The question of who owns and authorizes the month holds particular relevance amid attacks on Black history in the US<\/p>\n
There is a myth that persists about Black History Month<\/a> that can be heard in the common gripe: \u201cThey gave us the shortest month of the year\u201d (they, the unnamed powers that be). Jarvis Givens, the author of I\u2019ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month<\/a>, hates it. \u201cEvery time I hear that backhanded comment it doesn\u2019t seem right,\u201d said Givens, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. \u201cIf you know anything about the basic origins of Black History Month then you know that we weren\u2019t \u2018given\u2019 anything.\u201d<\/p>\n The question of who owns and authorizes Black History Month holds particular relevance now, in its centennial year, and at a time when efforts to celebrate, preserve, and acknowledge Black people\u2019s past in this country are under attack. Official recognition of Black American resistance to centuries of racial injustice is being challenged by local<\/a>, state<\/a>, and national<\/a> efforts to restrict, ban<\/a> and possibly criminalize<\/a> such information in public schools, universities and other institutions. So the sentiment that Black history can be quite literally given or taken away<\/a> by state officials is valid.<\/p>\n Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The question of who owns and authorizes the month holds particular relevance amid attacks on Black history in the US There is a myth that persists about Black History Month that can be heard in the common gripe: \u201cThey gave us the shortest month of the year\u201d (they, the unnamed powers that be). Jarvis Givens, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}