Cost” from Lamar’s highly acclaimed To Pimp a Butterfly album. He added that he favored the Compton emcee over Drake. The differences between these two commercially successful emcees are numerous and clear, especially when one considers the content of their rhymes and freestyling abilities. Though he spits about struggle (“Started From the Bottom”), Drake does not rhyme about black history. Lamar, on the other hand, has creatively rapped about black history since his imaginative track “HiiiPower” (2011).
Inviting Lamar to the White House did not evoke the same response as Common’s visit to the Oval Office did. Though he can be considered a “conscious” rapper (however problematic this label is), Lamar is also a black entertainer who has enjoyed white mainstream success. In choosing Lamar over Drake, it is not unreasonable to deduce that Obama approves of the more introspective, complex, and soul-searching rhymes. With “How Much a Dollar Cost,” Lamar pleads guilty to turning his back on the poor, to abandoning the “Golden Rule” and Jesus’s dedication to giving to the unfortunate.
During his first term, very few emcees—namely Dead Prez, Killer Mike, Lupe Fiasco, and Lowkey—openly condemned Obama for his racial neutrality and, in their minds, imperialistic foreign policy. Most emcees and members of the hip-hop community and expansive generation embraced Obama in part because he validated them, in some instances side-by-side with revered civil rights elders who shaped history profoundly. Hip-hoppers view Obama’s presidency as epoch-making. As was the case with his philosophy of black history, Obama’s outlook on hip-hop vacillated throughout his political career. As hip-hop studies scholars Erik Nielson and Travis L. Gosa noted in a 2015 Washington Post editorial, after Obama was elected, his relationship with hip-hop artists and activists began to deteriorate and hip-hop heads “took notice.”69 Rather than remembering Obama as “The Hip-Hop President,” it would be more accurate to describe him as being a cautious consumer of and prudent apologist for hip-hop music and culture.
Whether speaking to or interacting with the millennial hip-hop generation, black and white audiences from various age groups, the mainstream media, or his fellow politicians, Obama made conscious decisions about how to portray African American history. Obama, who left the White House in January 2017, no longer needs to practice the hyper social awareness that he did during his presidency. He can now speak more plainly about a range of issues, including African American history. I would not be surprised if the Obamas’ forthcoming Netflix series produces films and documentaries on dimensions of black history. As touched upon in the next chapter on Black History Month, his handling of this annual observance reflects his calculated stance toward the black past.
Honoring “The Gift of Black Folk”
The Contested Meaning of Black History Month
“Who made America?” queried W. E. B. Du Bois in the preface to The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America, first published in 1924. “Now that its foundations are laid, deep but bare, there are those as always who would forget the humble builders, toiling wan mornings and blazing noons, and picture America as the last reasoned blossom of mighty ancestors.” He continued:
America is America even because it shows, as never before, the power of the common, ordinary, unlovely man … We who know may not forget but must forever spread the splendid truth that out of the most lowly and persecuted of men, Man made America.1
With great pride, the prolific editor of The Crisis was referring to the black “Man” and everyday African Americans as the “humble builders” who, in essence, contributed in monumental ways to America’s economic growth, democracy, and culture. Like scores of self-taught black historians who preceded him, Du Bois spotlighted and memorialized how generations of African Americans “made America.” For him, this story, the chronicle of African Americans’ contributions, needed to be publicized in the name of “truth.” Several years after The Gift of Black Folk was published, historian Carter G. Woodson created Negro History Week. The “high priest of Negro history” echoed Du Bois’s search for the “truth” in describing the underlying objective of this celebration. Others felt the need to tell this story too. “Let truth destroy the dividing prejudices of nationality and teach universal love without distinction of race, merit or rank,” Woodson declared.2
Fifty years after Woodson founded Negro History Week, the then Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) was at the forefront of a movement to transform this weeklong celebration in February into a monthlong tribute. “In celebrating Black History Month,” Gerald Ford remarked in the first presidential observance on February 10, 1976, “we can seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” A decade later, the United States Congress passed Public Law 99-244 (1986), designating the month of February as being National Black (Afro-American) History Month. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the celebration was renamed National African American History Month.
Most often called Black History Month (National African American History Month is a mouthful and comes across as being unduly formal and even portentous), today this annual commemoration constitutes a firmly established custom and institution in American life, especially among African Americans. During the twenty-first century, however, debates about the meaning and intention of this observance have proliferated. Countless people—journalists, political pundits, public intellectuals, educators, activists, and scholars—have wrangled over Black History Month’s role in American life, even contemplating whether it is still necessary and of value. As historian Daryl Scott, former president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, remarked in 2014, thrashing out Black History Month’s contemporary relevance and standing within American culture “is a cottage industry.”3
On the eve of Black History Month 2016, a reporter for MSNBC covering the most recent chitchat about its observance in social media outlets contended that “the debate around Black History Month really began in earnest 10 years ago” when Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman publicly raised objections to the celebration.4 Though Freeman’s comments undoubtedly reignited “the Black History Month debate,” the contemporary war of words about this popular custom are not recent, avant-garde, or cutting-edge: such concerns have been looming in the minds of and articulated by a medley of thinkers for more than seventy years. In actuality, much of what is now being conjured up about Black History Month was present in the discussions of Woodson and his colleagues in the early years when Negro History Week was practiced.
Using provocative and in some cases quite entertaining discussions of Black History Month as instructive and engaging points of departure, this chapter opens by exploring how this observance has recently been reconceptualized by a group of citizen journalists. To illustrate that contemporary and widely publicized diatribes against Black History Month are reminiscent of past grumblings, I historicize twenty-first century debates and controversies surrounding this established celebration. I also unpack President Obama’s ritualistic commemorations of the black past, recent “Black Future(s) Month” activities, and the paucity of scholarship on Black History Month. In conclusion, I consider Black History Month’s unresolved future.
FEBRUARY 20l6: A BLACK HISTORY MONTH TO REMEMBER?
By the middle of February 2016, many in the social media world were declaring that the 40th National African American History Month was the “best,” “greatest,” and “blackest” manifestation of this commemoration that the world had ever seen. One of the first bloggers to trumpet this conviction was Damon Young, co-founder of the popular daily digital magazine VSB (verysmartbrothers.com).
