You Can Respectfully Celebrate Black History Month And Have A Ton Of Fun Too
Truly celebrate the lives and work of Black people. Don't just memorize bad things about history.
“We work so hard to remember what we lost. But memory is meaningless—worse than meaningless—without emotion.”—N.K. Jemisin, Far Sector
Everyone should learn the hard parts of Black history. I know because I’ve done it professionally for a decade, editing the writing of dozens of Black writers, activists, leaders, and producing numerous online talk shows that spoke directly to the Black educational experience in America. It’s as invigorating as can be and I’m deeply proud of my work, mainly for education activism nonprofit Ed Post for five and a half years. I’ve helped my neighbors—Black, brown, white, and everyone else—put their voices, stories, and history into the public record. I’ve helped them fight for more resources for their families and communities. It’s so hard but it’s worth it. Learn about it, engage with it, and use it to make life better for today’s people. Do it year-round, not just in February.
That said, I think white people should have a lot more fun with Black History Month. You don’t need to wallow in the suffering of your neighbors. When you treat February as a way to cram for a test by memorizing the timeline of slavery in the U.S. and when the Emancipation Proclamation and the “I have a dream” speeches took place, you look like you’re just pretending to be good people who have “done the work.” You look like you don’t think about Black people as, you know, people. But they are indeed individuals with tons of ideas, talents, flaws to overcome, flaws that have been overcome, art produced, and so much more.
People are interesting. Memorizing when historic events took place is not.
With that in mind, this week’s newsletter is built around the idea of celebrating Black History Month. Black people have made my life better by being part of it. Black friends, colleagues, and classmates have made my days better. Black professionals have taught me so much about how to succeed. Black entertainers have blown my mind with their talents. I admire them and learn from them. I think you should too. Besides, it’s fun!
So the following is a list of recommendations. I will provide you with three Black figures each from the worlds of music, movies and television, books, comic books, journalism, history, politics, sports, and activism. They have helped me become the person I am today. I like the person I am today. Thank you to everyone on this list and everyone else who has gotten me to that point.
Happy Black History Month.
Music
Janelle Monáe’s blend of science fiction and soul and modern R&B has lit my brain on fire for the better part of 15 years now. Her more recent work has shifted away from the stories about robots and more into the stories of the people living and trying to thrive on a planet drowning in dystopia. Much like David Bowie before her, every new Monáe release is a true event meant to pull listeners into a brand new world rather than just a collection of new songs.
London punk trio Big Joanie have some of the coolest production in music today. Every song sounds like you’re in a garage or dive bar show with them. It’s raw, but it’s not shabby. It’s passionate but it’s not throat shredding rage. It’s more focused than that kind of anger. These women give a shit about everyone getting a shot to live a good life—preferably with their music on the soundtrack.
Sunny War mixes ancient blues, folk, and roots music with modern radical politics. Her voice is haunting, like a ghost singing you story songs. Last year’s Anarchist Gospel immediately became one of the decade’s most important records upon its release.
Movies and Television
Boots Riley, whose hip-hop group The Coup could have just as easily been an entry in the music section above, has shifted into visual art in recent years. His debut film, Sorry To Bother You, nailed the absurdist experience of working in a call center—before people start turning into horses in one of the wildest science fiction movies of the 21st century. His latest project, Prime miniseries I’m A Virgo, treats teenagers like sweet, worthy, mistake-prone, wonderful people to spend time with. Yes, one of them is a literal giant and others have crazy superpowers, but the show’s true power comes from humanizing young people and co-signing their desires for a better world.
Documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, which you can watch on MAX, does not shy away from the hard stuff. It should not. But it should remind you to never, ever take the police at their word. It should remind you that the Black Panthers were one of the greatest organizations this country has ever seen. I mean, how the hell can you not love the people who worked their asses off to make sure all the kids in their communities had enough to eat?
See You Yesterday, available on Netflix, is another pro-teen, pro-creativity, pro-humanity science fiction flick. Much like the second film on this list, it will remind you that cops are routinely a force for evil in this country, incapable of doing anything that helps a human being thrive. But unlike either of the previous two recommendations, this movie is in the great tradition of mad scientists tinkering on crazy contraptions in their garage. What’s not to like?
Books
Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy is one of the most vivid new worlds created in American pop culture in the last decade. Young Binti, an African girl hundreds of years in the future, gets accepted into one of the most prestigious universities in the known universe. Her adventures on the way to and from that otherworldly college show young adult readers how simultaneously thrilling and terrifying it is to go away to school. It hammers home the idea that you can’t forget where you came from, either. It brings everything together by telling these young readers that they must use those amazing things they learn at these faraway places to invest in and improve their homes.
Scientist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein just so happens to also be an incredible writer. The Disordered Cosmos is part autobiography about growing up biracial and the endless barriers placed in front of any ambitious science students who happen to be anything other than white men. But the book also speaks about the wonders of astrophysics in a way that ordinary people can understand. At least I felt like I grasped some physics in the moment I was reading her descriptions. Don’t ask me to pass a physics test, though, pretty please. But I sure will behave like a fan of scientists like Prescod-Weinstein for their ability to make the universe more accessible to me.
