magical negros embarrassing white America with their exceptionalness, its the story of real flawed people finding solidarity and community and using those as a base from which to challenge the very structure of American life. Revolutions don't come at the hands of a few doing their best, they come at the hands of many doing what they can. Starting a network of Black laundresses who could share information about abusive white employers is a more important act in the history of Black resistance to white supremacy than inventing over 300 uses for a peanut. You can find individual characters through which to tell the tale of those washer women, but ultimately the story cant be meaningfully reduced to acts of individual heroism. It was a collective effort born not out of a call to greatness, but average people doing what they can to survive.
These efforts weren’t a contribution to the American project, they were a direct rebuke of a hierarchical society based on exploited labor. Which brings us to our second problem.
The popular expression of Black History Month presupposes that the foundational structure of American political economy is just and fine, it doesn’t critique the underlying assumptions of American exceptionalism and individualism but rather the stubborn refusal of white America to let Black people join the club.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you have heard this argument many times but it bears repeating in the context of discussing Black History Month. America's problems with race are not due to the actions of easily identifiable racist villains. They are due to the very structure of a political economy based on exploitation and Black peoples historical status as surplus labor. That a few Black people can achieve remarkable things does not negate this status. At the very best, highlighting the achievements of impressive people of color serves to create an aspirational class of “good Blacks”. The credits to their race if you will. A class of people to which all Black Americans can be measured against and found wanting, both by racists looking to attribute glaring racial inequities to individuals failings or a deficit culture of poverty, and by the Black bourgeoisie looking for racial advancement anywhere but the deconstruction of the institutions that have granted them wealth and influence.
And at worst, it serves to convince people that being represented in white institutions or starting Black institutions with the same hierarchical power structure is more meaningful than organizing the shop floor. It prizes representation over a coherent political project for Black America. Which describes the presidency of Barack Obama just perfectly.
This article is not a call to cancel Carter G. Woodson and Black History Month. Much like the founding fathers, he was a product of his time. A period where the only acceptable argument to be made on behalf of racial equality was to appeal to the nominal ideals on which the country was founded. This meant proving to both Black and white America that Black people could embody the same qualities of individual studiousness, entrepreneurship, industriousness, and steadfast morality that was believed to be endemic to white America’s success. There is nothing inherently wrong with those qualities, but putting them at the center of both Black and overall American history presents a deeply misleading picture.
If you celebrate Black History Month, if you appreciate the pop culture education it provides, if you find something affirming in learning the histories oft overlooked but nonetheless remarkable people, that’s just fine and great. I don’t think Black History Month should be abolished. What I would like to see is a more socially and materially rooted exploration of Black History. A history that better prepares Black people to understand the political and social currents that are the primordial soup from which aspirational figures emerge. I would like a history that doesn’t rest on the shoulders of heroes but rather shows the heroism inherent in everyday people relying on each other. A history includes the scary socialism that was significant to building the civil rights movement, the class politics that brought a few alienated white workers to the cause of Black liberation, the messiness and violence that is always inherent in social revolution.
I’d like a more relatable psyop please.
I made it through 18 Februaries without learning much about people like A. Philip Randolph, Lucy Parsons, Claude McKay, Peter H. Clark and other Black socialists. As we mentioned before, 2025’s theme is African Americans and Labor. If the world still exists by then, I’m going to be very interested in how that plays out. It would be difficult to talk about Black labor (not to mention American labor in general) without talking about them, and even sticking to a history of biographies would still introduce some seriously subversive topics. Of course such subversive histories would not be so readily accepted or promoted by a mainstream media still wedded to traditional American capitalist structures. But what is life without hope?
I guess we’ll find out.
Solidarity Forever.
Great piece--I wish Claude McKay were better known, such a fascinating figure and writer! I read Amiable with Big Teeth recently and it was amazing.
Well now I have to go back and tell my students that a preacher is only as great as his or her congregation...that Tom Brady ain't shit without the fat dudes in front of him...I have to tell them one rich Black woman doesn't mean that they too can be rich and famous...
My wife and I started a business with the help of a white man who encouraged us to take advantage of equal opportunity set aside laws...he also told us that there were a few Black people living in his area but it would never be more than a few...that's all the political and social system would allow.
I think that I need to do more to empower young people by helping them to recognize their particular their collective strengths and not just the honor roll kids.
Excuse me, I have wright a new lesson plan.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hkAavVTGRB0dIQOCKWgutU6Hv4QC9GOv/view?usp=drivesdk