Black History Exposes White Mythology
By Halford H. Fairchild, Ph.D.
February is celebrated as “Black History Month.” It was expanded from a week to month in 1970. During this month, people are encouraged to explore the many facets of Black History. That exploration reveals the achievements of civic leaders, freedom fighters, inventors, athletes, artists, musicians and others.
Deep study of Black history reveals that every human on Earth has African ancestry. Black history is African history is Human history.
Our Black ancestors created language, community organization, art, music, dance, mathematics, cosmology, horticulture, the domestication of animals, architecture and indoor plumbing. The pyramids are lasting testimony to the heights of ancient Black civilizations.
We celebrate Black History because it has been given short shrift in public, private and higher education. An African proverb states, “If the lion wrote history, the hunter would not be a hero.”
But much of Black history was written by the hunters and conquerors (Europeans and White Americans). That history created an elaborate mythology extolling the virtues of the hunters, while derogating their victims as savages with little or no history.
What are some of the myths that pose as White history?
Christopher Columbus is hailed as the great discoverer, but how do you discover a continent that is already inhabited by millions of people who had established elaborate cultures over the course of thousands of years? Columbus was the first “White person” to discover the American continent. It is the height of White arrogance to claim Columbus as anything but a late arriver. In our study of Black history, Ivan Van Sertima’s book, “They Came Before Columbus,” documented an African presence in the Americas many hundreds of years before Columbus (but no one is claiming that Africans discovered America, unless we acknowledge that all humans have African origins).
George Washington is acclaimed to be of such irreproachable moral character that, as a child, he confessed to chopping down the cherry tree. On closer inspection, we learn that there was no cherry tree, the whole story was a fable, and Washington was an enslaver who held hundreds of people in lifelong captivity. Those enslaved Africans’ uncompensated labor generated great wealth for Washington and the other “Founding Fathers.”
The idea of “freedom” is sacrosanct in America, but freedom in America is a myth. In 1976, the United States commemorated its “Bicentennial” with a specially minted Kennedy half dollar. The reverse of the coin has the words, “200 YEARS OF FREEDOM.” 1776 to 1976 is two hundred years, but slavery in the U.S. wasn’t abolished until 1863 (enslaved Africans in Texas learned about their emancipation in 1865), and it was followed by decades of Jim Crow segregation and racist practices that continue to this day.
The biggest and most pernicious myth is that of Jesus Christ. The Christian religion wishes us to believe in Immaculate Conception (Jesus’s mother, Mary, was a virgin). Jesus, a carpenter, developed magical healing powers, was crucified, and then came alive again and ascended into Heaven. According to Christian orthodoxy, if we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we can follow Him to the Pearly Gates. If we are ignorant of Jesus or deny Him, we are doomed to an eternity in Hell.
As preposterous as the Christian myth is, it is embraced by hundreds of millions of people around the world. December 25th is Christmas Day. It is preceded by several weeks of the Christmas Season and is marked by Christmas gifts, lights, trees, ornaments, songs, cards, movies and wishes. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who is portrayed as a White male, and who takes on the power of the deity Himself. Christians worship Jesus, God and the Holy Ghost in equal measure, but Jesus takes the cake. How many times have you heard someone end a prayer with, “In Jesus’s name”?
The concern is that it was in Jesus’s name that genocidal wars were waged against Indigenous Americans and they remain confined in out-of-sight, out-of-mind “reservations.” It was in Jesus’s name that Africans were murdered, enslaved, colonized and imprisoned. It was in Jesus’s name that the sovereign nations of the Pacific Ocean were conquered and made servile.
So in this moment of reflection during Black History Month, 2022, we recognize that Black history is human history, and that much of White history is, well, merely self-serving mythology.
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Halford H. Fairchild, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at Pitzer College. He is a Past National President of The Association of Black Psychologists. He may be reached @HalFairchild.