Religion scholar Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism walks you through the history of American evangelicals’ centuries of supporting harm done to Black people—physically, emotionally, mentally, financially, and in every other way from the beginning of America. No, this one is not fun. But it is indeed great. It will give you all the ammo you need to call bullshit on lazy, fake Christians who pretend to “love everyone.”
Comics
Roxane Gay is a public intellectual who has written a number of books about sociology and feminism and Black rights. But this section is about comic books. That’s where The Banks comes in. Gay’s graphic novel about a multigenerational family of cat burglars weaves a crackerjack tale of heists. Artist Ming Doyle’s cartooning brings to life the tensions parents feel when their children make their decisions about what to do with their lives. But the art also will make you chuckle out loud and keep you turning the pages to find out how their biggest score yet goes.
Christopher Priest’s Black Panther planted the seeds that grew into my obsession with government conspiracy stories and the CIA’s secrets. I was 9 when Priest’s collaborative run began with Mark Teixeira and artist (and eventual Marvel Comics editor in chief) Joe Quesada. If you’ve seen the Black Panther films, you will recognize many of the elements introduced by Priest, including King T’Challa’s relationship with the American government. The painterly art will dreamily guide you through delightful tales of espionage, intrigue, and other forms of globetrotting adventures.
Writer N.K. Jemisin and artist Jamal Campbell’s Far Sector provided the quote that began this piece. Brand new Green Lantern Sojourner "Jo" Mullein is assigned to be the sole space cop patrolling The City Enduring, a planet-sized municipality at the edge of the galaxy. The reason they don’t need a bunch more Green Lanterns patrolling the streets is because The City Enduring anesthetizes its multi-species citizens from having their natural emotions. They don’t have crime. That is, until Lantern Mullein shows up and a string of murders begins. Within the classic tradition of detective stories, Jemisin and Campbell create an entirely new world unlike anything else in the rest of DC Comics. People’s dreams are broadcast across the skies. Lantern Mullein struggles to communicate with a bunch of emotion-free automatons. It is a blast.
Journalism
Jamelle Bouie’s opinion pieces are alone worth a subscription to the New York Times. Bouie is one of the few columnists out there who focuses on history. His pieces will show you how every conservative’s statements about the Founding Fathers and later American leaders are… full of shit. Bouie complicates those past figures and includes the things they actually wrote and said. Pretty much every single myth conservatives tell you about slavery, the founding of America, the Civil War, and more are directly contradicted by the things those people wrote and said in their own time. For example, Bouie taught me that Thomas Jefferson himself, a man who owned and raped people regularly his entire life, said that the Constitution should be completely rewritten every couple decades so that current generations could decide for themselves what to do about issues of liberty and justice for all. Also, it’s pretty hard to claim the Civil War was about “states’ rights” when the leaders of the Confederacy kept on saying it was about slavery.
Astead Herndon’s The Run-Up podcast introduces you to the voters who actually show up to political events around the country. They are batshit. The podcast, which covers the ins and outs of the 2024 presidential campaign on the ground, will teach you about the sheer manpower it takes to mount a campaign like that. And it will also make you feel just a tad (or more than just a tad) uncomfortable about the people you need to have on your side in order to win a national campaign. Some people are genuinely dumb. Others don’t pay attention. Others insist the opposite of what happened, happened. Though they may make you uncomfortable, all of them still deserve to thrive in the richest country in the history of the world. So you better get comfortable with people having different ideas out there. This podcast helps you practice that.
Perry Bacon Jr. is the most forceful progressive columnist for the Washington Post. His work helps me see things that are working in various states around the country, and it also highlights just how much ordinary people can push the Democratic Party to do big things. Bacon showcases the genuinely good things that are possible when even moderate Democrats control the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government—and the horrors that Republicans invasively inflict upon their constituents when they have the same power.
History
Mary McLeod Bethune was a member of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” which you can read more about in The Black Cabinet by Jill Watts. As director of FDR’s Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, she began the long and difficult process of getting the historically pro-slavery Democratic Party to invest in Black Americans. She is directly responsible for the Democratic Party becoming the party of Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and others. I can and do have extreme misgivings about Obama and Harris for the actions they have taken as leaders, but the fact that Black people can become president and vice president is itself a good thing worth celebrating.
Martin Luther King Jr. should not be treated as the saint of America. That makes him boring because saints never get up to anything remotely fun. Besides, King was a man who hurt his loved ones repeatedly with infidelity and paying more attention to his work than his family. But as Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life biography makes obvious, King was a rad guy to hang out with. He delighted in telling dirty jokes because of how shocking it would be for people to hear a preacher say something like that. He shot pool all night. He learned as much about grand strategy from folks like gay and Black rights icon Bayard Rustin as he taught others. His “I have a dream” speech and “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” always get mentioned every February, but it is so much more interesting to learn how King gradually grew from what Eig describes as a “philosophical” nonviolence to a practical, strategic way to deliver material improvements to people’s lives in the face of violent resistance.
