The last time I wrote in this space was November of 2024. I wrote then about the demographic that would decide the presidential election—white women—and they did what they’ve done since 1968: the majority voted Republican, including for Donald Trump. They did so with full knowledge of who he was and with a Republican Supreme Court actively dismantling their bodily autonomy. Since then, I haven’t written about Trump or America, not out of uncertainty, but because nothing that followed required interpretation. It required recognition.
From Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois to James Baldwin to Derrick Bell, to name a notable few, Black thought has never primarily been about convincing America of anything. It’s been about helping Black people understand ourselves under hostile conditions.
I’m writing now because I’ve spent the last year thinking and reflecting about us. The Us I’m talking about is not America or all people of color in America; it’s not other marginalized groups. The Us is the descendants of the African Diaspora in the United States—not even the descendants of the African Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. If your first ancestor wasn’t one of the estimated 400,000-plus Africans brought to these shores as a function of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, then you may continue reading, but know I’m not talking to you.
I’m also writing this in February for three reasons. It’s the 100th anniversary of Negro History Week, the precursor to Black History Month. Also, it’s in February when we inflict the most crippling intellectual and psychological damage on ourselves. If it’s possible for Carter G. Woodson to turn over in his grave, we do it to him every February. What is it we keep getting wrong every February? Actually, we start in January with the MLK birthday commemorations. Every year in mid-January, America—with our complicity—reduces Dr. King’s life and body of work to the improvised ending of a speech.
Second reason: Donald Trump has been president for a year. There’s a Turkish proverb that provides the proper context for this moment: When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus. Enough said.
The last, maybe the most important reason, is that in July of this year the United States will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And we—that’s the Us referenced earlier—will insist on being invited to the party in spite of what Frederick Douglass told us 164 years ago.
Black history fact: In July of 1852, Frederick Douglass was invited by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society to give a Fourth of July speech. He gave it on July 5 instead. It was entitled What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? I read this speech every July because I’m always blown away that he gave it 164 years ago—and he could give that speech today, word for word. The reality is that’s how little America has changed, protestations notwithstanding. A hit dog always hollers.
We have never really understood or embraced what I’ll call our Black intellectual pedigree and the pedagogy that comes with it. From Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Du Bois to James Baldwin to Derrick Bell, to name a notable few, Black thought has never primarily been about convincing America of anything. It’s been about helping Black people understand ourselves under hostile conditions. The goal has always been to understand America well enough that we could explain ourselves to each other. American contradictions—liberty and slavery, equality and hierarchy, E Pluribus Unum and segregation—are treated in the American myth as anomalies or moral failings in the process of being corrected. The Black intellectual tradition begins from the opposite premise: that contradictions are not errors in the system, but evidence of how the system actually works. What the American myth asks of Black America is to believe it and not our lying eyes.
Black thought leaders are never writing to persuade, but to diagnose—not to reach consensus, but to discover truth—so we can know the difference between the American myth and the Black memory. One is fiction; the other is real. I would posit there is a Black Canon that sits outside of, but adjacent to, America’s poor man’s Western epistemology. There is a way of knowing and understanding the world from the perspective of the lived Black experience in North America. It’s that canon and perspective that should be the foundation of how we practice what is now Black History Month. Carter G. Woodson thought so. Here’s what he said in 1927 in the Journal of Negro History: “We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history…”
We don’t study history to learn random facts about people and places. We study history for insight into the human condition. History doesn’t repeat itself, but there are conditions that produce recurring events. So when new situations occur that mimic the past, people have the tendency to react the same way as before. You can’t predict the future, but you can recognize and understand the present by empirically studying the past. There’s a name for it: pattern recognition. Knowing what was can clarify what is.
America is at an inflection point. That’s not a moral judgment, but an empirical declaration. Donald Trump and MAGA America are a symptom, not the cause.
Mr. Jones is always an informative and thought provoking writer. I enjoy reading his columns.