Does ‘Black History Month’ adequately honor our African American

By Regi Taylor Contributing Writer

On a recent episode of The Conversation with Al McFarlane, a regular expert guest lamented that over his lifetime he has been identified in various legal documents as Colored, Negro, Black, and African American. As we approach ‘Black History Month’ 2023 is it time to reconsider how we as a people define ourselves?

In the case of our former celebration of racial pride, prior to Black History Month, we honored our ethnicity during Negro History Week, instituted by Harvard-educated historian, Carter G. Woodson in 1926, when his move was a very bold political statement.

For half a century, until 1976, ‘Negro’ History Week as an observance of pride became passé. Starting in the late 1960’s, bolstered by the James Brown song, ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Black History Month replaced the former one-week designation, observed the second week of February which coincided with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

As we approach another 50 years, 2026, of celebrating our ancestral heritage as Black History , is it time to update the definition again of who we are as a people?

I first broached this idea as a college freshman in the late 1970’s, soon after Black History Month began.

As the producer and host of Backstage with Regi Taylor , a weekly public affairs talk show on WMTB-FM, Mt. St. Mary’s University radio, I broadcast an announcement to the school’s 2000 Caucasian and 15 African American students about my upcoming show where I would discuss discontinuing Black History Month.

The campus’ racial groups were beside themselves. The mostly

German, Irish, and Italian kids were ecstatic. What a sensible discussion to have was the feedback I was getting from them. The African American kids were dumbfounded, or maybe they just thought I was dumb, but they damn sure didn’t like it.

However, when I broadcast the live callin show, I got the reverse reaction from both groups.

I never wanted to suspend a celebration of our ancestry, I only wanted to redefine the observance by calling it African American History Month

I have always felt conflicted about ‘Black’ History Month. Why have we allowed our great heritage to be artificially distilled and defined as a color? Should European history be ‘white’? Asians, ‘yellow’? Hispanics and Near Easterners, ‘brown’? Native Americans, ‘red’?

Not only are we relegating our rich history as a people to a benign description subject to any cultural interpretation by anyone, allowing detractors to discard our ancestral lineage for a definition that simply defines us in the vane of Jim Crow, a people whose history only began on American shores as the lowest among this country’s caste system; and this is our upgraded, post-slavery status.

We have been known as, and answered to, Slave, Nigger, Colored, Negro, Black, and African American. Which is it going to be? Who are we, really? Which moniker best defines our ancestry? Black is damn sure Beautiful, but it is our image, our appearance, how we look, not who we are in our genealogic and geographic essence. Moreover, ‘Black,’ and ‘white’ may be at the core of what exacerbates continued racial strife in America. These two artificial colors describing diverse ethnic Americans