The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, is the most important place I’ve visited in my adulthood. It is one of the least comfortable experiences you will ever have, but if you’re American you should go. It’s part of our heritage and we must come to terms with how damaging centuries of owning human beings truly is to this nation. Go. Learn. Grow.
Politics
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson never stops showing off how proud he is of our shared city. He wants the city to feel good about itself. He’s working to keep the Bears in Chicago and going on local sports shows to make the case to keep them in town after a move to the north suburbs long appeared certain, away from the city that gives the team its name. The White Sox look like they’re about to get a sweet new ballpark too. “It is a public good, quite frankly,” Johnson told local sports show Football Night In Chicago. I agree with him that the city should have amazing, state of the art public gathering spaces for sports and other events. But mainly I’m glad I voted for him because he boosted vacation time for Chicago workers. He’s implementing an elected school board, something the city desperately needs after decades of Johnson’s predecessors dictating school closures and austerity and endless fights with teachers unions over pay and “accountability” (re: being able to fire teachers willy nilly) instead of implementing innovative new teaching methods in classrooms. He’s creating mental health support for the city after it closed its public mental health clinics a decade ago. He’s expanding his immediate predecessor’s greatest legacy, a project that invests in the infrastructure of the terminally underfunded South and West Sides. And he won’t celebrate his first year in office until the spring.
Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock literally has Martin Luther King Jr.’s old job as the leader of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Additionally, he walks in the footsteps King should have been able to walk himself in the Senate during the 1970s and ‘80s, had he not been murdered for being a good person. Warnock’s laser focus on ending child poverty, just like King’s, is amazing. Watch him live it.
Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley doesn’t mince words. She doesn’t play with her party, the Democrats, when they get lazy and stop helping their constituents. She unequivocally supports the Green New Deal, and advocates for it in the actual halls of Congress. It’s not a pipe dream. She helped begin its implementation by voting for the infrastructure, climate, and healthcare laws signed by President Biden in his first term. She’s making it happen. You should support her in doing so.
Sports
Derrek Lee was the Chicago Cubs’ first baseman for my formative years. Traded to Chicago before the 2004 season, I rooted for Lee for the better part of a decade, during my high school and college years. He stoically navigated a Chicago sports media that can be rather harsh to players of color, like Lee’s one time Cubs teammate, relief pitcher LaTroy Hawkins. Lee was the steadiest, most ideal first baseman you could ever hope to have, slickly fielding every ball that came his way on defense and smashing memorable homers when taking his cuts. He was my favorite player on the two best Cubs teams of my life before 2015. Best, most likable dude ever.
The Chicago Bulls’ DeMar DeRozan is a relentlessly efficient scorer in crunch time and a joy to watch on the court. But the reason he’s on this list is because he’s the ultimate culture builder. He’s a true team leader who shows up to the rookie camps to cheer on the young kids who may not even make it onto the roster to become his teammates. He hosts crazy offseason boot camp workouts with all the young guys, and now we’re seeing 23-year-old Coby White blossom into a star alongside DeRozan as just one result. He speaks up for his teammates and makes sure they laugh. The guy rules. I hope he finishes his career in Chicago, even if the team around him could really use some improvements.
Jason Heyward played on the best Cubs team of my lifetime, the 2016 World Series champions. The slick fielding right fielder may never have figured out his batting woes in a Cubs uniform, but he’s credited with giving a rousing rain delay speech to power his teammates to victory in the greatest game ever played. I owe the guy for what was probably the most fun night of my life. But I admire him for using his large contract to build the Jason Heyward Baseball Academy, a community center for Chicago’s kids to learn how to play baseball and have a safe place to hang out. Heyward plays for the Dodgers now, but his Chicago legend will grow with each year the academy helps out the city’s kids.
Activism
This last section is a little different. My three recommendations for Black activists are people I know and have worked with personally. I love them and consider them personal heroes. I’ve gotten drunk on alcoholic slushies with them. I have bolted through city streets with them trying to catch a shuttle bus to an upcoming flight. I produced their (dearly departed) collective online talk show, Talk Dat Real Shit. They’re great and I’m proudly biased in their favor. You should support them and their work, financially and rhetorically.
These days, Tanesha Peeples runs The Roots Initiative, which works with Black youth to develop leadership skills, provide them with safe places to hang out and be kids, and teach them about the history of Black excellence. I have been in the room while Tanesha speaks with kids. Their eyes light up at her encouragement. Donate to The Roots Initiative here.
Jason Burke Allen is an Atlanta-based educator and political candidate who never, ever stops pushing for kids to have the very best. His Speak Black Man podcast is produced through Educational Entities, a platform for clients looking to educate the public on important issues.
Nehemiah Frank created the Black Wall Street Times, one of the leading independent Black news and culture websites around. He has been a leading, national advocate for reparations to the surviving victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre. He is as justice-minded and creative as it gets. Support his and his team’s work.